The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason
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And what of values? Counter-enlightenment thinkers, like 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, were concerned about the erosion of traditional values in selfsacrifice, community spirit, and duty. Science, with its idea of allowing individuals to generate knowledge, naturally led to political individualism, where the happiness of an individual is his moral right to pursue. What would happen to religious concepts such as predestination when education, science, and technology allow any person to set their own goals and create their own destiny? It is a far cry from the idea of “for King and country.” To pre-modernists past and present, the Enlightenment movement and science in general was promoting amoral, godless, arrogant, pitiless, and spiritless human life.
Immanuel Kant With that context in mind, let us look more closely at the most important Counter-Enlightenment thinker: Immanuel Kant. Recall that pro-reason intellectuals are looking to gain ground in the culture by defending realist accounts of perception, concepts, and logic. Kant, more than any other, buttressed pre-modernist ideas against the Enlightenment, laid the groundwork for continued pre-modernist thought in the form of irrationalism and idealist metaphysics in modern times, and provided the epistemological backdoor for postmodernist thought. Kant is conventionally considered a defender of reason: he favored science, promoted consistency in ethics, and set out a regulative framework for reason and principles to guide thinking. However, Kant also (in)famously disconnected reason from reality, which decidedly places him as against realist epistemology. Kant argued that we can never
