1750, casualty of 1914

lest we Forget (the prekantian enlightenment)

Matthew Sharpe

pp. 251-276

in: Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs, Jack Reynolds (eds), 100 years of European philosophy since the Great War, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

"1750", the French enlightenment, was a retrospective casualty of the catastrophes set in chain by 1914. German Kulturpessimismus, heightened by the war and enflamed by the abuse of liberal ideals at the Treaty table at Versailles, has since been disseminated through, amongst other things, the intellectual normalisation of Heidegger's metapolitical, radically antimodern "history of Being", and more recently Carl Schmitt's work. The paper recalls that the French enlightenment, a divided period of intellectual ferment, was characterised as much by scepticism as rationalism, Deism as atheism, anticolonialism as Eurocentrism, the recovery of Roman (as against Greek) antiquity, and the philosophical use of literature to break with old modes of intellectual production, and create new public spheres.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Kant Immanuel

Schmitt Carl