This column / book review by N. S. Lyons is worthwhile — as much for its ultimate affirmation that this may be “neither the best nor the worst of times, but simply the time we have been given” as anything else. There is one feature I find odd. Toward the end of the piece, Lyons cites Jordan Peterson’s recent proclamation that we are living on the cusp of (or indeed in the early moments of) the Counter-Enlightenment. He then goes on to cite Oswald Spengler’s suggestion in The Decline of the West that the collapse of the “age of theory” might give way to a “sweeping re-Christianization” (Lyons’s term, not Spengler’s). The effect is to suggest that “the Counter-Enlightenment” and the “sweeping re-Christianization” will be, if not perfectly co-constitutive, at least a 90% overlapping Venn diagram.

But, as Lyons (and Peterson) surely know, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments before, and likely will be again before Enlightened modernity has run its course. Probably a majority of the most celebrated philosophical thinkers active since 1800 have been, in some sense, Counter-Enlightenment figures: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Spengler (!), Scheler, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault are the first ten names that come to my mind, and obviously there are others — Wittgenstein, anyone? (Crack open the bibliography of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things for many more!) The interwar German philosophical coterie of which Heidegger was the most prominent figure even seems to have self-consciously identified as a new Counter-Enlightenment school. None of these figures, whatever their individual religious beliefs, can really be said to have contributed to any sort of sweeping re-Christianization, though in my estimation some are more readily appropriated for the tasks of Christian philosophy and theology (Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and — in a roundabout way — Nietzsche) than others (Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Foucault, and probably Derrida too, whatever Jamie Smith says).

And — to turn the screw further — what could be more quintessentially Enlightenment in its underlying attitude than, say, a project to refound all of metaphysics from first principles? Every Counter-Enlightenment inevitably has a great deal of Enlightenment still in it. That is because the Enlightenment is not a philosophical school — Wolffian deductive rationalism, Kantian transcendental idealism, Benthamite utilitarianism, or whatever it is that Steven Pinker and Peter Singer have in common — so much as a set of postures, habits, and — for lack of a better word — vibes. An extremely persistent and evolutionarily successful set of postures, habits, and vibes, no less, which has spent the better part of three hundred years displaying an extraordinary capacity to adapt and co-opt opposition. The Enlightenment mold, it seems, cannot be shattered from within: now that Kant’s “sapere aude!" has become conventional wisdom, anyone who self-consciously tries to break with it is still, by definition, daring (in some measure) to use their own understanding. Once one has grown up and been educated under the plausibility structures of post-Enlightenment modernity, it is extremely difficult to shake them off and abandon them entirely. (See also: theologically educated Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism.) Neither can the dialectic of Enlightenment be simply ignored; its embodiment in modern technologies and technological society shows it is almost no use deciding you are simply uninterested in the dialectic, since the dialectic remains just as rapaciously interested in you. The rise of a purportedly Counter-Enlightenment movement in Western public life neither guarantees a sweeping re-Christianization of society nor promises a breaking out of the Enlightenment mold.