ABSTRACT
Today’s counter-Enlightenment is an assault on Reason that over the last four decades has invested the field of architecture through the agency of a particularly pernicious brand of theory. In this chapter I argue that the academy has failed miserably to follow up on the legacy of the Enlightenment while advancing a pedagogy that leaves no room for the critique of reason, expressing no concern for the ethics and aesthetics underlying this critique. Rather, all its energy has been spent on training uncritical ‘professionals’. As I demonstrate, beyond the practical accomplishments of architectural modernism, however, was an intellectual failure. It is reflected in the contradiction between rationalism and Nietzsche, a thinker who was deeply averse to the whole project of the Enlightenment, hostile to Reason from Plato to Kant and the whole tradition of German Idealism, and who railed against Kant in The Will to Power claiming that ‘faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism’.
