"Enlightenment" After The Enlightenment

The picture of the world、the way of thinking and the point of value established bythe Enlightenment laid a basic road of modernity，but with the emergence of themodernity crisis， the Enlightenment was being questioned. Criticizing mainmetaphysics from different positions and declaring that "the Enlightenment has ended"became a major philosophical trends in20th century. So how to understand the truepurport of the various "anti-Enlightenment" thought forms, and to reveal majortheoretical significance of the "post-metaphysical thinking" has become a majortheoretical issues that we need to think. This paper through distinction between theEnlightenment and "Enlightenment " that the Enlightenment as an event and the spiritof the Enlightenment characterized in criticism and negation, in order to illustrateinherent nature, limitations and heritage of the Enlightenment worldview, demonstrateeternal legality of the" enlightenment ",and examine the connotation of"Enlightenment" about the "post-metaphysical thinking" in contemporary philosophyperspective. The page is divided into introduction and four parts of main.Introduction: This section mainly distinguishes between the Enlightenment and“Enlightenment” through in-depth investigation of the history of philosophy. TheEnlightenment put Kant’s "should have the courage to use your own reason" for thebasic slogan, and it criticized traditional religion, superstition, tradition with a criterionof reason, so it deemed the reason to the highest authority. Rationalism of theEnlightenment illuminated the darkness through the light of reason, but it just ignoredquestioning and investigating of reason itself, as a result the reason moved towards itsopposite. To better understand the intrinsic relationship between the Enlightenment anda variety of anti-Enlightenment philosophical thoughts, to reveal various theoretical forms of the anti-Enlightenment playing s role of " detoxication" to traditionalrationalism, thus it is necessary to distinguish between the Enlightenment as a nounand the "enlightenment" as a verb, we consider the development and progress ofhuman society is the result of continuous human "enlightenment".Chapter One: As a unique event in the history of Europe, the Enlightenmentopposed superstition and ignorance, set up the authority of reason, and conceived anearth heaven where no contradiction, no dark. The Enlightenment thinkers firmlybelieved that with the process of rationality and enlightenment of people, an idealcountry would be achieved. People replaced God as the highest subject in theEnlightenment perspective, which epitomized the fundamental beliefs that "humanlegislated nature","human legislated moral","human legislated for history". Worldbecame the "image", the value became "personified",the history became "rational"while human became the subject.Chapter two: The picture of the world, ways of thinking, value norms establishedby the Enlightenment are guiding and shaping the modernity, and to achieve importantresults when its inherent paradox began to be felt. And its roots was that the logicparadigm of the Enlightenment-scientism and metaphysics intellectual thinking logicdominated. As a fundamental "climate of opinion" and "theoretical form," theenlightenment worldview intention was to lay a foundation for human freedom, but infact it always went toward its opposite.Chapter three: By examining the true meaning of "the Enlightenment failed " wewanted to specify that the conceit of the Enlightenment rationalism should be digestedand criticized, but the" enlightenment "itself could not be digested."Enlightenment"did not criticize the reality by some priori principles, while "enlightenment" wasunderstood as a critical, reflective spirit which was inherent in real life and promote thereal social change. It was a historic diagnosis and treatment for the specific issues, andthe most profound expression is that "finding a new world during the process ofcriticizing the old world" which is said by Marx. In the real life, there were always avariety of abstract ideas and alien forces that dominated human, therefore criticizing and revealing factors which dominated human, opening up the free space fore humanlife was the fundamental task of "enlightenment", which was the real reason that"enlightenment" could not be digested.Chapter4: This chapter is further deepen for chapter three, which clarifies the"enlightenment" connotation of the "post-metaphysical thinking", and re-understandsthe valuable heritage of the Enlightenment philosophy in modern and contemporaryphilosophy perspective. Modern and contemporary philosophy criticizing and rejectingof rationality, universality, its fundamental purpose was to save the real existent ofpeople and defend "negative" freedom of people. The principles of interpretation andunderstanding of human existence behind post-metaphysics was opposite to traditionalrationalism. But the traditional Enlightenment philosophy was not completely useless,in fact it contained a lot of valuable ideas. The most important idea was that itconsidered freedom as an adjustable idea, and attributed the real subject to individual.In this sense, it has some inspired meaning for contemporary "enlightenment" whichmeant liberating people from domination universal principleIn a word, the "enlightenment" is an unfinished business, it is a never-endingprocess to criticize abstract concepts and ideology which dominated us, and to defendthe real existence and value of people. The standard to judge whether a person is"enlightenment" is investigating if a person can consciously maintain consciousness oftranscendence, the spirit of freedom and the critical dimension.