IX. The Inevitable Self-Corruption
The deepest failure of the Enlightenment was not in politics or economics or science. It was in the very premise from which all else followed: the autonomy of reason.
Reason was to be self-grounding, answerable to no external authority. But reason cannot ground itself. Every attempt to provide a rational foundation for reason either assumes what it seeks to prove or regresses infinitely. The Enlightenment’s greatest minds recognized this problem and attempted to solve it, but their solutions have not survived either scrutiny or the experience borne of the passage of time.
Descartes sought certainty in the thinking self, but the existence of the self is precisely what requires demonstration; the cogito is an assumption, not a proof. Hume, being slightly more honest, admitted that reason could establish nothing beyond immediate impressions and the custom of conjunction; causation itself was a habit of mind, not a feature of reality. Kant attempted to rescue reason by distinguishing the phenomenal from the noumenal and confining knowledge to the realm of appearances, but this concession was fatal, because it amounted to an admission that reason could never directly touch reality itself.
The subsequent centuries have traced the consequences of this admission. If reason cannot reach reality, then reason is not discovering truth, it is constructing a variant of it. The positivists of the early twentieth century attempted to restrict knowledge to empirically verifiable propositions, but their criterion of verifiability was itself unverifiable. They constructed a self-refuting standard. The postmodernists of the late twentieth century finally admitted the inevitable result of Enlightenment philosophy: truth is a construction, a social product, an artifact defined by those with the power to enforce it. What counts as knowledge is what the powerful have decided to call knowledge. Reality is what those in authority define it to be. Reason is not a tool for discovering reality; it is merely a weapon in the struggle for dominance.
This is why the scientific authorities can declare that the impossibility of evolution by natural selection is a scientific fact. This is why the government authorities can declare that a married couple is divorced and that a man is truly a woman. In the postmodern world, there is no objective truth or objective reality, literally everything is subjective and capable of being redefined at any moment. War is Peace, Love is Hate, Free Association is Racism, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.
This Orwellian world is not a corruption of the Enlightenment; it is its idealistic completion. If reason is autonomous and answerable to nothing beyond itself, then reason is also groundless. And groundless reason is not reason at all, but sheer will dressed in rational costume. Nietzsche saw this more clearly than anyone: he understood that in Enlightened terms, the will to truth was only a form of the will to power, and those who claimed to serve truth were only serving themselves while wearing a more flattering mask.
The Enlightenment began by enthroning reason and ended by destroying it. The progression from Descartes to Derrida is not a decline or a betrayal, but the logical and inevitable path. Each generation discovered that the previous generation’s stopping point was arbitrary, that the foundations assumed were not foundations at all, that the certainties proclaimed were merely conventions. The Enlightenment’s acid dissolved not only tradition and revelation but eventually reason itself.
The modern West now lives among the ruins. The vocabulary of the Enlightenment persists, and men pay homage to its rights, progress, science, reason, freedom, but the very meanings of those words have been hollowed out entirely. No one can say what a human right is grounded in, or why progress is desirable, or how science differs from ideology, or what reason can legitimately claim, or where freedom ends and license begins. These concepts are invoked ritually, habitually, but they no longer make sense nor command belief. They are just antique furniture sitting in a ruined house whose foundations have collapsed.