Dear John and Peter,
I think the term you were searching for, John, is “post-Enlightenment.”  I see several terms all pointing to the same social, philosophical, scientific,  and cultural developments: post-Enlightenment, post-secular, post-positivist, and post-modern.  These all overlap one another, but they point to the wearing out of some of the assumptions of the Enlightenment. Rather than seeing a binary, as Peter has cast it, between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment, or even Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment, I tend to see a progression, an evolution in which some assumptions proved worthwhile, but were overstated, over indulged, and other assumptions were just plain false.  They did not prove to accord with the facts as the facts unfolded over time.  I have clipped something from an article by a post-secular writer who teaches at a university in Austria.  I hope you can sense from this that the term post-secular might be a bit misleading for some; it’s not simply about a return to religion. Staudigl is one of several thinkers in Europe and Russia (some very interesting writing about this in Russia). 

I am contemplating creating a “project” at New Gestalt Voices (this is not a done deal as of yet), where people can explore all these things.  While religion/spirituality would be included, the post-secular also includes philosophy, research values and methodologies, psychology and psychotherapy.  I’m thinking of inviting guest “speakers”/thinkers in to interact with participants.  It would be like a dedicated think tank for working through the implications of post-modernity, post-Enlightenment, post-secular, and post-positivist influences.  And, I’d like to apply these newer possibilities to the task of examining possible contradictions between some of the elements in our theory if one is stuck in the older kinds of thinking and worldview.

"As some critics of secular modernity and a so-called civilizing process hold, these developments demonstrate that the long assumed “disenchantment of the world” has but resulted in the creation of a “wasteland of sense”39. In this “wasteland,” to follow Nietzsche’s predictions, a “great hunt” for the “still unexplored possibilities”40 of genuinely human life is unleashed again and again. Such a hunt contributes, however, to the make-up of some “society of the spectacle,”41 which dooms us to chase some ever-fading sense in a never-ending proliferation of projects, images, and performances. As French phenomenologist Michel Henry has argued, this very dynamic epitomizes nothing but the archetype of globalization. Finally, as he explains, it results in the reign of a systemic “barbarism”42, which mistakenly relegates the meaning of life to the media of its representation and expression. With the related categories of expression – progress, popularity, and commodification – converting into sacrosanct social values, the relentless pursuit of the project of modernity thus seems to reach its apex, or perhaps its truly critical point of no return. What has been called the “dialectics of secularization”43 is a clear expression of this truly abyssal condition of late modernity: it points at a condition at a loss of grounds, one that forces us to navigate between the Scylla of disillusioned individualism with its moral sources drying out, and the Charybdis of an impossible community, which is longed for but also feared in its assumedly illiberal, fundamentalist and totalizing implications." (M. Staudigl, 2019, p. 387)

From the Crisis of Secularism to the Predicament of Post-Secularism: Late Modern Social Imaginaries and the Trope of Religious Violence
Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and
Transformation in Contemporary Society, Part II
Bordering Imaginaries II: The Need for Conceptual
and Historiographical Innovation
5 (2019) 379–412

Michael Staudigl
Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna
Universitätsstr. 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria





> On Apr 5, 2021, at 4:28 AM, Peter Philippson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> It is not so much that I am anti-Enlightenment, but that, just as now, the pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment were polarizations, which, as Friedlaender said, often share some things in common.  So it looks very much like the USA political landscape today, both with their rationally developed principles and little emphasis on contact and play.  Happiness was something to 'pursue', not the result of taking pleasure in each other.  Both made human beings special and separated us from the natural world.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Peter
> 
> Peter
> 
> On Sat, 3 Apr 2021 at 23:24, Philip Brownell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi John
> Yes. Right now I’m burning clippings but I’ll get back to it. Thank you for your interest. I believe Peter can speak to this as well. 
> 
> Phil
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Apr 3, 2021, at 4:05 PM, john wymore <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> There’s no way i can participate in the conversation with you and Peter
>> 
>> But since the seam began between you two, I ‘ve continued to be interested in one thing you said about your poisiton on the Enligtnmet.
>> 
>> I cant find your phrase but it was something like anti-Enlightment.  I am sincerely interested in the details of your position and of the 
>> intellectual foundatoin.  
>> 
>> Would you oblige me ? 
>> <JWonTrike.jpeg>
>> ______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.
> ______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Peter (Philippson)
> [log in to unmask]
> ______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.

______________
Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.