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willow
i often come back to thinking about this line from geuss when my bfs lapse
raymond geuss, outside ethics, "on the usefulness and uselessness of religious illusion", pg. 152 fear of instrumental reason. In all three of these respects it shows itself to be very similar to well-known properties of archaic religions. In contrast, philosophers who see themselves as the successors of Nietzsche and Foucault have no generalized fear of instrumental reason. They are willing to treat the liberal subject as one good among others, not as a fetish surrounded by a number of taboos. Finally, they have little interest in the metaphysical need except as an object of historical curiosity. This is the reason so many of our contemporaries believe that Nietzsche and Foucault are the true “progressive” heirs of the Enlightenment, whereas the representatives of the Critical Theory often run the risk, to modify a phrase of Nietzsche’s, of choking while remasticating theological absurdities, or, like Habermas, of becoming the conformist defenders of the liberal social order in which we are at the moment forced to live. It must be recognized that the final demise of religion in Western societies, so confidently predicted for the past two hundred fifty years, has not yet taken place, but there seems little reason to congratulate ourselves on this. If anything, religious belief in 2005 would have to be even more wilfully obscurantist than it was in 1805 because it requires active suppression of so much of humanity’s accumulated stock of knowledge and lacks the institutional support that was still intact in much of Europe in the nineteenth century. It is hard to see what the compensating benefits could be, even if one presupposes the widest and least utilitarian sense of “benefit.”