Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment

Abstract

TW A Te are moving toward a reassessment of in which there will no longer be The Enlightenment,a unitary and universal phenomenon with a single history to be either celebrated or condemned, but instead a family of discourses arising about the same time in a number of European cultures, Protestant as well as Catholic, insular as well as peninsular, and certainly not all occasioned by the Parisian intellectual hegemony that sought to establish itself among them. This view reasserts the diversity of cultures, some of them national and some of them built by states, in a Europe presenting itself at the end of the twentieth century as a cultural homogenization bent on the destruction of both states and nations; in resisting this aggression, the study of Enlightenment discourses seeks to maintain the open society by articulating the diversity of voices within it. Within a family of Enlightenments, furthermore, there is room for the recognition of family quarrels, some of them bitter and terrible in their conduct; and in escaping the false unity of The Enlightenment, we escape the error of regarding as culminating in The Enlightenment Project, a construct invented by both left and right in order that they many denounce it (thus imposing on the open society the poverty of historicism). This enterprise, however malevolent, focuses on a problem others may wish to discuss: how it was that very often at its beginnings a program of persuading the human mind to recognize its limitations, in certain cases became a program of revolutionary triumphalism. This did sometimes happen; the historicist error is that of supposing that all roads led to this conclusion. By first pluralizing the Enlightenments, and then by focusing upon the concept of enthusiasm-one of the key words in the Enlightened lexicon-this essay attempts to show that the Enlightenments from their outset recognized the possibility of an intellectual fanaticism arising within as well as without the enterprises in which they were engaged.

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