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About one thing the Enlightenment critics – including the French postmodernists (see Koops, 2008) – were right: Enlightenment was riddled with an unjustified belief in Progress. The monumental work from the Enlightenment, the “Encyclopedia” by Diderot, d’Alembert and others, intended: “to further develop our descendants and at the same time make them more virtuous and fortunate.” (“Knowledge is virtue,” was the motto of Het Nut). Both history and Rousseau’s Émile were thought to be characterized by a spontaneous, natural development for the better. However, there are two objections to this. First, learning does not automatically lead to a higher morality and, second, there is no reason to assume that reality develops into something better and more beautiful by a law of nature. By now these objections have been generally accepted, so much so that many contemporary intellectuals consider the Enlightenment superseded. Drawing on an acute and rapturous essay by the contemporary French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut (1949–), I would like to forcefully object to this notion to prevent “the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater.”

In “La défaite de la pensée” (“The undoing of thought”) Finkielkraut (1987, 1988) displayed the sad consequences of the introduction of the term Volksgeist by Herder in 1774. In order to explore the thinking of Herder and German Romanticism in more detail, it should be explained that German Romanticism was motivated by the Prussian defeat at the battle of Jena in 1806. The battle of Jena (located in former Prussia, now Germany) was fought on 14 October 1806 between the forces of Napoleon the first of France and Fredrick William the third of Prussia. The unexpected and decisive defeat suffered by the Prussian Army subjugated the Kingdom of Prussia to the French Empire. In short, in Jena, the Prussians (joined by allied forces) suffered a crushing and unexpected defeat against Napoleon.

It is not surprising that Hegel (1770–1831), who was at the time a professor at the University of Jena, spoke of “the end of history” (see Fukuyama, 1989, 1992), implying that history had been completed with the permanent establishment of the principles of Enlightenment, resulting in the French revolution and the liberal democratic state. In Prussia, the intellectuals responded by withdrawing into a Romanticism which was primarily based on the ideas of the philosopher Herder, thereby creating a counter‐movement to the French Enlightenment; a counter‐movement in honor of the unique German Volksgeist. This concept, created by Herder, refers to the spirit of the Volk (folk, people). It was Herder’s conviction that every distinct population expresses a unique group psychology, intelligence, behavior, character, morals. After the battle of Jena the Germans were seeking their own uniqueness. They were in search of a new start of their identity. This intensified post‐Jena Romanticism centered on the romanticized child personifying the hope for a better future. Going back to the roots of the identity of Germanism meant: going back to childhood, child development, and education.

The finest abstract of this new creature is a lost drawing by Runge (1777–1810) from 1809 (Figure 5.3). According to the art historian Rosenblum (1988), this drawing is the symbol of the Romantic Child, just like Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a naked man in a circle and square has become the symbol of Renaissance man. “This drawing of 1809 can also be seen to evoke a state of natural innocence and religious purity so primal that the vision of a sacred beginning to a radiantly new and magical world can hover in our imagination above the baby’s fixed gaze” (Rosenblum, 1988, p. 9).

Figure 5.3 “Das Kind” (1809) (The Child) By Otto Runge.

Source: Philipp Otto Runge, The Child (1809). Public Domain.

Notwithstanding the beautiful wordings of German Romanticism, in the wake of Finkielkraut we must be extraordinarily fearful of its ideological core. As his name reveals, Finkielkraut, a French philosopher with a German name, was born in Alsace‐Lorraine. The area of Alsace‐Lorraine in the north‐east of France (or, depending on the point of view, the south‐west of Germany), rich with its large coal resources, fell prey to a series of wars between France and Germany in the 19th century, changing nationality each time, a situation that only ended after World War II, when the area was allocated to France. Finkielkraut, born in this area, alleges to have, like no other philosopher, access to the unique cultural history of this particular area, representing the clash between German Romanticism and French Enlightenment. After Herder, says Finkielkraut, the term culture is no longer associated with science, no longer refers to diminishing prejudice and ignorance, but expresses the irreducible individuality of the unique soul of the people (the Volksgeist) (Finkielkraut, 1987, p. 13 ff.). Herder’s Germanic Romanticism provided what Finkielkraut expressively called “the maternal warmth of prejudice” (Finkielkraut, 1987, p. 27). The Volksgeist proved to be “the most dangerous explosive of modern times” and resulted in two world wars. This expression originates from the French historian Joseph Renan (1823–1892), in response to the German conquest of Alsace‐Lorraine in 1870 (see Finkielkraut, 1988, p. 133). In essence the wars in Alsace‐Lorraine were wars between the French Enlightenment rationality and the German Romanticism of the Volksgeist.

