Paradoxically, the crisis of Enlightenment arose from within, and indeed from its most cherished principles. The problem is that this principle is self-reflexive. If reason must subject all beliefs to criticism, it must also subject its own tribunal to criticism. To exempt its tribunal from scrutiny would be nothing less than ‘dogmatism’, accepting beliefs on authority, which is the very opposite of reason. The criticism of reason therefore became the meta-criticism of reason. If the Enlightenment was the age of criticism, the 1790s were the age of meta-criticism. All the doubts about the authority of reason, which are so often said to be characteristic of our ‘post-modern’ age, were already apparent in late eighteenth-century Germany.
From Frederick Beiser’s Hegel.
[This being, incidentally: An elementary lesson on the Enlightenment and its necessary supplement of self-doubt, and on how, contrary to the vain cat-calls made by sundry (philosophically illiterate) skull-heads, this self-doubt is not simply synonymous with some nebulous entity called ‘post-modernism’, this last being so often little more than an opaque gas compounded of the atoms of indignation and disgusted/ frustrated grunts of those who are prevented from grasping anything lying outside their drastically foreshortened purview of the world on account of their being chained to the ballast of Common Sense and stuffed with pre-digested journalese pap. Gracias]
See also Alphonse's post.
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