One learns much about the biology of viruses by studying all things antiviral: immune response, vaccine physiology, pharmaceutical interferences. So it is with history. I am finding that I understand the Enlightenment much better when I look at the resistance raised against it.
Garry Wills book Head and Heart, American Christianities is helpful here. In his discussion on the development of Christian thought and culture in the nineteenth century he explains the influence of German counter-enlightenment thought. Isaiah Berlin, a leading romantic historian, is frequently cited. Berlin claims that the reaction against the enlightenment was "the most decisive event of modern times. It was certainly the largest step in the moral consciousness of mankind since the ending of the middle ages, perhaps since the rise of Christianity".
Here is Berlin explaining the defiance of Johann Hamann, one of the earliest European dissenters:
The sciences, if they were applied to human society, would lead to a kind
of fearful bureaucratization, he thought. He was against scientists,
bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen,
Deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes, everybody who wished to assimilate one thing to another, everybody who wished to prove, for example, that creation was really the same as the obtaining of certain data which nature provided, and their rearrangement in certain pleasing patterns...the whole of the Enlightenment doctrine appeared to him to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man, and for the whole rich world of the senses, without which it is impossible for human beings to live, to eat, to drink, to be merry, to meet other people, to indulge in a thousand and one acts without which
people wither and die. It seemed to him that the Enlightenment laid no
stress on that, and that the human being as painted by Enlightenment thinkers was, if not "economic man" at any rate some kind of artificial toy...
The dissent which rose up in the germanic states was reinforced by a necessary opposition to French domination: whether the etiquette of Louis XIV's court, postrevolutionary nationalism, or Napoleonic aggression, the modest European state was becoming something of a relic. French social philosophy was no small part of the presence which cast so great a shadow over Europe in the early nineteenth century.
Garry Wills book Head and Heart, American Christianities is helpful here. In his discussion on the development of Christian thought and culture in the nineteenth century he explains the influence of German counter-enlightenment thought. Isaiah Berlin, a leading romantic historian, is frequently cited. Berlin claims that the reaction against the enlightenment was "the most decisive event of modern times. It was certainly the largest step in the moral consciousness of mankind since the ending of the middle ages, perhaps since the rise of Christianity".
Here is Berlin explaining the defiance of Johann Hamann, one of the earliest European dissenters:
The sciences, if they were applied to human society, would lead to a kind
of fearful bureaucratization, he thought. He was against scientists,
bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen,
Deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes, everybody who wished to assimilate one thing to another, everybody who wished to prove, for example, that creation was really the same as the obtaining of certain data which nature provided, and their rearrangement in certain pleasing patterns...the whole of the Enlightenment doctrine appeared to him to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man, and for the whole rich world of the senses, without which it is impossible for human beings to live, to eat, to drink, to be merry, to meet other people, to indulge in a thousand and one acts without which
people wither and die. It seemed to him that the Enlightenment laid no
stress on that, and that the human being as painted by Enlightenment thinkers was, if not "economic man" at any rate some kind of artificial toy...
The dissent which rose up in the germanic states was reinforced by a necessary opposition to French domination: whether the etiquette of Louis XIV's court, postrevolutionary nationalism, or Napoleonic aggression, the modest European state was becoming something of a relic. French social philosophy was no small part of the presence which cast so great a shadow over Europe in the early nineteenth century.
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