This is not shameless promotion as I have barely any time to write on here anymore but it probably touches on the kind of thing you are talking about. Popper's poitn about the transition from Closed to Open Society is somethign I feel is too readily overlooked:
Open Society, Open Wound

One is to read them proleptically as laying the groundwork for dealing with the new demands of the modern age through decluttering the views of their predecessors from dogmatic, superstitious and irrational elements. This may indeed be what they saw themselves as doing, not knowing where modernity would lead. Another way to read them is to view them as trying to create space in an enchanted world that remained more vivid to them than it does to us for newer social and scientific realities. — Pierre-Normand

So would the efforts of Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, etc. (and later echos in the 20th century) then be a sort of inversion of the bolded, an attempt to clear space in an increasingly mechanistic and instrumentalized world for a sense of "enchantment" that was ever less vivid?

But if that has to be one's goal, doesn't that already say a lot? Perhaps it's a worthy goal, but if you compare Romantic literature to its inspirations, say to Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it seems obvious that the older goal, of simply holding back the darkness (or basking in the glory of the cosmos and ordering oneself to it, as in Scipio's Dream or the Consolation of Philosophy) is always going to be more romantic. And yet, while I wouldn't want to say Cicero or Boethius are naive, I do think there is something gained (as well as lost) in the distance the Romantics have from the sentiment they want to capture.

To borrow a metaphor from the Enlightenment, a common theme was that man had just reached "adulthood" with the Enlightenment. This often took the form of what Taylor calls a "substraction narrative," where "childish superstition and dogmas are overturned an man comes into his own, into the flourishing adulthood on the new reason." Enlightenment adulthood is what is left when childish error is put aside. But I might ask of the lifecycle metaphor if we might not perhaps still be in our adolescence (we certainly seem to be grappling with uncontrollable passions, courting ecological disaster for instance). And with adolescence can come greater levels of clarity, but also greater levels of self-delusion (normally a mix of both!).

So I think this is the central difference, and its significance lies in what it reveals about the motivations and aims of the respective arguments. H&A are motivated by the promise of freedom and an end to domination, aiming at a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Reactionaries would banish it and reinstate domination of a different type. And that's a big difference. — Jamal

But that's not how they would see it, right? Their argument is rather that the Enlightenment systems leave men enslaved, and what is worse, not merely as outwardly the slaves of tyrants or kings (which it might also do, e.g., communism)—leaders who might be more or less wise and just—but what is worse, inwardly slaves to unrestrained passions and ignorance. The result is that "leaders" are generally as fully enthralled as those they rule over.

And this complaint need not rely on any appeal to a "Golden" or even a particularly "better" age, only the notion that freedom requires self-governance, which requires a level of cultivation that Enlightenment thought generally fails to provide because it operates on a "thin" (often wholly formal) vision of freedom.

That is, liberalism and consumerism, communism, capitalism, technocracy, etc. "leave most men, even its societies 'elites,' firmly entrenched in something like 'Plato's cave,' and what is worse, convinces us that watching shadows on the cave wall is the fullest attainment of freedom and power, the most a man can hope for," (the famous cave analogy of course being put to many different sorts of uses, some more or less plausible, in this sort of critique).

Now, it might be easy to dismiss the maximalist versions of this sort of critique, but I think most people will invariably agree with some form them. For instance, for most, Huxley's A Brave New World is not a utopia simply because virtually all of its citizens consent to their state and find its rule pleasurable. Rather, it is a dystopia precisely because all of the citizens "freely" consent to it. (And, unlike many fictional dystopias, ABNW is very honest about how it functions, and the Alphas and Betas at least know exactly how and why it is organized as it is). Likewise, I think most people can sympathize with J.S. Mill's desire to refine utilitarianism by speaking to some degree of differentiation between "higher" versus "lower" pleasures (e.g., pornography and fast food versus learning to appreciate fine art) to at least some degree. We might have the suspicion that Rawls' man who wants to spend his life counting blades of grass does not have a good conception of what it means to "live a good life" and "be an excellent person," or that a system that tends towards something like Idiocracy at the limit is not, in the end, making men free, regardless of if the "choosing agents" involved "choose" such a system "without coercion."

That is, while "reactionary" (but also many Nietzschean) attacks on Enlightenment values, particularly exclusive humanism might be dismissed as "aristocratic," caricatured, etc., they also exist on a spectrum and to dismiss them all is to be pushed very far to one side of that spectrum. I am not sure if attempts to stake out some middle area of the spectrum, such as Nussbaum affixing "internal" and "external" as prefixes to "transcendence" (the "external" being the bad sort) really resolve the issue here either.

Of course, not everyone feels this way, some are happy to deny any real distinction between the lower and higher, or any "proper ordering" of desire and the authority of logos over thymos (honor and regard) and epithumia (pleasure and safety). For those who do want to hold on to something of such a distinction though, the question is whether they can justify such an ordering of goods on the "thin" anthropology common to liberalism and the Enlightenment more broadly, and I think that is where traditional critiques tend to make their hay vis-á-vis Enlightenment thought's inability to promote true liberty. (And not all such critiques are wholly negative either, sometimes Enlightenment thought plays the role of Stoicism for Boethius, a sort of initial medicine for promoting negative freedom, that is none the less at best prepatory for deeper therapies).

