ABSTRACT
Post-modernists proclaim the failure of the projects of the Enlightenment - the death of philosophy, epistemology, morality, imagination and reason. Nietzsche announced the death of God and with him died all hope of founding either a secular morality or a secular epistemology. If God is dead, then so too is 'that of God in every man', that 'natural light of reason' by which the Good and the True stand revealed. Even mathematics suffers a loss of certainty (Kline 1980). Yet in the very culture within which this loss occurs there has a arisen a new faith - the cult of information technology, of the computer, of scientific facts and figures. But how can numerical representation and computation be worshipped in this way after the death of the mathematician-god, architect of the universe, and after the discrediting of the myth of a supersensible mathematical reality? Because, as in all supplanting of one faith by another, there is a supporting mythology of conquering and vanquished heroes. Transcendent reason, on which the Enlightenment pinned its hopes, has been imprisoned in formal, computational chains and it is the celebration of this victory which forms a necessary, legitimating complement to post-modernist claims. Enlightenment is impossible because reason has been rendered practically and theoretically impotent; it is confined to symbol manipulation, infallibly tracing paths through symbol structures, but incapable of showing a way out of these man-made 'information' -labyrinths, or even of determining the transition from one such labyrinth to another.
