The
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment was a term that some 20th-century
commentators have used to describe multiple strains of thought that
arose in the late-18th and early-19th centuries in opposition to the
18th-century Enlightenment. The term is usually associated with Isaiah
Berlin, who is often credited with coining it, though there are
several earlier uses of the term,[1] including one by German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote of Gegenaufklärung at the
end of the 19th century. The first known use of the term in English
was in 1908, but Berlin may have re-invented it. Berlin published
widely about the Enlightenment and its enemies and did much to
popularise the concept of a
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment movement that he
characterised as relativist, anti-rationalist, vitalist, and
organic,[2] and which he associated most closely with German
Romanticism.
Contents
1
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment movement vs Enlightenment thinkers
2
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolution
3 Romantic revolt against the eighteenth century
4 Enlightened totalitarianism
5 Enlightenment's "perversion of reason"
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 External links
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment movement vs Enlightenment thinkers[edit]
Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre

Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre was one of the more prominent
altar-and-throne counter-revolutionaries who vehemently opposed
Enlightenment ideas.
Although the term 'the Counter-Enlightenment' was first used in
English (in passing) by William Barrett in a 1949 article ("Art,
Aristocracy and Reason") in Partisan Review, it was
Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin who
established its place in the history of ideas. He used the term to
refer to a movement that arose primarily in late 18th- and early
19th-century Germany against the rationalism, universalism and
empiricism commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Berlin's widely
read essay "The Counter-Enlightenment" was first published in 1973,
and later reprinted in a popular collection of his essays, Against the
Current, in 1981.[3] The term has had wide currency since.
Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin traces the
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment back to J. G. Hamann
(shown).
Berlin argues that, while there were enemies of the Enlightenment
outside of Germany (e.g. Joseph de Maistre) and before the 1770s (e.g.
Giambattista Vico),
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment thought did not really 'take
off' until the
Germans

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
reaction was led by the Königsberg philosopher J. G. Hamann, 'the
most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the
Enlightenment', according to Berlin. This German reaction to the
imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution,
which had been forced on them first by the francophile Frederick II of
Prussia, then by the armies of Revolutionary France, and finally by
Napoleon, was crucial to the epochal shift of consciousness that
occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism.
According to Berlin, the surprising and unintended consequence of this
revolt against the Enlightenment has been pluralism, which owes more
to the Enlightenment's enemies than it does to its proponents, some of
whom were monists, whose political, intellectual and ideological
offspring have been terreur and totalitarianism.
In his book Enemies of the Enlightenment (2001), historian Darrin
McMahon extends the
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment both back to
pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of 'Grub Street,'
thereby marking a major advance on Berlin's intellectual and
Germanocentric view. McMahon focuses on the early enemies of the
Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten 'Grub Street'
literature in the late-18th and early 19th centuries aimed at the
philosophes. He delves into the obscure and at times unseemly world of
the 'low Counter-Enlightenment' that attacked the encyclopédistes and
fought an often dirty battle to prevent the dissemination of
Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. A great many of
these early opponents of the Enlightenment attacked it for undermining
religion and the social and political order. This later became a major
theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment after the French
Revolution appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes
in the decades prior to 1789.
Graeme Garrard traces the origin of the
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment to
Rousseau.
Cardiff University

Cardiff University professor Graeme Garrard suggests that historian
William R. Everdell was the first to situate
Rousseau

Rousseau as the "founder
of the Counter-Enlightenment" in his 1987 book, Christian Apologetics
in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion, and earlier in
his 1971 dissertation.[4] In his 1996 article in the American
Political Science Review (Vol. 90, No. 2), Arthur M. Melzer
corroborates Everdell's view in placing the origin of the
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment in the religious writings of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, further showing
Rousseau

Rousseau as the man who fired the first shot
in the war between the Enlightenment and its enemies. Graeme Garrard
follows Melzer in his "Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment" (2003). This
contradicts Berlin's depiction of
Rousseau

Rousseau as a philosophe (albeit an
erratic one) who shared the basic beliefs of his Enlightenment
contemporaries. Also, like McMahon, it traces the beginning of
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and prior to the German
Sturm und Drang

Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s. Garrard's book
Counter-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 through to
20th-century Enlightenment critics among critical theorists,
postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has enemies on all
points of the ideological compass, from the far left to the far right,
and all points in between. Each of the Enlightenment's enemies
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.
This argument has been taken a step further by some, like intellectual
historian James Schmidt, who question the idea of the 'Enlightenment'
and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it. As our
conception of the 'Enlightenment' has become more complex and
difficult to maintain, so too 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
enemies, rather than the other way round. The fact that the term
'Enlightenment' was first used in 1894 in English to refer to a
historical period (see Schmidt 2003) lends support to the argument
that it was a late construction projected back onto the 18th century.
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolution[edit]
Political thinker
Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke opposed the
French Revolution

French Revolution in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Although serious doubts were raised about the Enlightenment prior to
the 1790s (e.g. in the works of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau

