Why the Enlightenment was not the age of reason .
"The Enlightenment began with the scientific revolution in the mid-17th century, and culminated in the French Revolution at the end of the 18th. Hegel, in the early 1800s, was one of the first to go on the offensive. He said that the rational subject conceived by Immanuel Kant – the Enlightenment philosopher par excellence – produced citizens who were alienated, dispassionate and estranged from nature, with the murderous rationalism of the French Terror the logical outcome.
However, the Enlightenment was a diverse phenomenon; most of its philosophy stood far apart from Kantianism, let alone from Hegel’s version of Kant. The truth is that Hegel and the 19th-century Romantics, who believed they were moved by a new spirit of beauty and feeling, summoned up the ‘age of reason’ to serve as a foil for their own self-conception. Their Kantian subject was a straw man, as was the dogmatic rationalism of their Enlightenment.
In France, the philosophes were surprisingly enthusiastic about the passions, and deeply suspicious about abstractions. Rather than holding that reason was the only means of battling error and ignorance, the French Enlightenment emphasised sensation. Many Enlightenment thinkers advocated a polyvocal and playful version of rationality, one that was continuous with the particularities of sensation, imagination and embodiment. Against the inwardness of speculative philosophy – Renรฉ Descartes and his followers were often the target of choice – the philosophes turned outward, and brought to the fore the body as the point of passionate engagement with the world. You might even go so far as to say that the French Enlightenment tried to produce a philosophy without reason."
In France, the philosophes were surprisingly enthusiastic about the passions, and deeply suspicious about abstractions. Rather than holding that reason was the only means of battling error and ignorance, the French Enlightenment emphasised sensation. Many Enlightenment thinkers advocated a polyvocal and playful version of rationality, one that was continuous with the particularities of sensation, imagination and embodiment. Against the inwardness of speculative philosophy – Renรฉ Descartes and his followers were often the target of choice – the philosophes turned outward, and brought to the fore the body as the point of passionate engagement with the world. You might even go so far as to say that the French Enlightenment tried to produce a philosophy without reason."
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"Generalising about intellectual movements is always a dangerous business. The Enlightenment did have distinct national characteristics, and even within a single nation it was not monolithic. Some thinkers did invoke a strict dichotomy of reason and the passions, and privilege the a priori over sensation – Kant, most famously. But in this respect Kant was isolated from many, if not most, of his era’s major themes. Particularly in France, rationality was not opposed to sensibility but was predicated on and continuous with it. Romanticism was largely a continuation of Enlightenment themes, not a break or rupture from them.If we are to heal the divides of the contemporary historical moment, we should give away the fiction that reason alone has ever held the day. The present warrants criticism, but it will do no good if it’s based on a myth about some glorious, dispassionate past that never was."
And humanity will not be truly enlightened (unlikely) until supernaturalist myths are universally discarded.
