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intellectuals has increased. The task before them is to reflect upon values
capable of guiding the world, and to formulate convictions that are livable
and instructive for the global market economy. In the face of this
challenge, the strategies of retreat followed by intellectuals today loom
large. Instead of trying their utmost to fortify the achievements of the
liberal constitutional state and support economic policies that regulate the
strength of the market by socially peaceful means, intellectuals are
retreating from the modem age. Dissemination of their wild thoughts
suggests seriously that they are turning the clock back far into the
nineteenth century.
Inebriated with the idea of Europe, as today's English-speaking
authors are especially quick to point out, the West has lived in the illusion
of being able to forge supranational policies in a limited space with world–
wide repercussions - all the while forgetting that people need local
identities and loyalties in order to live and function.
It
is true that it was
an illusion to think that the nation-state was a thing of the past. While the
bureaucrats in Brussels fiddled with regulations to standardize apples in
Picardie and Pfalz, the Flemish and Walloons in Belgium consented to
change their constitution and to revert to a federal state. We are now
experiencing the return to regional loyalties and the rebirth of ethnicity.
This will go on for some time, and we will have to live with it.
Precisely because politics throughout Europe is leaning more and
more to the right, intellectuals must again define themselves as left.
Onward with the Enlightenment! Just as industrial society can exist only
through technology and science- some day, it is to be hoped, turning the
entire world into a place of meaningful survival - so intellectuals can pro–
duce ideas conducive to meaningful life only by critically examining the
Enlightenment, not by rejecting it. Horkheimer and Adorno's
Dialectic of
the Enlightenment
was written as a warning, not as a final parting. Voltaire
and Rousseau, who embodied overestimation and the rejection of reason,
both died in 1778. Of the congress in Paris commemorating their life and
work two hundred years later, what I remember most is the last sentence
of the opening speech: "If I had to choose between Voltaire and
Rousseau, I would still choose Diderot."
In order to recognize that the Enlightenment's value for the present
has to be weighed carefully, one must be able to read Diderot like the
English philosopher, Stuart Hampshire. Diderot was everything but an
"ideologue." He had doubts, and in spite of his commitment, he was still
uncertain of reason. He asked no more of life or theory than what they
could give. His own weaknesses and contradictions amused him. He was
not a hero. He valued compromise and made concessions. He believed in
the perfectibility of mankind no more than Kant, who thought man was
