Chapter 2. The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason

Chapter 2. The CounterEnlightenment Attack on Reason

“Institutionalizing confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment.” — Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

In this chapter we will briefly examine a turbulent period of the Enlightenment era, broadly covering the 17th through to the 19th century. As with all movements, and especially with the Enlightenment, the ideas promoted, even if successful, cannot be likened to smelting a bar of pure iron. Intellectual movements are better likened to a quilt, stitched together by individuals who work often with little communication. It is often only later in history that intellectual historians, having sufficient hindsight, define the era and pick out those they deem to be contributors. Certainly not all contributions strengthen the quilt nor blend with the others. This can be plainly seen in the Enlightenment project, whose main origins come from the quite different perspectives of Germany and Britain.

The British Enlightenment had three main figures: Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Bacon for his empiricism and scientific method; Newton for his science, especially in physics; and Locke for his philosophical work on reason, empiricism, and liberal politics. Selected from and absorbed by other intellectual centers in France and Germany, each of these thinkers had international appeal. The greatest crosscultural hurdle at the time was religion, which dominates and defines what is called pre-modernism. Enlightenment

thinkers were already primed to move past pre-modernism into modernism—many of them were deists and did not hold the more prevalent belief of God as a personal, caring creator that can hear prayers. Instead, God was conceptualized as the great spark that started the universe, or God the great mathematician, or the designer of all living things. Naturally, the first scientists were “religious” in the sense that they were interested in studying the “great works” of God, whether living or non-living.

These early scientists found themselves opposed to traditional theism when they considered God merely a distant architect and believed they could use the human power of reason to discover the workings of God’s creation. This tension with religion and the struggle to make science socially acceptable can be seen in the 17th century in a now famous remark from Galileo: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Are facts and knowledge simply hidden in scripture to be revealed through revelation by priests, or are they waiting to be discovered by observing and reasoning about the world?

This was the big idea developing in the early Enlightenment. Supernaturalistictradition from the pulpit was being replaced by naturalistic science from the lab. While inroads made by mechanics and chemistry created enough heat on their own, greater cultural shock occurred when scientific methods were applied to astronomy and even human beings. The re-orientation of the cosmos to the geocentric model was hard enough, but what would happen to the human spirit if we were to be analyzed down to the atom, with life itself becoming merely forces, chemistry, and plumbing?