Double Dialectics: Between Universalism and Relativism in Enlightenment and Postmodern Thought (review)

“The Enlightenment” and “Enlightenment thought” are weighty terms. In the past twenty years or so, they have taken on connotations nearly diametrically opposed to those they enjoyed in previous decades. For scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, the Enlightenment was a moral highpoint in the development of critical reason, seen as an arm that could be used to combat superstition of all stripes. For Cassirer, Gay, and a generation of literary critics and historians influenced by their work, the Enlightenment represented an antidote to the moral and political debacle of twentieth-century experience. If, however, one considers the pursuit of truth to be a mask for the exercise of power, or if specific interests, rather than universal ones, are found to be the real motivation behind the search for knowledge, then “the Enlightenment” risks becoming another word for—and justification of—exploitation. In the early 1980s, citing Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard among others, literary critics began to use “the Enlightenment” as a synonym for instrumental reason. In opposition to the views of Cassirer and Gay, many claimed that the humanism subtending Enlightenment thought, based as it was on narrow European norms, was in effect a form of exclusionary, even racist discourse. Instead of promoting freedom and tolerance, the Enlightenment actually worked against its own principles.