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TheCounter-Enlightenment refers to a loose collection of intellectual stances that arose during theEuropean Enlightenment in opposition to its mainstream attitudes and ideals. The Counter-Enlightenment is generally seen to have continued from the 18th century into the early 19th century, especially with the rise ofRomanticism. Its thinkers did not necessarily agree to a set of counter-doctrines but instead each challenged specific elements of Enlightenment thinking, such as the belief inprogress, therationality of all humans,liberal democracy, and the increasingsecularisation of European society.
Scholars differ on who is to be included among the major figures of the Counter-Enlightenment. In Italy,Giambattista Vico criticised the spread ofreductionism and theCartesian method, which he saw as unimaginative and stiflingcreative thinking.[1] Decades later,Joseph de Maistre inSardinia andEdmund Burke inBritain both criticised the anti-religious ideas of the Enlightenment for leading to theReign of Terror and atotalitarianpolice state following theFrench Revolution. The ideas ofJean-Jacques Rousseau andJohann Georg Hamann were also significant to the rise of the Counter-Enlightenment withFrench andGerman Romanticism respectively.
In the late 20th century, the concept of the Counter-Enlightenment was popularised by pro-Enlightenment historianIsaiah Berlin[2] as a tradition ofrelativist,anti-rationalist,vitalist, andorganic thinkers stemming largely from Hamann and subsequent German Romantics.[3] While Berlin is largely credited with having refined and promoted the concept, the first known use of the term in English occurred in 1949 and there were several earlier uses of it across other European languages,[4] including by German philosopherFriedrich Nietzsche.
Despite criticism of the Enlightenment being a widely discussed topic in twentieth- and twenty-first century thought, the term "Counter-Enlightenment" was slow to enter general usage. It was first mentioned briefly in English inWilliam Barrett's 1949 article "Art, Aristocracy and Reason" inPartisan Review. He used the term again in his 1958 book on existentialism,Irrational Man; however, his comment on Enlightenment criticism was very limited.[2] In Germany, the expression "Gegen-Aufklärung" has a longer history. It was probably coined byFriedrich Nietzsche in "Nachgelassene Fragmente" in 1877.[5]
Lewis White Beck used this term in hisEarly German Philosophy (1969), a book about Counter-Enlightenment in Germany. Beck claims that there is a counter-movement arising in Germany in reaction toFrederick II's secular authoritarian state. On the other hand,Johann Georg Hamann and his fellow philosophers[who?] believe that a more organic conception of social and political life, a more vitalistic view of nature, and an appreciation for beauty and the spiritual life of man have been neglected by the eighteenth century.[2]
Isaiah Berlin established this term's place in thehistory of ideas. He used it to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany against therationalism,universalism andempiricism that are commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Berlin's essay "The Counter-Enlightenment" was first published in 1973, and later reprinted in a collection of his works,Against the Current, in 1981.[6] The term has been more widely used since.
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Berlin argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany (e.g.Joseph de Maistre) and before the 1770s (e.g.Giambattista Vico), Counter-Enlightenment thought did not take hold until the Germans "rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment." This German reaction to the imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, which had been forced on them first by the francophileFrederick II of Prussia, then by the armies of Revolutionary France and finally byNapoleon, was crucial to the shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually toRomanticism. The consequence of this revolt against the Enlightenment waspluralism. The opponents to the Enlightenment played a more crucial role than its proponents, some of whom weremonists, whose political, intellectual and ideological offspring have beenterreur andtotalitarianism.
In his bookEnemies of the Enlightenment (2001), historianDarrin McMahon extends the Counter-Enlightenment back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of "Grub Street". McMahon focuses on the early opponents to the Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten "Grub Street" literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries aimed at thephilosophes. He delves into the obscure world of the "low Counter-Enlightenment" that attacked theencyclopédistes and fought to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. Many people from earlier times attacked the Enlightenment for undermining religion and the social and political order. It later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution, it appeared to vindicate the warnings of theanti-philosophes in the decades prior to 1789.
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Cardiff University professorGraeme Garrard claims that historianWilliam R. Everdell was the first to situate Rousseau as the "founder of the Counter-Enlightenment" in his 1971 dissertation and in his 1987 book,Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion.[7] In his 1996 article, "the Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity", in theAmerican Political Science Review (Vol. 90, No. 2), Arthur M. Melzer corroborates Everdell's view in placing the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment in the religious writings ofJean-Jacques Rousseau, further showing Rousseau as the man who fired the first shot in the war between the Enlightenment and its opponents.[8]Graeme Garrard follows Melzer in his "Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment" (2003). This contradicts Berlin's depiction of Rousseau as aphilosophe (albeit an erratic one) who shared the basic beliefs of his Enlightenment contemporaries. But similar to McMahon, Garrard traces the beginning of Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and prior to the GermanSturm und Drang movement of the 1770s. Garrard's bookCounter-Enlightenments (2006) broadens the term even further, arguing against Berlin that there was no single "movement" called "The Counter-Enlightenment". Rather, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments, from the middle of the 18th century to the 20th century among critical theorists, postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has opponents on all points of its ideological compass, from the far left to the far right, and all points in between. Each of the Enlightenment's challengers depicted it as they saw it or wanted others to see it, resulting in a vast range of portraits, many of which are not only different but incompatible.
The idea of Counter-Enlightenment has evolved in the following years. The historian James Schmidt questioned the idea of "Enlightenment" and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it. As the conception of "Enlightenment" has become more complex and difficult to maintain, so has the idea of the "Counter-Enlightenment". Advances in Enlightenment scholarship in the last quarter-century have challenged the stereotypical view of the 18th century as an "Age of Reason", leading Schmidt to speculate on whether the Enlightenment might not actually be a creation of its opponents, but the other way round. The fact that the term "Enlightenment" was first used in 1894 in English[citation needed] to refer to a historical period supports the argument that it was a late construction projected back onto the 18th century.
