Post-Enlightenment theorising and global polity in the twenty-first century and beyond

Abstract

In some sense, the period of scholarship we know as the Enlightenment, well-known for its individualistic, binaric and dichotomous theorising, could be largely to blame for the perceived schism between the humanities and the sciences – and, consequently, between humans and humans as well as between humans and the totality of their environment. My paper argues that, the philosophical and scientific achievements of the Enlightenment duly acknowledged (I have in mind here the positive central role that philosophical doubt plays in academic inquiry, for example), its destructive elements, epitomized by its dualistic, individualist, and, consequently, predatory subjectivity, have cast a long shadow on cordial human polity since the 17^th Century. In short, strictly speaking, taken to its logical conclusion, the Enlightenment cannot yield us an ontology that would engender cordial relations among humans themselves or between humans and their environment. Post-Enlightenment (by which is meant post-Cartesian) ontological, epistemological and ethical postulations could redress the centuries-old disjunction (which characterises this shadow) between technological or intellectual development and amicable global living.

Keywords: Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment, subject, object, dichotomous subjectivity, embodiedness, intersubjectivity, ethics