[FRA:] Enlightenment under attack

[steve.devos at krokodile.co.uk]

None of the responses to Ralph's defence of  the enlightenment are going 
far enough. The underlying problem with enlightenment values is that 
they offer no way out of the mass-extinction process that we are 
currently engaging in. In brief 'humanism', in the sense that it emerges 
from the enlightenment and the scientific/industrial revolution is now a 
disaster. When those, like Ralph and Catherine who in thier different 
ways are defending the 'enlightenment', show an acceptable philosophical 
means of  addressing the extinction event, which we should all realize 
by now makes facism and other 20th C despots like a relatively small 
scale problem then we may begin to get somewhere....

This doesn't seem to offer much hope.

steve

Catherine Liu wrote:

> In response to Ralph's comments:
>
>>
>> Ideologically, the assault on Enlightenment values, though 
>> narcissistic and self-serving, prepares the way philosophically for 
>> fascism to take over.  It is both liberal and illiberal, depending on 
>> what senses of the term you are using.  It represents what's left of 
>> liberalism under all meanings of the term but is fundamentally 
>> illiberal in its philosophical underpinnings.  Yes, these people are 
>> pilloried by the hysterical Right as the academic left, but not a one 
>> of them has a left bone in their bodies.
>
>
> "Narcissistic" psychologizes what is fully saturated by the political: 
> neo-pragmatism and cultural studies alike in their rejection of 
> universal values offers the rationalization for new forms of 
> domination: centered on responding to "individual" particularities, 
> its form of anti-Enlightenment is merely an 'updated' enlightenment.
>
>> DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT is hardly a counterexample to my thesis. 
>> Politically, it's nowhere in particular, and as an argument, lacks 
>> historical concreteness.  It is rather a dubious metaphysical 
>> excursus, or more generously, a metaphorical meditation that cannot 
>> survive being taken literally.
>>
>
> I don't know what 'being taken literally' means, but I have always 
> read it as a condemnation of Enlightenment instrumentalization of 
> reason as a betrayal of reason; but it does have the advantage of 
> articulating the creative and powerful faculties of bourgeois 
> consciousness, which does free us from the chthonic gods and the 
> endless cycles of mythology for forms of domination, inner and outer.
>
> Catherine Liu
>
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