What Does Enlightenment have in Common with Anti-Enlightenment?

Answer: Both (frequently) detest the Jews.

Jacobin Magazine has a fascinating and thoughtful article by Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss on the curious case of Jason Reza Jorjani, a recent Ph.D. recipient from the ultra-lefty SUNY-Stony Brook philosophy department who is now one of the major house philosophers of the alt-right. The article is primarily a critique of the anti-enlightenment tradition within philosophy (often associated with "Continental" philosophers) which, despite its often superficially progressive garb, the authors contend is and has been easily coopted and appropriated by the far-right. Jorjani, for example, doesn't draw just from the usual right-wing suspects (Heidegger, of course, was himself a Nazi) but from sources viewed as unimpeachably liberal like American pragmastist William James.

One thing the piece does is provide outstanding detail on just how the anti-enlightenment project has, historically, by justified by and gone and hand-in-hand with hatred of Jews. Opponents of the Enlightenment and its values were relentless in associating it with Jewry -- thought as quintessentially rationalist, conniving, cosmopolitan and thereby subversive. In that, it is a rare piece which takes seriously the significant intellectual pedigree of anti-Semitism which has continued influence over major schools of social thought.

However, the problem with Frim and Fluss' otherwise excellent piece is straightforward: all of this was equally true of Enlightenment thinkers. They, too, frequently justified the Enlightenment project by virtue of how it rejected the Jews and Jewish values -- who, in this tradition, were viewed as backwards, insular, tribalistic, and superstitious. Voltaire was a raging antisemite, but even friendly French emancipators unashamedly demanded the abolition of Jewish distinctiveness and the full Jewish assimilation into "neutral" French life. Marx's "Jewish Question" posited Jewishness itself as a problem to be solved, while Fichte's (a more borderline case in the "Enlightenment/anti-Enlightenment" divide) proposal for Jewish emancipation was that "their heads should be cut off in one night and replaced with others not containing a single Jewish idea."

In a world that was and is foundationally antisemitic, standing in opposition to Jews carried and carries rationalizing force. It is depressing, but actually not that surprising, that a great number of Enlightenment/Anti-Enlightenment debates took place on the terms of "who's more Jew-y?" This doesn't exculpate the antisemitic elements of the anti-Enlightenment tradition, which are and remain very real. But it is by no means the case that their Enlightenment counterparts have remained unstained. The real moral of the story here is neither pro- or anti-Enlightenment in itself, but rather lies in the cognizance of how deeply antisemitism infects the Western philosophical tradition because this philosophical dialogue to an alarmingly large extent has been about who better repudiates "Jewish" characteristics.

You Can't Have It All

Though I think this Duck of Minerva post on "certifying idealism" comes down a little hard, this paragraph is very wise and deserves repeating:

[T]he conjoining of "certifying" and "idealism" troubles my Weberian sensibilities to no end. If we are doing anything at all for our students -- and this applies broadly to everyone in the academy, I think, but perhaps especially to those of us who teach about politics -- we ought to be pressing them to deal with the conflicts between their ideals and the means of implementing those ideals. We should also be pressing them to deal with the fact that not all idealistic value-commitments point in the same direction, that not all normatively desirable ends can be accomplished all at once, and that in the end not all ideals can be rationally reconciled -- in other words, our students need to be appraised of the failure of the Enlightenment project of bringing all values together under the common head of Reason, and of the consequent need for hard and perhaps un-rationalizable choices and commitments.

Not everything that falls under the metric of "good" can be accomplished at the same time. Trying to do that usually leads to more harm than good, either because it engenders quiescence in people who refuse to do anything unless it can be done perfectly (which means nothing will ever happen), or because it encourages people to jettison values that really are important wholesale because they see them as barriers to the "ultimate" project (be it fostering the revolution, increasing liberty, reducing the size of government, securing the nation, or what have you). It is, of course, true that the opposite is true as well: people can be too quick to compromise and never take a stand to demand more than the bare minimum, and political movements can spin their wheels if they get stuck in an endless cycle of aimless, small-scale demands without any sort of larger vision of what they want to accomplish. But this interplay merely reinforces the point: mediating between those poles is tough, it will inevitably resist formula, and the best strategy is not a naive belief that one can be a messianic figure for political change, but rather acquiring the social and political agility necessary to make the world a better place.