Between Two Enlightenments

These essays focus on what the European Enlightenment has made of us. They put the many gains of science, and of a certain freedom, alongside a great and unexpected loss: the gradual loss of ourselves and of our lives.

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Have we been fooling ourselves? Has the almost complete takeover of culture by the thinking of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment come without a cost? The sequel to the Enlightenment, known as modern life, has expanded our horizons enormously but it has also reduced and restricted us. We have lost identity and relationship and our minds have become fragmented and are often little short of foolish. In particular we haven’t found a way of prioritising, as we must, the only things we surely have: consciousness and (hence) experience. These things are what the word ‘life’ means.



We need some form of detachment from the empty counting and measuring that are at the heart of the Enlightenment project. We need to focus less on having, and less even on doing, when our task is being. A more Buddhist detachment may restore our own experience to us and get us beyond the impasses of politics and mechanical science. We need less focus on the outside and more on the inside, for that is where our lives are actually lived.