Incomplete Enlightenment: Edgar Reitz's The End of the Future and the Aesthetics of Suffering

Jürgen Habermas has warned of an incomplete enlightenment with one realm of expertise—aesthetic, moral, scientific, or political—invading and spoiling all others. German director Edgar Reitz shows this happening in his "film-novel" Das Ende der Zukunft. First aesthetics, primed for beauty and morally forgetful, threatens the truth of an individual's suffering. Next, and worse, political opportunism erases individual suffering. Reitz's film invites considerations of how suffering, beauty, and morality connect—connections fundamentally and variously delineated by eighteenth-century thinkers such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant.