Roundtable Discussion Conclusion

My sincere thanks to Graeme Garrard, Eva Piirimäe, and James Schmidt for taking the time to read and respond to my essay on the pitfalls of the Counter-Enlightenment.

My own misgivings about the concept stem from two basic views. The first is that the Counter-Enlightenment is unfair to the many intellectuals of the eighteenth century who do not fit the stereotype of the high-brow, materialistic rationalist. As Schmidt notes in his response, countless religious thinkers participated in enlightened intellectual exchange, and these moderately religious intellectuals would be, I believe, shocked to learn that they were somehow “countering” the Enlightenment. In the original essay I wrote that the Enlightenment was a “complex, vibrant, and conflicted intellectual culture,” and here I wish above all to reinforce this contention. The second view is that the Counter-Enlightenment is a moving target, and that it has been defined in such radically different ways that it casts doubt upon the empirical basis of the category. The fact that Voltaire or Rousseau can be characterized in one text as leaders of the Counter-Enlightenment, and in the next as quintessential Enlightenment thinkers, confirms my contention that the idea of Counter-Enlightenment is a confused, unhelpful, and arbitrary category. Moreover, it suggests that thinking about the Enlightenment and its presumed Other has been an historically complex process that has been shaped by shifting ideas about religion, politics, national identity, gender, and cultural lineage, not to mention new discoveries in the archives.

Eva Piirimäe answers my call to test the validity and usefulness of Counter-Enlightenment and finds that it does little to help make sense of the history of nationalism. She also notes, pace Isaiah Berlin, that Herder very much swam in the currents of Enlightenment thought. James Schmidt agrees, following John Pocock, that the Counter-Enlightenment suffers from a pathological ambiguity. He also adds an extra layer of evidence to his earlier research on the origins of the terms. He shows that for many fin-de-siècle Germans, the “true Enlightenment” had a religious character to it, which meant that today’s Counter-Enlightenment is yesterday’s Enlightenment. Graeme Garrard argues that neither he nor Berlin wrote of a unified Counter-Enlightenment, but rather “counter-movements” or “Counter-Enlightenments” (in the plural). Here I concede the point, but only to note that the idea of Counter-Enlightenment has in general become quite unified and singular, and a brief glance at my footnotes shows that the term is often used to represent a homogeneous bloc. “What Caradonna should have said,” writes Garrard, “is that both the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment are forms of enlightenment.” This statement comes closer to my own argument. However, it still retains the essential binary that I wish to deconstruct, and it does not address the fact that the idea of “countering” has been so badly misconceived, and has needlessly and arbitrarily marginalized many Enlightenment thinkers.

Until greater empirical evidence emerges to suggest the existence of an identifiable Counter-Enlightenment(s), we should assume that it was an invention of critics and historians in search not of a thing called the Counter-Enlightenment, but rather of the “real Enlightenment,” by recourse to its presumed antithesis. If no such evidence comes to light, the most prudent conclusion to reach is that there was no Counter-Enlightenment as such, but instead a messy and contestatory intellectual culture that suffered a broad range of viewpoints, and did so within an equally broad range of practices that welcomed thoughtful criticism, reasoned debate, passionate exchange, and above all the tireless pursuit of knowledge.