The Enlightenment’s sacred-profane to imagination-reason shift was no simple hegemonic transfer

Evidence

Some modern commentators have observed that statements such as Fontenelle’s signaled a mutation of the older opposition between sacred and profane into a new opposition between imagination and reason, principles that inaugurate the secular Enlightenment. This change, they suggest, should be seen as the replacement of a religious hegemony by a secular one. But I think what we have here is something more complicated. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 128

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46