Also, there is the more general notion that categories are oppressive, or at least suspect. Whereas, there is contrary the argument that, since knowledge and understanding are liberatory, and categories are essential to human understanding, an undue skepticism of categories and the universal is in fact corrosive and oppressive.



Well, in the post you're responding to I pointed out that Medieval thought is (and is widely acknowledged to be) largely refining earlier paths, or synthesizing and harmonizing them. This has both good and bad elements. The bad comes in the form of slavish appeals to authority (although the best authors tend to transcend this to some degree), and a lack of flexibility in some areas, or the fact that some novel paths that predict ideas in modern thought are never developed.

Early modern thought tends to be much more original and creative. I also think it is noticeably far more amateurish, and so in some ways it ends up being more creative in the way self-trained artists might be when compared to artists well-trained in some particular school (although this analogy has its risks). This isn't really surprising considering the massive shifts in who is doing philosophy, the type of education they receive, the incentives they face, the factors determining which works become popular, etc. The explosion in creativity is itself not an unalloyed good (just as an explosion in creative medical treatments is not necessarily a good if the treatments are not themselves effective).

But here is a key difference. The medievals and late-antique thinkers' negative tendency to give undue weight to authority is also paired with a strong understanding of their own historical dependence. The general modern tendency to equate multiplicity and potency with freedom tends to obscure this sort of dependency, which in some ways only makes it more potent and inescapable. It's a bit ironic given the huge focus in modern thought on historicism, but I think it's precisely this sort of historicism (e.g., claims that the true thoughts of the sages of yore are wholly inaccessible to us, whereas a medieval might easily think of a thinker, even a Pagan or Muslim, centuries dead as a close teacher and mentor) that actually allows the influence of the past to become transparent, precisely because it becomes inaccessible and so in a sense inert. But the "problem" here isn't the influence of the past, but its transparency, and not even so much its transparency as the fact that what is being passed on (e.g., the conflation of voluntarism with freedom) is corrosive.

One issue here is that many of the foundational categories and dialectics of modernity were themselves self-conscious inversions of past thought, of the via antiqua, etc. They were, as @Pierre-Normand puts it, "exercises in clearing space," (sometimes with good motivations, sometimes political power moves), and so in some sense instrumental and time/goal limited. But the space has long been cleared and yet we are still left holding the same old tools because we think they are essentially an extension of our arms. So, re the "inaccessible past," I think the past, particularly re realist ontologies, the Analogia Entis, the Doctrine of Transcendentals, etc. is not so much necessarily inaccessible, as rendered alien and inaccessible by the very transparency of what were originally self-conscious inversions of these ideas, and that is what I mean by a "failure to transcend modernity."


Just as a quick example, there are innumerable ways to attack teleology and realism, or to argue positively for varieties of nominalism. Yet the fact that arguments on this front so often (and across diverse modern schools) fall into the same dialectic of pitting realism and teleology (often as "authority") against freedom (or creativity) strikes me as one particularly robust manifestation of the old Reformation struggles haunting modern thought.

I appreciate your view, and I understand why people might think that way.

I just don’t see how one can move from the belief “All there is matter” to the rest. I also don’t see how physicalism, individualism, human rights, the scientific method, or whatever these days are considered enlightenment thinking, precludes the experience of beauty, love, or meaning. I suppose Nietzsche is prophetic in this regard, but the only way one could reach such a state of nihilism is if one was already steeped in the defamation of the world and the worldly, and have laid the foundation of all subsequent thought on some variation or other of supernaturalism.

Observe the metaphor “stripped of meaning” when pointing the finger at the use of scientific language to describe the cosmos, as if some words or symbols were a kind of paint thinner when applied to celestial bodies. The language has changed since Galileo’s time, sure, but the cosmos has hardly changed at all. It’s the same with the evolution of the human species. Ideas and words just don’t have the evolutionary effect that people imply, and we’re practically the same animal as we’ve been for thousands of years. We’re just privy to more information than we once were.

At any rate, given the propensity to blame modern authors and words, and harken back to the authors of less enlightened times, it’s clear that they do not like the language of modernity rather than modernity itself, especially now that the means of communication are practically open to anyone and literacy rates are much higher. They fear the ugliness and disorder that comes with freedom of thought and speech.

If I think about what could be lost should anti-modernism be turned into political action, it may turn out to be the most dangerous form of egoism we’ve ever seen.

If I think about what could be lost should anti-modernism be turned into political action, it may turn out to be the most dangerous form of egoism we’ve ever seen. — NOS4A2

In many ways I agree. But to be clear, at least personally, I'm not "anit-modernism" nor do I hold a desire to return to the days of old. There's no looking back (other than to understand where the present has come from historically). There's only looking forward.

Yes, that was not pointed at you. I believe one can witness a nascent anti-modernism in politics and popular thought. In my view, they’re blaming the wrong things, and should they push their resentment into political action they’re going to pull the rug right out from under themselves. Thanks for the back and forth.