Are we enlightened yet?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/09/dark-side-enlightenment-fleming-review

Extract

“The aim of Kant’s “critical” philosophy was to restrain the pretensions of philosophers to lay claim to knowledge of items – the soul, freedom and God – which lie beyond the spatial and temporal limits of human experience. But this wasn’t just a matter of upbraiding his predecessors – Leibniz and Spinoza principal among them – for their hubris. On the contrary, Kant also recognised that the tendency of human reason to overreach itself is ineluctable. “Metaphysics” isn’t just a regrettable episode in the history of philosophy; it is a “natural” disposition that can’t be eradicated.

Fleming is interested in those who, during the Enlightenment assault on the claims of revealed religion and traditional metaphysics, were “unable to dispense altogether with ‘transcendence'”. All of which raises a number of rather profound questions – about the methodology of historical periodisation, particularly whether the Enlightenment marks a decisive and easily identifiable break with what preceded it, and the extent to which claims about an enduring appetite for transcendental experience are merely historical or in fact refer to certain permanent features of human nature. However, Fleming doesn’t seem especially interested in attempting to answer them. His approach, breezy and charmingly belletristic, is unabashedly impressionistic.”