What might the enlightenment mean, beyond the stereotypes?
* Castalian does not usually publish named pieces, for editorial reasons (we do accept applications for pieces under pennames, please message). But this piece is an unpublished text by the author, Matt Sharpe, which was unable to appear in the book The Other Enlightenment (2023), for editorial reasons. This was to have been the conclusion, now replaced by a far shorter piece in the text itself. Although it does consider contemporary polemical issues (another thing we wish to avoid, in direct forms), we publish it here, for anyone interested to consider, rebut, or debate.
7.1 What was enlightenment, again?
“A day will come when the libels published against the most illustrious people of this century will be raised up from out of the dust by the wicked from the same spirit that dictated them”, Denis Diderot wrote in 1782.
Here as elsewhere, the great philosophe has proven far-sighted. For, if even a sizable part of the evidences we’ve documented in this book are probative, then thinkers who hail from the political Left find themselves in an especially uncanny position.
By ‘the Left’, to be clear, is meant anyone who believes, under whichever names, in the abiding truth and worth of post-enlightenment ideals of the equal dignity of all human beings; in all peoples’ shared…