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September 6, 2004
What Stephen Eric Bonner is doing by reclaiming the Enlightenment tradition is to re-connect emancipatory reason with the progressive politics of modernity.
"The idea of reclaiming the Enlightenment views its subject less as a dead historical artifact than as the necessary precondition for developing any form of progressive politics in the present."
It is a worthy concern. It fits in with the concerns of philosophy.com about political reason and liberal institutions.
So how does Bonner do this? Alas, in a conventional and cliched way.
He reclaims a common ethos of resistance to the parochial beliefs and the arrogance of power by those representatives of church and tradition, who so vigorously opposed democracy and equality, revolution and reform, cosmopolitanism and internationalism, skepticism and science. He puts the political conflict between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment up front.
He does this by acknowledging the biases and prejudices of the Enlightenment tradition. He says:
"Viewing the Enlightenment as irremediably tainted by anachronistic prejudices only casts a plague on all houses. No need exists to compare the views of the philosophes and the fanatics: both are prejudiced with regard to race or sex or sexual practice and that is that. Forgotten is that the former can be held to their own ethical standards of progress while the latter cannot because they rejected those standards in the first place. "
The point of arguing that the Enlightenment ethos is not reducible to particular prejudices is to highlight the "qualitative differences between essentially progressive movements that embraced the political implications of the Enlightenment and essentially reactionary movements that resisted it."
He argues that illuminating the spirit of the Enlightenment, the best that it had to offer, is the place to begin. What the Enlightenment ethos stands for is a self-critical method that can be used in the fight for liberation from outdated prejudices and dogmas.
It all ends rather lamely. Bonner says:
"....when the salience of the Enlightenment can no longer be taken for granted, when its values have come under attack from both the right and the left, more is necessary than analyzing a few thinkers or some abstract philosophical propositions about history, nature, and “man.” It is a matter of presenting the Enlightenment as an overarching political enterprise and a living tradition—not merely in its ideas but in the actions it inspires."
What has been forgotten is the need to critique the way the Enlightenment tradition is embodied in current liberal practices and democratic political institutions. These are pushed to one side to fight the irrational right (religious fanaticism not merely of the Islamic variety, but of the sort promulgated by “born again” Christians, biblical literalists) and the irresponsible postmodern left.
Criticising the current political practices and democratic institutions that embody the enlightenment tradition in the name of the spirit of the enlightenment has been forgotten. What is presented by Bonner is a very thin and cliched conception of the progressive political discourse of modernity. Thge lack of the political that he criticizes in Adorno & Horkheimer is evident in his text.
Where is Bonner's mention of citizenship?
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The deficiencies of Adorno/Horkheimer in terms of social and political action are well understood. Indeed one could say that they haven't got further than what Marx called "sinnlich-menschliche Tätigkeit, Praxis" in his Feuerbach theses. To the current generation of critical theorists active in Germany, this points to the requirement of a categorical frame of analysis, which doesn't merely describe social power structures, but also contains a normative aspect about the social processes required to overcome them. Bronner however, seems to argue that this lack of normative instruction somehow points to a rehabilitation of enlightenment ideals, as understood in opposition to the counter-enlightenment. This seems a bit quick indeed, and strangely unrelated in the way he presents it. He doesn't actually seem to engage the first generation of critical theory, as much as he is regressing past them into a pre-Hegelian state of ahistorical affirmation, lastly in order to defend the liberal pretence which Adorno/Horkheimer have exposed.
This truly feels like a reduction of critical potential. At best, it seems to allow for a liberal concept of justice with a set of normative criteria to articulate social injustices, however, without questioning the institutional embeddedness of these criteria in a particular type of society. Criticism no longer seems to be understood as a reflective moment of a rationality that is rooted in the historical process. Doesn't this blind the idea of capitalism as being a cause for the transformation of social rationality, or even, eclipse the notion of instrumental reason altogether?
And how about Habermas' Kantian "project" in international constitutionalism (discussed in the same issue of logos online as the Bronner article)? Isn't this "project" ignorant of how Kantian idealism essentially reified Protestant morality and economic rationality in the institutions of the rising bourgeoisie? Can we afford to ignore Hegelmarxist objections in our discourse of modernity?