“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
Enlightenment as
Philosophia Perennis
WHAT HAPPENED THAT the Enlightenment became a relic of intellectual history, good enough at best for the diligent but sterile exertions of scholars? What sad aberration has brought us to the point where modern thinkers do not dare to employ concepts such as progress, humanization, and reason except within damning quotation marks?
The standard answers are close at hand; anyone can pass them on as the worn coins of a spirit that lost its own identity long ago. Enlightenment? A bourgeois mystification. Reason? The evil instrumentality of unjust, outdated forms of production. Humaneness? The pretext of the third estate, which presented its particular interests as universal values so that with their help it could exploit the fourth estate in good conscience. Progress? The frenzied obsession with production and profit of a bourgeoisie that has subjugated the proletarian and with him the earth. Thus, we late descendants of the great eighteenth and incomparable nineteenth centuries find ourselves in a world that is sick with progress, impoverished, and suffocating in its own excrement. “The earth’s ruin through the mind,” as another Lessing, with the given name of Theodor, solemnly proclaimed.1
But I protest passionately and with all the energy at my disposal. Not that I would venture the absurd claim that the damages of civilization in the individual-humane and sociopolitical realms are only neurotic fantasies of a malade imaginaire! The author of the book Lefeu oder Der Abbruch, which contains the bitter expression “decay of the epoch in gloss,” is free of illusions, of all naïve pleasure in the accomplishments of progress, which put to shame the discoveries of a humanely intended science.2 And still, I profess loyalty to enlightenment, specifically to the classical enlightenment—as a philosophia perennis that contains all of its own correctives, so that it is an idle game dialectically to dissect it. I stand up for analytical reason and its language, which is logic. In spite of all that we have had to experience, I believe that even today, as in the days of the Encyclopedists, knowledge leads to recognition and recognition to morality. And I maintain that it was not the Enlightenment that failed, as we have been assured ever since the first wave of the romantic counterenlightenment, but rather those who were appointed its guardians.
I would like to state concretely what I mean, in the simplest possible way and without fearing in the least the accusation of being “banal.” On the contrary and as an aside, so to speak: Nothing would be more beneficial for the trendy thinkers who on every occasion disguise the poverty of their thoughts with the pinchbeck of cheap “brilliance” than a good, bracing regimen of banality. The first consideration that I feel compelled to voice in this regard points to an evident fact: All of the freedoms we enjoy and are obliged to pass on are fruits of the bourgeois Enlightenment. Here we stand, critically minded intellectuals, and whatever intellectual freedom we possess, we owe to the Enlighteners: from Montesquieu to Freud, from Locke, Condorcet, and Diderot to Marx, Feuerbach, and Russell. Whatever insights we have acquired that have helped us to know ourselves and gain assurance in the world, we would not possess without the scientific world view of the Enlightenment. That applies to the little things of our daily life as well as to tremendous macro- and microphysical phenomena. Robert Musil once spoke in passing of our foolish arrogance toward science, saying that the “educated” do not know the name of the man who bestowed on the world the indescribable blessing of narcosis! We need only to go back for a moment to the condition of the world and the mind before the onset of the Enlightenment, and with horror we will perceive fear: fear of the unleashed powers of nature, fear of bodily pain, for which there was no relief, fear of the evil eye, of gods, idols, and demons, fear of the rulers whose sadistic exercise of power was not curbed by law, fear of one’s own fear, which arose from the unconscious and made man the slave to his “id.”