Rousseau in France and
J.G. Hamann in Germany in particular), the
Reign of Terror

Reign of Terror during the
French Revolution

French Revolution fueled a major reaction against the Enlightenment,
which many writers blamed for undermining traditional beliefs that
sustained the ancien regime, thereby fomenting revolution.
Counter-revolutionary writings like those of Edmund Burke, Joseph de
Maistre and
Augustin Barruel

Augustin Barruel all asserted a close link between the
Enlightenment and the Revolution, as did many of the revolutionary
leaders themselves, so that the Enlightenment became increasingly
discredited as the Revolution became increasingly bloody. That is why
the
French Revolution

French Revolution and its aftermath was also a major phase in the
development of
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment thought. For example, while
Edmund Burke's
Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) contains
no systematic account of the connection between the Enlightenment and
the Revolution, it is heavily spiced with hostile references to the
French revolutionaries as merely politicised philosophes. Barruel
argues in
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism

Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) —
one of the most widely read books of its period — that the
Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and
freemasons. In Considerations on France (1797), Maistre interprets the
Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment.
Romantic revolt against the eighteenth century[edit]
Many early Romantic writers such as Chateaubriand,
Novalis

Novalis and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge inherited this Counter-Revolutionary antipathy
towards the philosophes. All three directly blamed the philosophes in
France and the Aufklärer 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. Of particular concern to early Romantic writers was the
allegedly anti-religious nature of the Enlightenment since the
philosophes and Aufklarer were generally deists, opposed to revealed
religion.[citation needed] Some historians[who?]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.[citation needed]
Chateaubriand, Novalis, and Coleridge, however, are exceptions here:
few Romantic writers had much to say for or against the Enlightenment
and the term itself did not exist at the time. For the most part, they
ignored it.[citation needed]
The Sleep of
Reason

Reason Produces Monsters, c. 1797, 21.5 cm × 15 cm. One
of the most famous prints of the Caprichos.
The philosopher
Jacques Barzun

Jacques Barzun argues that
Romanticism

Romanticism had its roots
in the Enlightenment. It was not anti-rational, but rather it balanced
rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of
justice. This view is expressed in Goya's Sleep of
Reason

Reason (left), in
which the nightmarish owl offers the dozing social critic of Los
Caprichos

Caprichos a piece of drawing chalk. Even the rational critic is
inspired by irrational dream-content under the gaze of the sharp-eyed
lynx.[5] Marshall Brown makes much the same argument as Barzun in
Romanticism

Romanticism 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
Romanticism

Romanticism had more or less run its course. In this
optimistic age of science and industry, there were few critics of the
Enlightenment, and few explicit defenders.
Friedrich Nietzsche

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.
Enlightened totalitarianism[edit]
It was not until after
World War II

World War II that 'the Enlightenment'
re-emerged as a key organising concept in social and political thought
and the history of ideas. Shadowing it has been a resurgent
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment literature blaming the 18th-century trust in
reason for 20th-century totalitarianism. The locus classicus of this
view is
Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1947), which traces the degeneration of the general concept of
enlightenment from ancient Greece (epitomised by the cunning
'bourgeois' hero Odysseus) to 20th-century fascism. (They say little
about Soviet communism, referring to it as a regressive
totalitarianism that "clung all too desperately to the heritage of
bourgeois philosophy"[6]).
The authors take 'enlightenment' as their target including its
18th-century form – which we now call 'The Enlightenment'. They
claim it is epitomized by the Marquis de Sade. However, at least one
philosopher has rejected Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim that Sade's
moral skepticism is actually coherent, or that it reflects
Enlightenment thought.[7]
Many postmodern writers and some feminists (e.g. Jane Flax) have made
similar arguments, likewise seeing the Enlightenment conception of
reason as totalitarian, and as not having been enlightened enough
since, for Adorno and Horkheimer, though it banishes myth it falls
back into a further myth, that of individualism and formal (or mythic)
equality under instrumental reason.
Michel Foucault, for example, argued that attitudes towards the
"insane" during the late-18th and early 19th centuries show that
supposedly enlightened notions of humane treatment were not
universally adhered to, but instead, that the
Age of Reason