By the mid-1790s, theReign of Terror during the French Revolution fueled a major reaction against the Enlightenment. Many leaders of the French Revolution and their supporters madeVoltaire andRousseau, as well asMarquis de Condorcet's ideas of reason,progress, anti-clericalism, and emancipation, central themes to their movement. It led to an unavoidable backlash to the Enlightenment as there were people opposed to the revolution. Many counter-revolutionary writers, such asEdmund Burke,Joseph de Maistre andAugustin Barruel, asserted an intrinsic link between the Enlightenment and the Revolution.[2] They blamed the Enlightenment for undermining traditional beliefs that sustained theancien regime. As the Revolution became increasingly bloody, the idea of "Enlightenment" was discredited, too. Hence, the French Revolution and its aftermath have contributed to the development of Counter-Enlightenment thought.[citation needed]
Edmund Burke was among the first of the Revolution's opponents to relate thephilosophes to the instability in France in the 1790s. HisReflections on the Revolution in France (1790) identifies the Enlightenment as the principal cause of the French revolution. In Burke's opinion, thephilosophes provided the revolutionary leaders with the theories on which their political schemes were based.[9]
Augustin Barruel's Counter-Enlightenment ideas were well developed before the revolution. He worked as an editor for the anti-philosophes literary journal,L'Année Littéraire. Barruel argues in hisMemoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy ofphilosophes and freemasons.[10][11]
InConsiderations on France (1797),Joseph de Maistre interprets the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. According to him, "the revolutionary storm is an overwhelming force of nature unleashed on Europe by God that mocked human pretensions."[2]
In the 1770s, the "Sturm und Drang" movement started in Germany. It questioned some key assumptions and implications of theAufklärung and the term "Romanticism" was first coined. Many early Romantic writers such asChateaubriand,Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) andSamuel Taylor Coleridge inherited the Counter-Revolutionary antipathy towards thephilosophes. All three directly blamed thephilosophes in France and theAufklärer in Germany for devaluing beauty, spirit and history in favour of a view of man as a soulless machine and a view of the universe as a meaningless, disenchanted void lacking richness and beauty. One particular concern to early Romantic writers was the allegedly anti-religious nature of the Enlightenment since thephilosophes andAufklärer were generallydeists, opposed torevealed religion. Some historians, such asHamann, nevertheless contend that this view of the Enlightenment as an age hostile to religion is common ground between these Romantic writers and many of their conservative Counter-Revolutionary predecessors. However, not many have commented on the Enlightenment, except for Chateaubriand, Novalis, and Coleridge, since the term itself did not exist at the time and most of their contemporaries ignored it.[2]
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The historianJacques Barzun argues that Romanticism has its roots in the Enlightenment. It was not anti-rational, but rather balanced rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of justice. This view is expressed in Goya'sSleep of Reason, in which the nightmarish owl offers the dozing social critic ofLos Caprichos a piece of drawing chalk. Even the rational critic is inspired by irrational dream-content under the gaze of the sharp-eyed lynx.[12] Marshall Brown makes much the same argument as Barzun inRomanticism and Enlightenment, questioning the stark opposition between these two periods.
By the middle of the 19th century, the memory of the French Revolution was fading and so was the influence of Romanticism. In this optimistic age of science and industry, there were few critics of the Enlightenment, and few explicit defenders.Friedrich Nietzsche is a notable and highly influential exception. After an initial defence of the Enlightenment in his so-called "middle period" (late 1870s to early 1880s), Nietzsche turned vehemently against it.
AfterWorld War II, the Enlightenment re-emerged as a key organizing concept in social and political thought and thehistory of ideas. The Counter-Enlightenment literature blaming the 18th-centuryAge of Reason for both 18th and 20th-centurytotalitarianism also resurged. Thelocus classicus of this view isMax Horkheimer andTheodor Adorno'sDialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which traces the degeneration of the general concept of enlightenment fromancient Greece (epitomized by the cunning "bourgeois" heroOdysseus) to 20th-centuryfascism.
The authors take "enlightenment" as their target including its 18th-century form – which we now call "The Enlightenment". They claim it is epitomized by theMarquis de Sade. However, there were philosophers rejecting Adorno and Horkheimer's claim that Sade'smoral skepticism is actually coherent, or that it reflects Enlightenment thought.[13]
Later, various historians and authors argued that Fascism was a product of the Counter-Enlightenment itself. For example,Ze'ev Sternhell called Fascism "an exacerbated form of the tradition of counter-Enlightenment": with Fascism, "Europe created for the first time a set of political movements and regimes whose project was nothing but the destruction of Enlightenment culture."[14] Similar opinions were expressed by such historians asGeorges Bensoussan andEnzo Traverso, who noted "Counter-Enlightenment tendencies, combined with industrial and technical progress, a state monopoly over violence, and the rationalisation of methods of domination" and "Counter-Enlightenment (Gegenaufklärung) and the cult of modern technology, a synthesis of Teutonic mythologies and biological nationalism" in Nazism, thus recognizing it as grounded on intellectual traditions of counter-Enlightenment, but mixing them with "instrumental reason" which allowed adopting "the methods of industrial production and scientific management were employed" for such irrational goals as racial extermination.[15][16] Prior to these historians, various philosophers described Fascism as a "revolt against reason" and a force hostile to scientific objectivity and rational inqury, namelyUmberto Eco,Bertrand Russell,Richard Wolin andJason Stanley.[17]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)To my knowledge, the first explicit identification of Rousseau as "founder of the "Counter-Enlightenment" appears in William Everdell's study of Christian apologetics in eighteenth-century France.
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