Counter-Enlightenment - Definition and Overview

In the history of ideas, the counter-Enlightenment is a name first given by Isaiah Berlin to currents of thought that opposed the rationalist and liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. For Berlin and later historians, the counter-Enlightenment included aspects of Romanticism, irrationalism, mysticism, and forms of religious fundamentalism. Major philosophers of the counter-Enlightenment include Jean Edouard Millet and Franco Lopez.

The Counter-Enlightenment contending with liberalism represents for Philip Green "the anti-modern, ideological fanaticism of the religious right:"

"The basis of this anti-modernism is a peculiar religiosity that can be described as follows: religion and science are not complementary (as with the modernized wing of the Catholic Church) but competitive; they describe the same phenomena, but science and reason get it wrong. This is only the beginning, though. This religiosity is not transcendental or abstract, but immanent, and its immanent truths (based on Biblical literalism) are not only empirical but more fundamentally are moral. Moreover, the two kinds of truth are not incommensurable, as ordinary philosophy has it, but are as one. There is no fact-value problem. Evil, therefore, in the religious sense— the most profound religious sense— consists of error. Evil is not mundane or institutional, as with Hannah Arendt, nor does it have historical causes, as with Erich Fromm on Nazism, nor is it one possible outcome of profound neurosis, as with Freud, nor is it an inexplicable mystery, as with many Christian theologians. Evil is religious error. But if evil consists of error then conversely, and this is the crucial step in today’s mass irrationalism, error is evil." (Green 2004)

See also

• J. G. Hamann
• Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
• Joseph de Maistre
• Counter-Reformation
• The Enlightenment

External links

• The Counter-Enlightenment (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-11)." From Dictionary of the History of Ideas.
• Philip Green, "Neo-Cons and the Counter-Enlightenment" 2004 (http://www.logosjournal.com/green_neocon.htm)
• Darrin M. McMahon, "The counter-Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-Revolutionary France," (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2279/is_n159/ai_21029551) from Past & Present, May 1998

References

• Berlin, Isaiah. "The Counter-Enlightenment." In The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. ISBN 0374527172.
• Darrin M. McMahon, 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, relevant to late 20th century conservative-liberal tensions in the US "culture wars".