To be sure, it would be presumptuous to say that we are living without fear today. But if we compare our worst fears—of war and atomic disaster, of economic adversity—to mankind’s fear and trembling in the pre-Enlightenment epochs, they appear like the coy heartache of a nineteenth-century patrician’s daughter beside the raging hunger pangs of the Silesian weavers. Given such oppressively momentous facts, an enlightenment that seeks to transcend itself but in so doing destroys the foundations of rational-moral thought, is distressing. And it is against this that I intend to polemicize. Perhaps one can guess what I have in mind. Not the miserable, but relatively cozy, German irrationalism of the early twentieth century that Thomas Mann so incomparably rendered forever ridiculous in his description of the Kridwiss Circle in Doctor Faustus, not the “Conservative Revolution,” then; not Klages, Spengler, Alfred Schuler, or Joseph Nadler, who constantly found it necessary to play off the “soul”—whatever that is!—against the “mind.” I want to pick a quarrel neither with the vitalism of a Driesch, which is now ancient history, nor, in the name of Julien Benda, with Henri Bergson and his philosophy of the élan vital. Everything that Heinrich Mann once called “profound drivel” has already been left by the roadside of intellectual history. It would be a pure waste of energy if I were to present arguments here that would only be forcing wide-open doors. No, I do not have to defend the Enlightenment against “profound drivel.” But the time has come to protest against a high-flown hogwash that decks out homey old irrationalism in a new set of chic clothes—Parisian chic, to be precise. No matter how closely I listen, no voice can be heard that calls out: the kings are naked. It is sheer high-flown hogwash of the most dangerous sort when Roland Barthes presumes to declare, in a pseudo-radical manner that just flabbergasts the up-to-date intellectuals, that language itself is fascist, as this gentleman did before a vacuously enraptured audience, of all things, on the occasion of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France. It was unleashed sophisticated twaddle when already two years ago the philosopher Guilles Deleuze and the psychologist Félix Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus sought arguments against the skeptical, reasonable Freud from no other than Wilhelm Reich, in fact, the late Reich, whose clinical insanity is a demonstrated fact. It is unwieldy anti-Enlightenment chatter and nothing more when Michel Foucault disclaims the moral progress of criminal justice (which, alas, is proceeding at a snail’s pace) by castigating the triste surveillance and sentencing practiced by modern jurisdiction more severely than he does the bestialities that were customary before the Enlightenment.
And what is one to say about the intentions of the anti-psychiatrists, for whom reason is nothing but bourgeois alienation of man, and who celebrate insanity as the free inner space of people who they claim are permanently manipulated by society? Subjectively, their intentions are good, that is certain; but objectively they are a menace to culture. What is one to say of thinkers like Roger Geraudy, who has already seen better days but—excommunicated from the Marxist-Orthodox church—damns enlightened civilization as eurocentric oppression and holds Black African initiation rites in higher esteem than the philosophy of the Peripatetics? Do not all these people, dazed by ideological “fog formations of the brain,” see, hear, and feel that they are the negatively manipulated ones? That they are being manipulated by intellectual fashions that coming seasons will have forgotten as they do the latest models of haute couture? Doesn’t it enter their minds that their irrationalism is serving the cause of the rulers, the publishers, the media czars, the newspapers concerned only with circulation figures just as effectively as once did the soulful outpourings of the Conservative Revolution? Of course not. On the contrary, they regard themselves as the real enlighteners, the appointed demystifiers, perhaps the prophets of a coming revolution.
If I am right, then France, forsaken by the sanity of Cartesianism, really is at present the center of an artfully dissembling anti-Enlightenment that does not see itself for what it is. It would be unjust, however, to blame only the French. In any event, German complicity must not be passed over in silence. The king’s new clothes were worn in postwar Germany too, and very early at that. After many years I was again reading in The Dialectics of the Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer, a book that had filled me with enthusiasm three decades ago; I declare without hesitation that fright and deep discomfort seized me on rereading this most brilliant work. In their effort to rescue the classical Enlightenment from the naïveté determined by its epoch and to develop it further dialectically, the authors let themselves be carried away and made horrendous claims that, taken literally, could serve as an alibi for the very worst kind of obscurantism. The book contains extremely disturbing declarations, such as these: “Enlightenment is totalitarian.” “Enlightenment dissolves the injustice of the old inequality, direct imperium, but at the same time it perpetuates it through universal mediation, the relating of every existent to every other.” “In the face of the Enlightenment concepts are like pensioners in the face of industrial trusts: no one is able to feel secure.” “On the way from mythology to logistics, thinking lost the element of self-reflection, and today machinery cripples people even as it feeds them.”
I know, I know, it is an intellectual sin to quote “sentences torn from their context,” as it is said. But what I am citing are paradigmatic judgments. Every one of them contains resistance against logic, irrational rage against the technical-industrial world, the wholly false conception that the historical Enlightenment was nothing but the instrument of a brutal bourgeoisie that was securing its dominion. They are blind to the obvious historical fact that the bourgeois was also a citoyen at the same time, that in the particular nature of the bourgeois revolution there was also universality, that while industry and machines did harm the individual, they also freed him from the oppressiveness and dullness of the biblically accursed soil. I know the mountain peasants of the past in my native Austria, and I know the American farmer. No ever so refined dialectical philosophizing can rob me of the conviction that, thanks to his machines, the latter leads a life more worthy of a human being than did the former in bygone times.
