Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2013.
The customary understanding of our relationship with the Enlightenment assumes a continuity of ideals (e.g., individual liberty, legal equality, secularism, participatory institutions of government, etc.) which are claimed to have originated within that current of thought and were ultimately realized in the liberal capitalist state. From that perspective the French revolution was an opening towards modernity and post-Kantian idealism was an odd, potentially reactionary movement that rapidly dwindled into metaphysics and obscurantism. The Secret History of Reason argues instead that modernity grows out of a rejection or forgetting of the Enlightenment as a process, a process of which that idealism was the culmination. Devoted though it to the generation of a social and ethical framework to replace that of Christianity, the early Enlightenment retained the Christian problematic of individual rational souls whose pursuit of self-generated goals needed to be reconciled within an equally rational social world. This led to the aporias pointed out by Hume and Rousseau which Kant and his successors attempted to resolve. The idealists' metaphysics was entirely within this project of self-critique. It arose out of a realization that experience itself was a human product and had an inherent metaphysics which needed to be critiqued. In the course of doing so, however, they dissolved the dichotomy between self and world upon which all preexisting European thought had been premised. This was the origin of the negative thinking that Marcuse, for one, identified with the revolutionary power of Marx's dialectic. The Secret History is centered on the neglected figure of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, portrayed as a non-dualist thinker who argued that reason is fundamentally embodied and collective instead of discursive and private. His movement away from the presuppositions of post-Christian thought was paralleled by the radical and even millenarian aspects of the revolutionary events in France and the brief opening towards the philosophy and literature of India that took place at the same time. This fundamental questioning was forgotten and repudiated with the reaction of 1815 and later years, and with it went the one current of European thought that could serve as a genuine critique of modernity.
