Enlightenment reason replicated the tyranny it rebelled against, now over nature

Evidence

In philosophy, the Distinction, especially in its Is/Ought form, was perhaps the dominating problem in moral thought. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has asserted, “the fact/value split” has become “a dominant theme in our [twentieth] century” and has undergirded “a new understanding and valuation of freedom and dignity.” What needs to be said in addition is that it determined the entirety of our conception of reality, which Taylor appears to subsume under “freedom and dignity.” Powerfully expressed in the Kantian notion of autonomy, freedom ceases to denote God’s omnipotence and becomes instead an expression of man’s own natural powers of reasoning. Human reason becomes the sole arbiter in the project of objectifying the world, of submitting it to its own demands and will, which now have turned relentlessly instrumentalist. The pursuit of happiness, utility, and much else that is subservient to these imperatives—such as preservation of life and protection of private property—become natural rights derivable from the natural order by what is/was seen as far-sighted, calculating reason. Formerly restricted by the power of revelation as defined by the Catholic Church, reason now becomes, like a free market, free and unbound by any restricting consideration or enduring moral principle. It is reason on the loose. Yet, in the very outburst of Enlightenment reason against the absolutism of Church and monarch, precisely in its mighty reaction against such powers that had ruled over it with utterly free absolutism, Enlightenment reason’s distension and extension went the full circle of replicating the very tyranny that caused its rise in the first place, but this time it was not just people who were its subject of rule, but also nature and indeed the world in its entirety. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 182

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that reason ‘on the loose’ circles back to replicate exactly the absolutism it overthrew—now ruling nature and the world rather than just people—is dense and paradigm-shifting, worth sitting with.
• XREF: Echoes Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: instrumental reason as domination of nature returning to dominate humanity. — connects to: enlightenment is indefatigably self-destructive in its own tendencies; Enlightenment regresses into the very myth it claimed to escape; Reason’s apparent triumph over nature is really its obedient subjection to facts — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 45 (+11 more)