Question and Answer

Terry Eagleton on the Enlightenment and its discontents:

A new, prestigious image of Man was born as free, controlling, agentlike, autonomous, invulnerable, dignified, self-responsible, self-possessed, contemplative, dispassionate, and disengaged. It is this historically specific, morally checkered image that Ditchkins [Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens] celebrates as Reason itself. For him, it represents Man's coming of age. He does not see that this maturity, magnificently expressed in the liberalism of Immanuel Kant, is inseparable from a certain infantile anxiety. Agency, control, and autonomy are admirable virtues, but they are also attempts to master a world now felt to be threateningly alien. Sovereignty proves to be inseparable from solitude. At the peak of his assurance, Enlightenment Man finds himself frighteningly alone in the universe, with nothing to authenticate himself but himself. His dominion is accordingly shot through with a sickening sense of arbitrariness and contingency, which will grow more acute as the modern age unfolds. What is the point of extracting from the world with one hand values which the other hand has just put in? What is it for the human subject to stand on a foundation which is itself?

-- Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

The one principle of hell is -- "I am my own."

-- George Macdonald