后现代之后重审法国启蒙运动

Revisiting the French Enlightenment from the Postmodern Perspective

20世纪六七十年代兴起的后现代主义,对于作为现代性基石的启蒙运动大加鞭挞,指责它具有欧洲中心论、帝国主义、反女性主义等倾向,甚至声称它应对20世纪的极权主义、环境危机等问题负责。等到世纪之交,一批较为熟悉后现代主义思潮的学者开始反驳后现代主义对于法国启蒙运动的批判,并试图建构启蒙思想与后现代主义之间的内在关联。21世纪以来,启蒙运动研究不仅回应后现代主义的质疑,同时也与新的史学潮流相结合。研究者从殖民帝国、奴隶制、种族问题、女性主义、环境主义等多个角度考察启蒙运动,大大拓展了启蒙运动史的研究视野。为了客观评价后现代主义对于启蒙哲人的指责,新的研究改变了社会文化史注重启蒙运动载体与底层文人的研究取向,重新关注启蒙大哲的思想文本。在此过程中,史学家们进一步发现了启蒙思想的复杂性与多样性。

Postmodernism,appearing in the 1960s and 1970s,has severely criticized the Enlightenment,which is generally defined as the cornerstone of modernity.Postmodern theorists accused the Enlightenment of having the tendency to be European centralism,imperialism,anti-feminism,and even claimed that it should be responsible for issues such as the totalitarian system and environmental crisis of the 20th century.At the turn of the century,some scholars who are familiar with postmodern thoughts began to refute the postmodernist critique of the French Enlightenment and tried to construct the internal connection between the Enlightenment and postmodernism.Since the new century,Enlightenment researchers have not only responded to the critics put forward by postmodernists,but also combined with the new trends of the historiography.Scholars studied the Enlightenment from the perspectives of colonial empires,slavery,racial issues,feminism and environmentalism,which greatly expanded the field of the Enlightenment research.In order to objectively evaluate the accusations of postmodernism on the French philosophes,recent researches have departed from the socio-cultural-historical approaches,which paid much attention to the diffusion of the Enlightenment ideas and the impoverished hack writers,and have refocused on the works of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment.In the process,historians further discovered the complexity and diversity of the Enlightenment.