Review: In Defence of the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment, or at least a certain version of it, has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years, as irate newspaper columnists seek to cast themselves as modern-day Voltaires, defending the values of a secular west besieged by forces of irrationality and fundamentalism. In this short book, Tzvetan Todorov, the prolific Franco-Bulgarian humanist philosopher, seeks to complicate this picture by demonstrating that “the Enlightenment”, both then and now, is far from a straightforward set of ideas that, for example, characterise the superior achievements of Europe, as some would have it. At the same, time, though, he is keen to protect this complex legacy in the name of an “interminable” project that will seek to define and defend various dimensions of an Enlightenment approach to the whole: autonomy, secularism, truth, humanity and universality.
It is Todorov’s moral and intellectual concern with “humanity” above all that shapes his retelling of the narrative of the Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment was, he writes, the point at which “for the first time in history, human beings decided to take their destiny into their own hands, and to set the welfare of humanity as the ultimate goal of their acts.” Todorov’s “defence” is therefore conducted in the name of a holism that would see any attempts at a one-sided Enlightenment as a perversion of its well-rounded principles. He has far more liking for Rousseau in all his complexity than for the rather more aggressively atheistic, urbane philosophes who would rush to condemn those deemed to be “irrational”. Where certain elements of the Enlightenment have been taken up and defended with a fanaticism that the project as a whole was supposed to undermine, Todorov quite rightly sees only perversion and danger. He has particularly harsh words to say about scientism, holding the desire to attempt to master the laws of the world to be impossible, due, in part, to the human drive to resist being determined by any such totalising system.
