The Main Arguments of Counter-Enlightenment

The aim of the article is to explicate the body of arguments of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers. The body of arguments is understood as a set of philosophical ideas, and not just as a social opposition to the French Revolution outcomes on the part of conservative groups. The article is based on predominantly primary sources. These are texts of the classical Enlightenment thinkers (Immanuel Kant, Nicolas de Condorcet, and others) as well as texts of their opponents (Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Johann Gottfried Herder, and others). In addition to the primary sources, the article is based on historical and philosophical commentaries on the problem mentioned above, in particular, on Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment. The research method is hermeneutic. The study is based on the identification of the essential core of the educators' position and, accordingly, the symmetrical pool of their opponents' counterarguments. Four ideas are fixed as the core: the statement of a single reasonable principle of the world order, the understanding of thinking by the model of natural sciences, the fixation of the results of thought in a universal language and the possibility of building an ideal society on the basis of this knowledge. The pool of counterarguments also comprises four ideas: the impossibility of a rational understanding of the world, the value of abilities other than the calculating mind for understanding the world, the statement of the impossibility of a universal language and, finally, the fixation of essential problems of revolution and reform in the quest for an ideal society. A significant result of the study is a debate with Berlin on a number of statements. First of all, the author of the article points out the incorrectness of the separation of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment on the "geographical" basis, as ideas, respectively, formed in France and Germany. Further, a more complex nature of the debate on each point of divergence than that presented in Berlin's work is shown. In particular, it is shown that the Vico-Herder line leads to the genesis of the humanities, and the Leibniz-Goethe-Schelling line leads to the genesis of the biological sciences; both lines, in fact, cannot be attributed as anti-Enlightenment by essence. The debate around the key cognitive abilities of man does not revolve around simple dilemmas of "mind and feeling", "mind and intuition", "mind and faith" and so on. Rather, in most concepts, one finds a complex relationship between thinking and intuition in cognition. The debate against a universal language also has its limits, which can be seen in the example of distinguishing the general and special meaning of a word in Friedrich Schleiermacher' s hermeneutics or in the example of educational activities of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, in fact, clearly thematized language as an expression of the individual. And, finally, at the level of ideas, the debate between the progressives and the anti-progressives also does not look unambiguous. In the article, this fact is demonstrated through the tension between the statement of the infinite diversity of cultures and the normative development of humanity to Humanitat by Herder.

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