Age of Reason had to
construct an image of "Unreason" against which to take an opposing
stand. Berlin himself, although no postmodernist, argues that the
Enlightenment's legacy in the 20th century has been monism (which he
claims favours political authoritarianism), whereas the legacy of the
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment has been pluralism (something he associates with
liberalism). These are two of the 'strange reversals' of modern
intellectual history.
Enlightenment's "perversion of reason"[edit]
What seems to unite all of the Enlightenment's disparate critics (from
18th-century religious opponents, counter-revolutionaries and
Romantics to 20th-century conservatives, feminists, critical theorists
and environmentalists) is a rejection of what they consider to be the
Enlightenment's perversion of reason: the distorted conceptions of
reason of the kind each associates with the Enlightenment in favour of
a more restricted view of the nature, scope and limits of human
rationality.
Very few of the enemies of the Enlightenment, however, have abandoned
reason entirely. The battle has been over the scope, meaning and
application of reason, not over whether it is good or bad, desirable
or undesirable, essential or inessential per se. The conflict between
the Enlightenment and the
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment is not a conflict
between friends and enemies of reason, any more than it is between
friends and enemies of the notion of enlightenment.
Although objections have consistently been raised against what has
been taken as the typical Enlightenment view of reason by its
opponents (on all points of the ideological spectrum, left, right, and
centre), this has almost never been generalised to reason as such by
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment thinkers. Some charge that the Enlightenment
inflated the power and scope of reason, while others claim that it
narrowed it.
See also[edit]
Book: Enlightenment
Alasdair MacIntyre
Anti-intellectualism
Augustin Barruel
Charles Taylor
Chateaubriand
Dark Enlightenment

Dark Enlightenment (Neo-reactionary movement)
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Panagiotis Kondylis
Giacomo Leopardi
Friedrich Nietzsche
Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan
John N. Gray
Joseph de Maistre
Martin Heidegger
Walter Benjamin
Leo Strauss
Carl Schmitt
Ernst Jünger
Natural philosophy
Norbert Elias
Novalis
Juan Donoso Cortés
Søren Kierkegaard
Voltaire
Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald
Thomas Carlyle[8]
Julius Evola
Jacques Derrida
Gilles Deleuze
Giorgio Agamben
Georges Bataille
Pierre Klossowski
Charles Maurras
Notes[edit]
^ Listed by
Henry Hardy in the second edition of Isaiah Berlin,
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton
University Press, 2013), p. xxv, note 1.
^ Aspects noted by Darrin M. McMahon, "The
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment and
the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France" Past and
Present No. 159 (May 1998:77–112) p. 79 note 7.
^
http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/ac/counter-enlightenment.pdf
^ Garrard, Graeme (2003), Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A
Republican Critique of the Philosophes, State University of New York
Press, 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.
^ Linda Simon, The Sleep of Reason
^ Adorno & Horkeimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947, pp.
32–33
^ Geoffrey Roche, "Much Sense the Starkest Madness: de Sade’s Moral
Scepticism." Angelaki Volume 15, Issue 1 April 2010, pages 45 – 59.
Retrieved 12 December 2010. [1].
^ It is difficult to label Carlyle's thought, but his famous
conception on the "Hero Worship" and traditionalism, as well as his,
somehow, critical analysis on the
French Revolution

French Revolution (in one of his
classic books), links him close to the Counter-Enlightenment
References[edit]
Barzun, Jacques. 1961. Classic, Romantic, and Modern. University of
Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226038520.
Berlin, Isaiah, "The Counter-Enlightenment" in The Proper Study of
Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ISBN 0-374-52717-2.
Berlin, Isaiah, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann,
Herder. (Henry Hardy, editor). Princeton University Press, 2003
Everdell, William R. Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The
Roots of Romantic Religion. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987.
Garrard, Graeme, Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican
Critique of the Philosophes (2003) ISBN 0-7914-5604-8
Garrard, Graeme, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century
to the Present (2006) ISBN 0-415-18725-7
Garrard, Graeme, "Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment" in
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, ed. Joseph Mali
and Robert Wokler (2003), ISBN 0-87169-935-4
Garrard, Graeme, "The War Against the Enlightenment", European Journal
of Political Theory, 10 (2011): 277–86.
Humbertclaude, Éric, Récréations de Hultazob. Paris: L'Harmattan
2010, ISBN 978-2-296-12546-9 (sur Melech August Hultazob,
médecin-charlatan des Lumières Allemandes assassiné en 1743)
Israel, Jonathan, Enlightenment Contested, Oxford University Press,
2006. ISBN 978-0-19-954152-2.
Masseau, Didier, Les ennemis des philosophes:. l’antiphilosophie au
temps des Lumières, Paris: Albin Michel, 2000.
McMahon, Darrin M., Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity details the reaction
to
Voltaire
_-001.jpg/440px-Nicolas_de_Largillière,_François-Marie_Arouet_dit_Voltaire_(vers_1724-1725)_-001.jpg)
Voltaire and the Enlightenment in European intellectual history
from 1750 to 1830.
Norton, Robert E. "The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment," Journal of
the History of Ideas, 68 (2007): 635–58.
Schmidt, James, What Enlightenment Project?, Political Theory, 28/6
(2000), pp. 734–57.
Schmidt, James, Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British
Hegelians and the Oxford English Dictionary, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 64/3 (2003), pp. 421–43.
Wolin, Richard, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance
with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University
Press) 2004, sets out to trace "the uncanny affinities between the
Counter-Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism."
External links[edit]
Isaiah Berlin,"The Counter-Enlightenment", in Dictionary of the
History of Ideas (1973)
Darrin M. McMahon, "The counter-Enlightenment and the low-life of
literature in pre-Revolutionary France,"[permanent dead link] from
Past & Present, May 1998
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