After World War II, the United Nations created a special division which was to devote itself to science and culture, UNESCO. They intended to create an organization that would protect against abuse of power “and which would arm people with knowledge and understanding permanently against demagogical attempts at leading their thinking astray” (Finkielkraut, 1988, p. 54). This implies, says Finkielkraut, that the government officials and intellectual authorities invited by the UN intuitively endorsed the spirit of the Enlightenment. However, in one respect they did not, and this still has an impact today. The universal subject of man from the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” (The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) adopted in France in 1789 and leading to the French revolution, referred to the general concept of man and the general concept of the citizen. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, was based on this French declaration. It is because of this that Finkielkraut writes that this later declaration is based on (the French) Enlightenment. But as Finkielkraut explains: the universal subject of man has been replaced by actual people, in all their diverse modes of existence. That is: the universal declaration of the United Nations was not referring to something like the abstract humankind, but to diverse subgroups of humans, culturally different, all with their own “Volksgeist”

This replacement was prompted by a text, “Race et histoire”, written in 1950 by the cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss (1908–2009), upon the request of UNESCO (Lévi‐Strauss, 1951/1987). First, Lévi‐Strauss states that the term race has zero scientific value. Differences between human groups stem from “geographical, historical and social circumstances,” not from “anatomical or physiological conditions.” Second, he tells us to resist value hierarchy. “The many shapes adopted by mankind in time and space cannot be categorised in an order of increasing perfection: they are no beacons lighting the road to triumph, no stages on the way to the highest form of civilisation: Western” (based on the translation by Finkielkraut, 1988, p. 56). This is the very temptation the enlightened philosophers succumbed to: placing human communities on a scale of values, occupying the highest level themselves. This repugnant conviction laid the foundations for colonialism, and formed the basis of the closely connected 19th‐century ethnological science. However, when ethnologists discovered the complexity of traditions and modes of living in so‐called primitive societies, they did not take part in it anymore, as Lévi‐Strauss made clear. Ethnology became cultural anthropology and the general enlightened notion of man was replaced by a non‐hierarchical diversity of culturally specific characters (Finkielkraut, 1988, p. 65). This, however, is at least partly referring back to the idea of the Volksgeist. That is the core of Finkielkraut’s critical analysis.

The essence of Finkielkraut’s essay is that it makes clear that Lévi‐Strauss strikes out at hierarchizing so strongly, that in doing so he also abolishes the universality of Enlightenment thinking. That is to say: if one replaces the universal subject of man by concrete, living, and culturally differing groups, then one replaces the universality of the original declaration of the French revolution by Herder‐like thinking in terms of the Volksgeist. And Lévi‐Strauss has gathered a following. Following structural anthropology, all life sciences have opened the hunt for ethnocentrism, leading to what Finkielkraut dramatizingly calls “the second death of mankind” (the first being that of Romanticism) (Finkielkraut, 1988, p. 59). Contemporary fanatics of cultural identity have continued to glorify the collective soul, a glorification stemming from the term Volksgeist and culminating in racial theory and Hitlerism (Finkielkraut, 1988, pp. 76‐79). And, I am inclined to add, in the current multicultural debate in The Netherlands and many other European countries, which has taken the form of anti‐Muslim activism.