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.