Counter-Enlightenment
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In the history of ideas, the Counter-Enlightenment is a name first given by Isaiah Berlin to describe currents of thought that opposed the rationalist and liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. Berlin's project in a series of essays was the critical recovery of the ideas of Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann (whom Berlin virtually rediscovered in the essay The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the origins of modern irrationalism), and Johann Gottfried Herder, and an account of their appeal, so foreign to the Enlightenment, and their 19th- and 20th-century consequences. For Berlin and modern historians, the Counter-Enlightenment embodies a pluralist vision, accepting the fundamental irreconcilability of cultural values and their ineradicable conflicts with rationalism, as well as the conflicts within Romanticism, irrationalism, mysticism, and neo-Medieval forms of religious thought.
Major philosophers cited as examples of the Counter-Enlightenment include Jean Edouard Millet and Eliphas Levi. The term is sometimes used in modern critical theory to describe some of the origins of post-structuralism and postmodernism (especially as a description of Friedrich Nietzsche).
The characterization of Romanticism as the Counter-Enlightenment is strongly disputed by philosopher Jacques Barzun. Barzun argues that Romanticism was not anti-rational, but balanced rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of justice, and that Romanticism had its roots in the Enlightenment. In Goya's "Sleep of Reason" (illustration, above right) one of the nightmarish owls offers the dozing social critic of Los Caprichos a piece of drawing chalk: even the rational critic is inspired by irrational dream-content, under the gaze of the sharp-eyed lynx [link].
Another important critique of the idea of the Counter-Enlightenment comes from post-structuralism, which argues that the Enlightenment itself was rooted in royal patronage, and repressive government and social systems. Michel Foucault, for example, argued that the treatment of the insane during the Age of Enlightenment shows that liberal notions of humane treatment were not universally adhered to, but instead, that an Age of Reason had to construct an image of "Unreason" against which to take an opposing stand.
See also
- J. G. Hamann
- Johann Gottfried Herder
- Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
- Joseph de Maistre
- Counter-Reformation
- The Enlightenment
External links
- [Dictionary of the History of Ideas: "The Counter-Enlightenment"]
- [Darrin M. McMahon, "The counter-Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-Revolutionary France,"] from Past & Present, May 1998
References
- Berlin, Isaiah, "The Counter-Enlightenment" in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ISBN 0374527172.
- Berlin, Isaiah, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Henry Hardy, editor, Princeton University Press, 2003
- Mali, Joseph and Robert Wokler, "Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment" in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2003, ISBN 0871699354
- McMahon, Darrin M., Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity details the reaction to Voltaire and the Enlightenment in European intellectual history from 1750 to 1830.
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