The Meta-Critical Post-Secular Trans-Enlightenment Approach

In a post last week we mentioned the enigmatic 18th century German thinker Georg Hamann, whose baffling oeuvre is

peppered with allusions, riddles, jokes, epigrams, parodies, parables, and pranks, often in multiple languages.... The results can be anywhere between idiosyncratic and impenetrable. Reading him is like reading Ulysses in German.

You had me at jokes & pranks. Like any mischievous Raccoon, he has the "tendency precisely at the most sublime moments of his texts to indulge in the comical, the trivial, the fatuous, or even the obscene." He 

hides behind the appearance of a madman, painting the doors of his writings with bizarre signs, allusions, and ciphers -- not out of mere eccentricity, but as an appropriate, calculated posture before a proudly rational audience... a faithful enacting of divine folly in an age that proudly considered itself the age of "Enlightenment."

I can take a hint, so I picked up a copy of After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann, in order to further investigate this distant Coon. A reviewer says of him that he

penetrated to the godless heart of the Enlightenment, anticipating where it would finally lead European culture as witnessed in the moral collapse of Modernity.... Dr. Betz brings Hamann to earth for mere mortal moderns, looking for the deep answers of Hamann for our time which boil down to an existential Christian-theocentric understanding of human anthropology without which we fall into nihilism, gnosticism, human self-worship and idolatry with crushing, often violent, consequences.

I searched the blog to find out if I'd ever mentioned him before, and found this aphorism buried in a post from 2008:

Who can hope to obtain proper concepts of the present, without knowing the future?

Good one. It really comes down to what man is for, i.e., his telos. If we don't know that, then how could we possibly situate ourselves on the temporal/developmental map? 

Not to say he would put it that way. I'm only up to chapter two, but from the preface I already know that that this guy "prophesied the nihilistic destiny of the Enlightenment more than two centuries ago," and made the "explicitly 'metacritical' argument"

that any notion of secular reason that would claim to be pure of tradition is an illusion, since both how we reason and what we reason about are a product of tradition; and... given this a priori dependence, reasonable persons would do well to heed the inspired tradition.... which comes to the aid of reason like "light shining in the darkness..."

Such an approach is both "more sure and ultimately more fruitful than the principles and works of reason alone." In other words, it is not reasonable to pretend to a pure reason that can account neither for itself nor furnish its own premises, which anticipates Gödel, in a way. It also brings to mind Schuon, who reminds us that

Reason is not Intelligence in itself, it is only its instrument, and this on the express condition that it be inspired by intellectual Intuition, or simply correct ideas or exact facts; nothing is worse than the mind cut off from its root.

Or in other words, things aren't true because rational, but rational because true. Otherwise to hell with it. To conflate the trans-rational with the irrational is a rookie move, for 

religion and all forms of supra-rational wisdom belong to this extra-rational order, the presence of which we observe around us, unless we are blinded by a mathematician’s prejudice; to attempt to treat existence as a purely arithmetical and physical reality is to falsify it in relation to ourselves and within ourselves, and in the end it is to blow it to pieces (Schuon). 

And rationalism itself is "perhaps the most intelligent way of being unintelligent." It 

is a “wisdom from below” and history shows it to be deadly. The whole of modern philosophy, including science, starts from a false conception of intelligence; for instance..., it seeks the explanation and goal of man at a level below him, in something which could not serve to define the human creature. But in a much more general way, all rationalism -- whether direct or indirect -- is false from the sole fact that it limits the intelligence to reason or intellection to logic, or in other words cause to effect (ibid.).

Betz proposes to steer "a decidedly post-secular course (and thus an implicitly eschatological course) beyond postmodernity," being that "the latter is simply the logical, nihilistic surd of modernity." 

In other words, postmodernity is but the logically illogical entailment of the principles of the so-called Enlightenment -- which, like any other revolution, eventually eats its own. And here we are, right in the thick of it. The only way out is back to the future, to an incarnated reason that is actually open to, and in contact with, the Real that transcends it. Reality comes first, then we can reason about it.

But our new dark age is so confused precisely because "the age of reason, having proudly refused the gift of the light of faith, has run its inevitable course into nihilism." It's only logical. Or logical only:

the ideals of the Enlightenment have run their course for more than two hundred years and the theoretical and moral foundations of secular humanism have collapsed in ways that Hamann predicted...

I call that a pretty good guess, but that's what prophets do: read the signs of the times in order to see the future entailed in them. Or in other words, if you proceed in the same direction, you're likely to arrive there. 

In Hamann's view the "Enlightenment" was a misnomer, resting upon principles that were both philosophically and theologically defective.

He saw it not as "the dawning of a bright new age," but rather, as a kind of deceptive light "which would bring about a new age of spiritual darkness." Its votaries "were not messianic saviors to a world living in darkness," but "demagogues masquerading as angels of light." He predicted that

so strict a separation of reason from religious tradition (of philosophy from theology) would be reason's own demise, and with it the creation of a moral vacuum...

I keep wanting to say and here we are, but damn, here we are: "the modern doctrine of reason is that of an autonomous rationality, which admits no light beyond its own," inevitably redounding to "the tastes and prejudices of the time."

Reason can hardly conjure the Light by which it sees. That's just a modern -- and now postmodern -- myth.

You get the idea. That's enough for a foundation. Details to follow.