3.2 Crisis of the Enlightenment
Last modified 05/26/2008
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Even as the rise of secularism is a challenge to the religious
traditionalism of the outstanding products of the Axial Age, the factor of
religion, as such, however we define that, lingers as a challenge to the
secular. This issue, if we look closely, shows us a side to modernity that we
often fail to notice. After all, the rise of the modern is ignited in the
revolutionary episodes of the Reformation. And while this legacy of
Protestantism stands in paradoxical relation to the Enlightenment it is
nonetheless fully as 'modern' as anything else in the modern transition.
The crucial episode is, of course, the rise of modern science (a recursion almost of its first such rise in the Greek Axial transition!) as the workhorse of the Enlightenment and its theme of rationality. But a closer look shows that the scientific, secular, and rationalistic questions are instantly braided, on a higher philosophical level, with the religious, but in a fashion that rapidly outstrips the traditionalist trappings of religion surviving into the modern period. Thus the history of the so-called crisis of the Enlightenment shows us the hidden stream of religion, the word has become inadequate, even superfluous, entering into a decisive dialectic with the framework of the rising sciences. There were in fact many Enlightenments, the Enlightenment being a complex of historical transformations, rather than an 'ism' to be taken catechismically as a doctrine. The most obvious example of this is visible in the rise of German classical philosophy in the German Aufklarung, with the revolutionary advance in philosophy initiated by the philosopher Kant. In broad strokes the dialectic of Newtonianism and the clarion chord of freedom, visible in the parallel emergence of modern liberalism and scientism, creates the potential matrix of seed notions, fully equivalent, yet upgraded, that stand at the core of religion, remarkable as that might seem at first. This neglected period of the full Enlightenment, studied closely, shows how our 'second Axial Age' has outflanked the traditionalism of religion by jumping to a higher octave, as it were, and leaving in its wake a potential to easily reconcile the essential core of religion with the rapidly crystallizing scientism of the secular era.
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