Challenges to the Enlightenment Ideology

One must consider, in the context of the failure of post-Enlightenment society to guarantee or provide support for individual freedom and autonomy, the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels (1), in The Communist Manifesto, wrote that:

"The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonism

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und a relatively small number of beautiful men who were possessed of "power, will to power, courage, pride" (Nietzsche, 526). This position, though distinct in many ways from the ideas advanced by Marx and Engels (7) regarding the stultifying influence of the bourgeoisie, clearly suggests that post-Enlightenment ideals had not been realized and could not be realized because they failed to take into account the true nature of human beings in the aggregate. The Romantic position on the Enlightenment is best represented in the poems of writers such as William Wordsworth (in Meyer, 917) who wrote in "The World Is Too Much With Us," that "we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!.... For this, for everything, we are out of tune." For Wordsworth, therefore, man found his freedom not in society or in labor as Marx and Engels (9) would have it, but rather in his active engagement with the natural world. Further, Wordsworth (in Meyer, 917) makes it clear that "getting and spending, we lay waste our power." The focus of post-Enlightenment humanity on achieving great wealth or power in this poet's view led to his distancing from that which is most valuable - Nature, which was given relatively little significance when compared to
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Approximate Word count = 1961
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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