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Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was heavily spiced with hostile references to the revolutionaries as merely politicized philosophes. Barruel argued, in his best-selling Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism , one of the most widely read books of its period, that the French Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and freemasons. De Maistre saw the crimes of the Reign of Terror as the apotheosis and the logical consequence of the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century, as well as the divinely decreed punishment for it.
This reaction to the French Revolution did not necessarily extend to its American counterpart. Burke, for one, was entirely supportive of the American Revolution , whose values he saw as compatible with traditions in their best sense.
The political Counter-revolution had its counterpart in a religious reaction to its Enlightenment values, especially in France. Joseph de Maistre, mentioned above as a political counter-revolutionary, was also a staunch defender of the Papacy; in he wrote Du Pape On the Pope in which he argued for the infallible authority of the Pope to bring political stability in Europe.
With the long tradition of Lutheranism and Pietism in Germany, a fideist reaction against the Enlightenment emerged there. Johann Georg Hamann maintained that reason is limited when people try to understand themselves and all existence, and that this limitation of reason leads them to feel that they are ignorant.
Consciousness of ignorance leads to genuine faith. Another German fideist was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi , who believed that super sensible realities such as God can be perceived by an intuitive feeling or faith, as distinguished from scientific reason. Rousseau 's romantic sentimental longing for nature was an influence for the emergence of a new movement called Romanticism around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, as an another reaction against the Enlightenment.
It was especially in Germany that this movement, with its emphasis upon imagination, spontaneity, and passion, flourished in the fields such as literature and art.
Graeme Garrard identifies Rousseau as the father of the Counter-Enlightenment, [4] and even broadens the meaning of the term "Counter-Enlightenment," by saying that there have been many Counter-Enlightenments from the middle of the eighteenth century to the twentieth century amongst various critics, both conservative and liberal alike, including postmodernists and feminists.
After the end of the Second World War the Enlightenment tradition reemerged as a key organizing concept in social and political thought and the history of ideas.
But with the rise of postmodernism, which is one of the Counter-Enlightenments according to Garrard, the features of the Enlightenment started to be regarded as liabilities—excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the excessive admiration of Enlightenment figures such as the Founding Fathers of the United States.
They prompted a backlash against both science- and Enlightenment-based dogma in general. Postmodern philosophers such as Michel Foucault are often understood as arguing that the Age of Reason unfairly constructed a vision of unreason as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore, evil and befouling.
He saw truth as more subjective and all disciplines as created by elites who control the academy, who determine, often based on self-interests, the standards of normality. Once one method has been selected over others, alternatives become deviant. What does not conform is heresy. History, for example, is written by winners not losers, usually by men not women, by the elite not the workers.
Foucault actually draws some of his ideas from the Freudo-Marxist book written by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was a penetrating critique of what they perceived as the contradiction of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment is at once liberatory and, through the domination of instrumental rationality, tending towards totalitarianism, such as fascism, in the twentieth century.
Nasr expresses Muslim criticism of the Enlightenment as separating knowledge from value. Western science and technology, he says, is immoral because there is no concern with the consequences of progress, but focus only with progress itself.
Science no longer serves humanity, but its own quest for yet more knowledge. His basic critique is that reason became detached from "revelation," and thus also from values. Nasr castigates contemporary Islamic fundamentalists for claiming that when they borrow Western technology that are retrieving what Islam gave Europe through Spain.
Nasr argues that the West condemns as heretics the very philosophers from which they borrowed, while Western science also stands on a foundation which they reject, that is, the primary of reason over revelation. There are also Christians who likewise have criticized the Enlightenment. At the end of the eighteenth century, Christian thinkers such as Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher were actually appreciative of the Enlightenment, but at the same time, they were of Pietistic background.
They were deeply aware of the tension of their Pietistic faith tradition with the humanism of the Enlightenment.
So, they attempted to critically accept Enlightenment thought, by synthesizing both traditions. Kant came up with a religion of "practical reason" not of "pure reason" as a new synthesis of the two, while Schleiermacher decided that "feeling" not "pure reason" nor "practical reason" is the domain of synthesis.
Their projects of synthesis set the tone of nineteenth century Christian theology. Today, many conservative and evangelical Christians see the Enlightenment tradition as a continued challenge to their faith. The tension of the two traditions still seems to continuously exist today. So, in the twentieth century Reinhold Niebuhr called for "a new synthesis" of both traditions and Paul Tillich for "new ways of mediation.
Glenz, and Alister McGrath have been open to dialogue with the Enlightenment tradition. New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation.
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