Enlightened Heirs of the Counter-Enlightenment

The thoroughly modern Dervish is an enlightened heir of the Counter-Enlightenment.

The European Enlightenment of the 18th century spawned its own Counter-Enlightenment in the figure of J. J. Rousseau. The Counter-Enlightenment continued to develop through the 19th century among the Romantics of Great Britain and Continental Europe, the Transcendentalists of New England and, late in that century, the great Russian novelists, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The first half of the 20th century witnessed the Great European Implosion (in two parts: 1914-1918 and 1939-1945). During the second act of that catastrophe, certain intellectuals who had survived the first act brought the Counter-Enlightenment to "philosophic expression" in a loose movement that acquired the name "Existentialism" (see William Barrett, Irrational Man, 274-275).

Proponents of the movement (such as the American intellectual William Barrett) argued passionately that:

Contrary to the rationalist tradition, we now know that it is not his reason that makes man man, but rather that reason is a consequence of that which really makes him man. For it is man's existence as a self-transcending self that has forged and formed reason as one of its projects. As such, man's reason is specifically human (but no more and no less than his art and his religion) and to be revered. All the values that have been produced in the course of the long evolution of reason--everything that goes under the heading of liberalism, intelligence, a decent and reasonable view of life--we wish desperately to preserve and enlarge, in the turmoil of modern life. But do we need to be persuaded now, after all that [happened in the] twentieth century, how precariously situated these reasonable ideals are in relation to the subterranean forces of life, and how small a segment of the whole and concrete man they actually represent?

[Barrett, 279].

The thoroughly modern Dervish does not need persuading. She is acutely conscious of the "subterranean forces of life," and her embrace of the Dervish way in the late modern context is not a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment rationalism but a manifestation of her conscious awareness that such rationalism is a two-edged sword. She counters the thrust of that sword with a combination of Montaignean reasonableness and humble gratitude.

For the thoroughly modern Dervish, Heidegger's pairing of thinking and thanking is more than a clever pun: it is her way of being-in-the-world.