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The Principal Folly of the Enlightenment

It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment, an aspiration the formulation of which was itself a great achievement, to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which alternative courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or […]

It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment, an aspiration the formulation of which was itself a great achievement, to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which alternative courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, ti was hoped, reason would displace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural particularities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be the mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places. And that rational justification could be nothing other than what the thinkers of the Enlightenment had said that it was came to be accepted, at least the vast majority of educated people, in post-Enlightenment cultural and social orders.

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Yet it is of first importance to remember that the project of founding a form of social order in which individuals could emancipate themselves from the contingency and particularity of tradition by appealing to genuinely universal, tradition-independent norms was and is not only, and not principally, a project of philosophers. It was and is the project of modern, liberal, individualist society, and the most cogent reasons that we have for believing that the hope of a tradition-indepdendent rational universality is an illusion derive the history of that project.~Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [italics above mine]

MacIntyre’s body blows to Enlightenment thought are well known, and I won’t pretend that I can indict the incoherence of that thought better than he already has. I remain an enthusiastic amateur in these matters, of course, but if MacIntyre’s characterisations are right I do take some consolation that my earlier descriptions of Enlightenment ideas on morality were not nearly as superficial as some had claimed.

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