The Enlightenment brought exceptional knowledge and prosperity to the human race but counter-enlightenment thinkers have stressed the limits of reason for centuries. The lack of communication between these two strains of thought has caused some of humanity’s greatest political failures. It is time to unite them, argues Spencer Critchley.

With the Enlightenment triumph of reason, humanity escaped millennia of ignorance, superstition, and needless suffering, into a new era of unprecedented progress in knowledge, prosperity, health, and freedom.

Who could object? Plenty of people, it turned out. A Counter-Enlightenment resistance movement arose and has persisted to this day.

The Enlightenment set the course for the modern world. But its split with the Counter-Enlightenment (so-named later, notably in a 1973 essay by Isaiah Berlin) has been a cause of many of modernity’s failures.

The schism has been all the more destructive because it has largely gone unrecognized. The Enlightenment’s very success has led to rationality defining — and limiting — our worldview. Ironically, an epoch named for light made us partially blind. As a result, a series of threats, crises, and catastrophes have taken us by surprise, while opportunities have passed us by.

Some of the resistance to the Enlightenment was just a reaction against the threat to the Old Order. But the Counter-Enlightenment was not simply reactionary: its leading figures were thoughtful philosophers, theologians, and writers who understood the power of reason, but who believed it was nowhere near enough. These included Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, the Romantics, and Edmund Burke, among many others.

The Enlightenment’s very success has led to rationality defining — and limiting — our worldview.

Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment prophet, largely unknown in his time, but influential ever after. He argued (in 1725’s The New Science), that while science could describe what was scientific, it missed everything else: meaning, morality, art, culture, identity.

“Whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things,” he wrote, “They judge them by what is familiar and at hand.” In other words, when all you have is reason, everything looks like data.

Hamann argued that any rational assertion about the world was reductionist: useful as far as it went, but that was only to the edges of a walled garden. Not logic, but poetry was “the mother tongue of the human race.”

Neither could the human spirit be captured by reason. Herder maintained that universal principles, like those of mathematics, would never apply to people, who were as different as their cultures, each of which could only have grown from a particular homeland. The Germans were essentially German, the French essentially French. 

But then Enlightenment concepts gave birth to the world’s first civic nations, the United States of America and the French Republic. These were based not on ethnicity but on universal principles such as the “natural rights” propounded by Locke. Nationality would no longer be based on tribe, but on rational agreement to a “social contract.”

To Counter-Enlightenment minds, this was not nationality at all, but mere commerce. As Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), “The state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern.”