Abstract

In The Devil and Secular Humanism Howard Radest explored the enlightenment roots of humanism; in this book he moves on humanism’s “personal and transcendental” features. As he sees it, contemporary humanism faces two enemies. There is, first, the “shadow enlightenment.” Radest describes this as that version of enlightenment principles with which humanists operate today, but which distorts the original meaning of those principles. Thus, for example, in place of the revolutionary idea of the moral equivalence of all persons, we are now said to be guided by a specious and superficial individualism. Second, Radest denounces those cultural ideologies—religious fundamentalism, New Ageism, and postmodernism— which have arisen as a critical response to the enlightenment’s distorted self-image. Radest’s goal is, therefore, to counteract the power of these ideologies by way of refurbishing what he takes to be humanism’s immanent conceptual appeal.