The first mistake, they said, was to start from the consciousness of an individual mind. The disembodied individual reasoner, ripped from his culture and its history, is a figment of the Enlightenment thinker's imagination. A person is not a locus of abstract cogitation -- a brain on a stick -- but a body with emotions and a part of the fabric of nature.
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The second mistake was to posit a universal human nature and a universally valid system of reasoning. People are embedded in a culture and find meaning in its myths, symbols, and epics. Truth does not reside in propositions in the sky, there for everyone to see, but is situated in narratives and archetypes that are particular to the history of a place and give meaning to the lives of its inhabitants.
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A second counter-Enlightenment movement took root in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was centered not in England but in Germany. The various strands have been explored in an essay by Isaiah Berlin and a book by the philosopher Graeme Garrard. This counter-Enlightenment originated with Rousseau and was developed by theologians, poets, and essayists such as Johann Hamann, Friedrich Jacobi, Johann Herder, and Friedrich Schelling. Its target was not, as it was for Burke, the unintended consequences of Enlightenment reason for social stability, but the foundations of reason itself.
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In this way of thinking, for a rational analyst to criticize traditional beliefs or customs is to miss the point. Only if one enters into the experience of those who live by those beliefs can one truly understand them. The Bible, for example, can be appreciated only by reproducing the experience of ancient shepherds in the Judaean hills. Every culture has a unique Schwerpunkt, a center of gravity, and unless we try to occupy it, we cannot comprehend its meaning and value. Cosmopolitanism, far from being a virtue, is a "shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself." Universality, objectivity, and rationality are out; romanticism, vitalism, intuition, and irrationalism are in. Herder summed up the Sturm und Drang (storm and impulse) movement he helped to inspire: "I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!… Heart! Warmth! Blood! Humanity! Life!"
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A child of the counter-Enlightenment, then, does not pursue a goal because it is objectively true or virtuous, but because it is a unique product of one's creativity. The wellspring of creativity may be in one's own true self, as the Romantic painters and writers insisted, or it may be in some kind of transcendent entity: a cosmic spirit, a divine flame. Berlin elaborates:
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Others again identified the creative self with a super-personal "organism" of which they saw themselves as elements or members -- nation, or church, or culture, or class, or history itself, a mighty force of which they conceived their earthly selves as emanations. Aggressive nationalism, self-identification with the interests of the class, the culture or the race, or the forces of progress -- with the wave of the future-directed dynamism of history, something that at once explains and justifies acts which might be abhorred or despised if committed from calculation of selfish advantage or some other mundane motive -- this family of political and moral conceptions is so many expressions of a doctrine of self-realization based on defiant rejection of the central theses of the Enlightenment, according to which what is true, or right, or good, or beautiful, can be shown to be valid for all men by the correct application of objective methods of discovery and interpretation, open to anyone to use and verify.
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The counter-Enlightenment also rejected the assumption that violence was a problem to be solved. Struggle and bloodshed are inherent in the natural order, and cannot be eliminated without draining life of its vitality and subverting the destiny of mankind. As Herder put it, "Men desire harmony, but nature knows better what is good for the species: it desires strife." The glorification of the struggle in "nature red in tooth and claw" (as Tennyson had put it) was a pervasive theme in 19th-century art and writing. Later it would be retrofitted with a scientific patina in the form of "social Darwinism," though the connection with Darwin is anachronistic and unjust: The Origin of Species was published in 1859, long after romantic struggleism had become a popular philosophy, and Darwin himself was a thoroughgoing liberal humanist.
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The counter-Enlightenment was the wellspring of a family of romantic movements that gained strength during the 19th century. Some of them influenced the arts and gave us sublime music and poetry. Others became political ideologies and led to horrendous reversals in the trend of declining violence. One of these ideologies was a form of militant nationalism that came to be known as "blood and soil"-- the notion that an ethnic group and the land from which it originated form an organic whole with unique moral qualities, and that its grandeur and glory are more precious than the lives and happiness of its individual members. Another was romantic militarism, the idea that (as Mueller has summarized it) "war is noble, uplifting, virtuous, glorious, heroic, exciting, beautiful, holy, thrilling." A third was Marxist socialism, in which history is a glorious struggle between classes, culminating in the subjugation of the bourgeoisie and the supremacy of the proletariat. And a fourth was National Socialism, in which history is a glorious struggle between races, culminating in the subjugation of inferior races and the supremacy of the Aryans.
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The Humanitarian Revolution was a milestone in the historical reduction of violence and is one of humanity's proudest achievements. Superstitious killing, cruel punishments, frivolous executions, and chattel slavery may not have been obliterated from the face of the earth, but they have certainly been pushed to the margins. And despotism and major war, which had cast their shadow on humanity since the beginning of civilization, began to show cracks. The philosophy of Enlightenment humanism that united these developments got a toehold in the West and bided its time until more violent ideologies tragically ran their course.
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