These progressive white knights - like psychologist Stiven Pinker and neuroscientist Sem Harris - condemn the apparent revival of passion, emotion, and superstition in politics.
The essence of modernity, they tell us, is human ability to curb the divisive forces with the reason of the cold heads. What we need now is a revision of the Enlightenment. Surprisingly, this pink appearance of the so-called "Age of Reason" is wholly similar to the advanced image of its naive adversaries.
The fascinating view on Enlightenment derives from Hegel's philosophy to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School in the mid-twentieth century. These writers identify a pathology in Western thought that equates rationality with positivist science, capitalist exploitation, nature domination - even in the case of Max Horkhajmer and Teodor Adorno, with Nazism and Holocaust.
But the claim that Enlightenment was a movement of reason, despite passions, apologists and critics, are two sides of the same currency. Their collective mistake is what makes the "Age of Reason" classy so powerful. Passions - impacts, desires, appetites - were the forerunners of the modern meaning of emotions.
Since ancient Stoics, philosophy has generally seen passions as threats to freedom: the weak are slaves for them; the mighty affirm their reason and will, and thus remain free. The contribution of the Enlightenment was the addition of science to this picture of religious reason and superstition in the concept of passionate slavery.
However, to say that Enlightenment was a movement of rationalism against passion, of science against prejudices, of progressive politics against conservative tribalism, seems to be profoundly wrong. These statements do not reflect the rich qualities of the Enlightenment itself, which put a high value on the role of empathy, feeling and desire.
Enlightenment began with the scientific revolution in the mid-XVII century, and culminated in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Hegel, in the early 1800s, was one of the first to be attacked.
He said the rationale conceived by Emanuel Kant - the main philosopher of the Enlightenment - produced citizens who were alienated, without any passion and naked from human nature, with the murderous rationalism of French Terror as the logical outcome.
However, Enlightenment was a different phenomenon; most of her philosophy was far from Kantianism, and then left behind by the Hegelian version of Kant. The truth is that Hegel and the 19th century romantics, who believed that they were driven by a new spirit of beauty and feeling, called the "Age of Reason" to serve as a packet for their self-conception .
Their Kantian subject was a straw lantern, as was the dogmatic rationalism of their Enlightenment. In France, philosophers were surprisingly enthusiastic about passions and deeply suspicious of abstractions. Rather than argue that reason was the only way to counteract error and ignorance, the French Enlightenment put the text in sensation.
Many thinkers of the Enlightenment supported a vibrant and vibrant version of rationality, which was consistent with the features of sensation, imagination, and incarnation. Against the backdrop of speculative philosophy - Rene Dekart and his followers were often intent - the philosophers turned their attention outwardly, and laid the body in the foreground, as a point of enthusiastic engagement with the world.
It can go so far as to say that the French Enlightenment tried to produce a philosophy without reason. For example, for philosopher Etien Bono de Kondilak, there was no sense to talk about reason as "choice". All aspects of human thought were born of our senses, he said - specifically, the ability to retreat from pleasant sensations, and leave them painful.
These stimulants created passions and desires, and then led to the development of languages, and to the full flourishing of the mind. In order not to fall into the trap of a false articulation, and to stay as close as possible to sensual experience, Kondilak was a fan of "primitive" languages, unlike those based on abstract ideas.
For Kondilak, the right rationality required societies to develop more "natural" ways to communicate. This would mean that rationality was necessarily plural: it differed from country to country rather than existed as a universal undifferentiated rationality.
A totemic figure of the French Enlightenment was Denis Dousero. More widely known as the editor of the Encyclopedia (1751-1772), Dido himself wrote many of the subversive and ironic articles - a partially designed strategy to avoid French censors.
Didoro did not write his philosophy in the form of abstract treaties: Together with Volter, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Marquis de Sade, Déchoir was the master of the novel. A century and a half before Rene Magri wrote the ironic sentence "This Is not a Pipe" under his painting "The Treachery of Images" (1928-1929), Didier wrote a short story called "This is not a story" .
Didcho believed in the benefit of reason in pursuit of truth - but he had an acute enthusiasm for passions, especially when it comes to morality and aesthetics. With many of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, like David Hjum, he believed that morality was based on sensual experience.
The ethical judgment was closely connected, even indistinctly by aesthetic judgments, he claimed. We judge the beauty of a painting, a landscape or the face of our beloved, as we judge the character's morale in a novel, in a show, or in our lives - that is, we judge good and beauty directly and without the need the reason.
For Dido, the elimination of passions could only produce abomination. A person with no ability to touch emotionally, because of lack of passions or lack of senses, would be morally monstrous.
However, Enlightenment claimed that sensitivity and feeling did not bring about a rejection of science. Rather, the most sensitive individual - the person with the utmost sensitivity - was the most acute observer of nature. The typical example was a doctor, adapted to the patient's body rhythms, and their special symptoms.
Instead, it was the speculative system builder who was the enemy of scientific progress - the Cartesian doctor who saw the body as a simple machine or those who learned medicine by reading Aristotle but not observing the sick. So the philosophical doubt of reason was not the rejection of rationality in itself; that was just a rejection of reason in isolation from the senses, and distanced from the enthusiastic body.
In this regard, the philosophers were in fact more connected with the romantics than the latter would want to believe. The generalization of intellectual movements is always a dangerous thing. Enlightenment had distinct national features, even within a single country was not monolithic.
Some thinkers evoke a strict separation between reason and passion, and privileged what they enjoy and feel about the sensation, with Kant as the most famous example. But in this respect, Kant was isolated from many, if not most of the key issues of his era. Especially in France, rationality was not against sensitivity, but based on the latter. Romanticism was largely a continuation of the Enlightenment themes, and not a break from them.
If we want to close the gaps of the contemporary historical moment, we must end the claim that only reason has saved the world. The present guarantees the criticism, but it will do no good if it is based on the myth of a glorious exculpatory career that never existed.
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