The Enlightenment Spirit Of Depravity And Redemption

The book named Dialectics of Enlightenment explained that the spirit of the Enlightenment was changing from positive to negative, resulting the tense relationship between man and nature. This idea help us to understand the ecological crisis.Dialectics of Enlightenment implies that the spirit of the Enlightenment includes : the core of universal knowledge ; coquetting and dominating nature ; establishing man's freedom. With the development of science and technology, the man's rationality becomes a kind of tool rationality and at the same time the relationship between man and nature is also gradually changed. Man is absolutely controlling the nature, and the nature is only the object that is transformed by people. This confrontation between man and nature makes theirs relationship further deterioration. The pursuit of human freedom is the ultimate goal of enlightenment, but the pursuit of freedom is restricted by the limited resources and the environment. While the Liberalism ignoring this limits is bound to lead to the excessive consumption of resources and the environment heavily polluted. Therefore we can conclude that the degeneration of the spirit of the Enlightenment provides us an important clue in searching for the root causes of the ecological crisis.It is precisely because the essence relationship of man and nature is separated by modern people, rationality becomes to be the slaves of the desires and a kind of tool of human ruling nature. So the ecological crisis that is led by the degeneration of spirit of the Enlightenment should be treated as human crisis. In order to get out of the evil, we must face the naturally occurring human. Only generating human nature of loving nature, can people control unlimited material desires, and make scientific and technological knowledge a change from the destruction of the natural tool to saint patron of nature ,and people can move toward harmony with nature. Therefore, the study of degeneration of the spirit of the Enlightenment will contribute the elimination of ecological crisis.