2
Ludwig Wittgenstein is observant when he tells us that the most important aspects of things are
hidden simply because they are familiar, that is, we fail to notice them because they are always
right before our very eyes.
3
The Enlightenment is the soul of mainstream Western modernity. Its legacy continues
today. Some speak of modernity as an unfinished project, a second modernity, even the
modernization of modernity, or the second coming of Enlightenment itself. They have an
unblinking faith in it as the absolute telos of history. Enlightenment’s unbridled optimism is
pledged to promote and crown the Promethean progress of humanity based on the universal
cultivation of pure and applied reason. Kant spelled out the civilizing mission of Enlightenment
in the clearest and simplest term: to sanctify the autonomous benefaction of reason in rescuing
and emancipating humanity from the dark grotto of self-incurred immaturity.
4
In so doing, he
institutionalized the major agenda of European modernity. While privileging and valorizing the
autocracy of reason for allegedly human progress and emancipation, European modernity
unfortunately overlooks, marginalizes, and disempowers the (reason’s) other whether it be the
Orient (or the so-called non-West), body, woman, or nature at the genuflected altar of
Enlightenment’s sovereign reason. Orient, body, woman, and nature are not randomly isolated
but are four closely interconnected issues. Johann Gottfried Herder raised a wholesale objection
to the Enlightenment project in an interesting way in terms of a metaphor of the body: “After
dozens of attempts, I find myself unable to comprehend how reason can be presented so
universally as the single summit and purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good. Is the
whole body just one big eye?”
5
The legacy of Enlightenment is deeply anchored in the Cartesian project of the cogito or
epistemocracy which has become the canonical institution of modern philosophy in the West.
Convention