And the mention of dialectical thinking gives me a cue. I have tried elsewhere to grapple with dialectics as a specific mannerism of thought. I rejected the methodological claim of dialectical philosophizing, but I acknowledged with admiration the inspiring strength of the dialectical process. One is not indebted to Sartre, as is the author of this text, without having tried one’s hand at dialectics. There is not one of my writings, hardly a single sentence that I’ve written, in which traces of dialectics cannot be detected. And yet, when I try today, at a late date, to clarify for myself whether dialectics has brought the history of human thought more good or more bad, it seems to me as if the “Bacchic frenzy,” as Hegel himself called the (dialectically) “true,” in the last analysis created more vainglorious mischief than it did possibilities for authentic progress. I don’t want to go as far as the philosopher Etiemble, who spoke of Hegel in a recently published text as the “architraitre,” the “archtraitor” of reason. But to the same extent that I clarify for myself the puzzles, the distortions, and the acrobatics of dialectics that maliciously force reason, pure and practical, into the retirement home of intelligence, I become estranged from this manner of thinking. This happens all the more easily since I see in Marx today less the dialectician and successor to Hegel than the prophet of a new morality, the direct descendent of the very same bourgeois Enlightenment that in the eyes of modern Marxists—who wish to know nothing more of the human being—is but an unwieldy instrument of the ruling classes.
How lovely, spirited, and virile, how sensible and lucid the classical Enlightenment appears against the background of dialectical obfuscation. All this despite its naïveté and epistemological deficiency, despite its optimism, which is called “childish,” although I believe that soon it will gloriously revive as the highest level of humane maturity. Together with the skepticism that does not contradict it but rather ingeniously complements it, the benevolent optimism of the Enlightenment, with its constant values of freedom, reason, justice, and truth is our sole hope of making history and in so doing of carrying on the one truly humane business: lending meaning to the meaningless. It is the intellectual and social demand of the day that we rediscover the classical Enlightenment. Certainly, the perspectives have shifted. We no longer believe that we know, as once did the Encyclopedists, but we know always—in scientific research as well as in the humanities—that we merely believe and that we must constantly be prepared to revise our scientific doctrines. Revision, moreover, is taking place all the time, and no one is more keenly aware of this than the natural scientists when, like the great Enlightener Jacques Monod, they recognize our presence here as the product of blind chance and yet, as Sartre says, create something out of that into which we have been made.
A little less than fifty years ago, Thomas Mann, the author who is dearest to me among all those writing in my native tongue, spoke on the 200th birthday of the man in whose spirit this address is intended. Mann’s words appear to me to be so very pertinent that I cannot refrain from citing them here. The writer, who late in his life overcame the bourgeois ironic view of death in order to attain to active enlightenment, proclaimed:
To the inferior joy of all enemies of manly light, all priests of the dynamic orgasm, we have already reached the point of irrationality where the natural backlash is beginning to look viciously dangerous; and by now a backlash against the backlash appears necessary in order to frighten the chthonian rabble that has gotten too much grist for its mill back into the obscurity to which matriarchal right entitles it.
It is now crucial that the Enlightenment not permit itself to be intimidated, either by the traditional reproach—whose historical patina by no means renders it respectable—that it is “shallow,” or by the modishly gesticulating, arrogant, but wholly unsound argument that it is “outdated.” Analytic ratio does not become obsolete, unless by its own doing—whereby, to be sure, it invariably reconsolidates at the same time. Truth is certainly a difficult epistemological problem. In daily practice we are able to differentiate it from untruth. We need no philosophy of law in order to demand justice. Anyone who has ever lived in unfreedom knows what freedom is. Whoever was a victim of oppression can easily confirm from experience that equality is no myth. Reality is always more clever than the philosophy that impotently wishes to reflect it. That is why enlightenment is no seamless doctrinary construct but rather the constant illuminating dialogue that we are obliged to conduct with ourselves and with others. The light of the classical Enlightenment was no optical illusion, no hallucination. Where it threatens to disappear, humane consciousness becomes clouded. Whoever repudiates the Enlightenment is renouncing the education of the human race.
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“Aufklärung als Philosophia perennis,” in Über Jean Améry (About Jean Améry; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977), pp. 69-78. This essay is an address given by Améry on May 16, 1977, upon receiving the Hamburg Lessing Prize, an award created to honor the great German Enlightenment poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81).
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