“Myth is Totality,” as Desire, Part I

If we had been obeying conventional wisdom, we at the Enlightenment Underground would have begun our enquiry (and defense?) of the historical Enlightenment with the recognition of the Enlightenment as that period in the intellectual history of the West when reason comes to be urged as the basis for political authority. Our defense of the Enlightenment and resistance to the Counter-Enlightenment would have been straightforwardly an urging for a return to the principles of the authority of reason and a resistance to those political forces or movements supporting anything other than reason as a basis for political power.

Upon this conventional understanding of the Enlightenment (and Counter-Enlightenment) Carl’s theory of the Enlightenment, “Enlightenment is the overcoming of myth through critique,” would have been rendered as, “Enlightenment is the overcoming of unreason through critique.” Overcoming would then denote the processes by which unreason is replaced or supplanted by reason, and critique would simply be equated with reason, “Enlightenment is the rational replacement and rational supplanting of unreason by reason,” is how Carl’s theory might then read. (A threatening redundancy in the theory becomes clearer.) Our mission here at Enlightenment Underground of defending the historical Enlightenment and resisting the Counter-Enlightenment would have then also been much more straightforward: we’d simply need to show where in the political and social realms there are transgressions of reason and how reason might be reasonably reasserted.

However, we didn’t obey conventional wisdom – we didn’t even give a nod in its direction until now. We preferred to blithely ignore any stability and orientation we might have received by treating “reason” as a real or unitary thing, as the conventional wisdom of the Enlightenment demands it must be. Perhaps because that conventional view of reason seems so ridiculous to us, we happily wandered into dark and ugly thickets of thoroughly unenlightened entanglements. Not that I necessarily regret it or think holding to the obvious straight and narrow path of “reason” would be more productive, “correct”, or intelligent. But my goal now is to understand why we went astray in the manner we did.(Is it productive to equate going astray with productivity?) What is our temptation and what are our fears? What do we want?

We want something from the historical Enlightenment, and yet we do not (at least not in the same form – but in a different form reason is not reason,) want what the historical Enlightenment wanted: political and social authority for “reason” alone. Do we?