The Super-Enlightenment

Sometimes words are made to work too hard. Such is the case with the title of this engaging set of essays, ‘the super-Enlightenment’. Each author struggles to define the ‘super-enlightened’ so as to make clear its precise distance from, and relationship to, what is commonly called ‘the Enlightenment’. Dan Edelstein proposes to study texts ‘commonly designated as “illuminist”’, those characterised as theosophical, hermetic and mythical, vitalist, esoteric, even mystical. None of the authors wish to perpetuate the rationalist claim that such works have nothing to do with enlightened thought; rather, they are merely representative of enlightened beliefs pushed to their limit and beyond. But it is not obvious that ‘super-Enlightenment’ conveys the intended meaning, suggesting instead a superior form of enlightened values. These essays are about philosophes who dared to know gnostically, or who revolted against the commonplace deism and materialism which we associate particularly with the French Enlightenment. The whole conceptual structure upon which the title and book rest requires, however, an outmoded conceptualisation of how the human mind works. Since the philosophical interventions of Hilary Putnam and Mark Johnson, and the arguments of Antonio Damasio derived from neuroscience, the once-imagined gap between reason and imagination, between thought and feeling, mind and body has largely been closed. We should no longer be surprised to learn that John Toland (d. 1722), the pantheist, invented rituals for his Socratic or Masonic brotherhood, or that prominent French government ministers of the 1780s belonged to societies in search of a new theosophical religion

Aesthetics · Art · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Materialism · Meaning (existential · Mysticism · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Theology · Throne · Vitalism · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Law · Philosophy