Enlightenment Interrupted: The Lost Moment Of German Idealism And The Reactionary Present
by Michael Steinberg /
2014 / English / EPUB
2.1 MB Download
The modern world claims to inherit the values of the Enlightenment.
The modern world claims to inherit the values of the Enlightenment.Enlightenment Interrupted
Enlightenment Interrupted suggests a different genealogy.
Instead of carrying on the Enlightenment it grew out of its
suppression and forgetting, a founding act of bad faith and willed
blindness that has haunted our world from its birth.
suggests a different genealogy.
Instead of carrying on the Enlightenment it grew out of its
suppression and forgetting, a founding act of bad faith and willed
blindness that has haunted our world from its birth.
In this groundbreaking analysis Michael Steinberg restores German
Idealism to its rightful place as the culmination of the
Enlightenment critique. Its great achievement was to move beyond
the self-world dichotomy at the heart of Western thought. In the
work of Fichte, especially, the recognition that all human life is
the product of collective human activity had revolutionary
implications. After 1815, however, in the aftermath of a quarter
century of revolution, philosophers and politicians alike swept
such challenges under the carpet. Modernity was thus founded in
reaction.
In this groundbreaking analysis Michael Steinberg restores German
Idealism to its rightful place as the culmination of the
Enlightenment critique. Its great achievement was to move beyond
the self-world dichotomy at the heart of Western thought. In the
work of Fichte, especially, the recognition that all human life is
the product of collective human activity had revolutionary
implications. After 1815, however, in the aftermath of a quarter
century of revolution, philosophers and politicians alike swept
such challenges under the carpet. Modernity was thus founded in
reaction.
Lucidly written and accessible to non-specialists,
Lucidly written and accessible to non-specialists,Enlightenment
Interrupted
Enlightenment
Interrupted places the Idealists in the contexts of
Romanticism, the brief contemporary openness to non-Western
thought, and the political and social experimentation of the French
Revolution. What followed was not a development of those tendencies
but a retreat to the opposition of self and world and a drastic
reduction in intellectual and social possibilities. This is one
source of the collective impotence that sees the twenty-first
century in a lockstep march to disaster.
places the Idealists in the contexts of
Romanticism, the brief contemporary openness to non-Western
thought, and the political and social experimentation of the French
Revolution. What followed was not a development of those tendencies
but a retreat to the opposition of self and world and a drastic
reduction in intellectual and social possibilities. This is one
source of the collective impotence that sees the twenty-first
century in a lockstep march to disaster.