The Sceptical Enlightenment: Philosopher Travellers Look Back at Europe

Abstract

A central failure of the Enlightenment, it is frequently argued today, lay in its incapacity to deal with human difference and diversity.² The consequences of this failure seem nowhere more apparent than in the question of Europe’s relationship to non-European peoples and cultures. The alleged insensitivity of eighteenth-century thinking to the intrinsic value of cultural difference is commonly attributed to its universalist frameworks of inquiry — to its abstract conceptions of a uniform and invariable human nature and to the grand narratives of a progressive history of human civilization.³ What is at issue in this critical portrayal of Enlightenment legacies is not merely the epistemological inadequacy of universalist presuppositions to the task of understanding foreign cultures in their own terms Enlightenment universalism is seen to have fostered modes of thinking which in the following two centuries would all too often serve to legitimate European global dominance and to conceal the histories of destruction that were entailed in it.⁴

If the scientific and scholarly gain of a few individuals has to be bought at the price of the happiness of whole nations, then it would be better for discoverers and discovered alike if the South Sea had never become known to the restless European.¹