The Invention of the Counter-Enlightenment: The Case for the Defense

Joseph Mali

In recent historiography of the Enlightenment it has become a common- place to define this era not merely as the “Age of Reason,” but also, and primarily, as the “Age of Criticism.” As Ernst Cassirer has pointed out in his classic, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932): The eighteenth century is very fond of calling itself the “century of philoso- phy,” but it is not less fond of calling itself the “century of criticism.” The two phrases are only different expressions of the same situation, intended to characterize from diverse angles the fundamental intellectual energy which permeates the era and to which it owes its greatest trends of thought.1 True to that mission, some of the leading luminaries of the age—the most well-known being Jean-Jacques Rousseau—directed their criticism at the ideology of the Enlightenment movement itself. Consequently, albeit unintentionally, because of their practical implementation of the Enlightenment’s insistence on criticism, these ideological opponents of the movement may justifiably be considered partakers in the Enlighten- ment, even if seemingly in spite of themselves. Alas, this anomaly has been largely ignored by historians of the Enlight- enment; there has not even been a suitable term to define it. Obviously, the philosophes themselves, and generations of scholars following them, were well aware of this contrarian movement, for who could ignore such classic statements of opposition as Rousseau’s two Discourses or Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France? But even so, historians have been hard pressed to furnish an adequate characterization or proper definition, particularly since these critical opponents of the Enlightenment, unlike its other enemies, did not belong to the clerical or monarchical orders, nor indeed to any particular class that was threatened by the libertarian and

1 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove; Princeton, 1951), 275. 206 joseph mali egalitarian slogans of the Enlightenment. Rather, they were independent men of letters and science, who assumed the common posture of public moralists or “intellectuals” as befitting men of Enlightenment. However conservative and even reactionary they may have been, they framed their worldview in analytical terms, using logical arguments, and did all that in a style which was as intelligent and almost as elegant as that of the French raisonneurs. The only difference between them and their illustrious con- temporaries and adversaries, then, was that they employed the Enlighten- ment’s own critical methodology in order to combat its critical ideology. That opposition to the essential ideology of the Enlightenment was the crucial difference between these men and some other critical observers of the Enlightenment, who objected to certain assumptions in its ideology but nevertheless believed in the fundamental notion of enlightenment. The latter group included men like Voltaire, who attacked the excessive optimism of his fellow philosophes; David Hume, who questioned their unsustainable rationalism; and Montesquieu, who did not believe, unlike so many of his fellow gens de lettres in the Club de l’Entresol or in the Aca- démie Française, in any form of monarchic absolutism, however “enlight- ened” it might be. These and similar liberal thinkers operated, as it were, from within the Enlightenment; and if occasionally they turned against it, they nevertheless continued to believe in its general direction. They all shared the belief that the process of “civilization”—a term invented, fittingly, by the Enlightenment2—through critical rationalization and technological innovation, would ultimately lead to salvation; a secular salvation, of course, that in the parlance of the age meant the emancipa- tion of modern humanity from all the self-imposed inhibitions stemming from its supposed “immaturity.” That is the main message of Immanuel Kant’s famous essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784). Kant defines “immaturity” (Unmündigkeit) as the reluctance of men in the modern age to use their own understanding freely and independently for their own welfare.3 For the participants in the European—and particularly Prus- sian—Enlightenment, what Kant meant thereby was clear: that modern man had become mature enough to liberate himself from the burden of tradition, above all from religious superstition. More concretely, Kant

2 Jean Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” in idem, Blessings in Disguise: Or, the Moral- ity of Evil (trans. A. Goldhager; Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 1–35. 3 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), in idem, Political Writings (trans. and ed. H. Reiss; Cambridge, 1991), 54.