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The Inertia of Endarkenment: How Modernity Translated Rather Than Transcended Its Dark Inheritance: An Essay in Historical Epistemology and Critical Ontology

Type: article
Abstract: The Enlightenment is conventionally narrated as modernity's decisive break with epistemic constraint—a passage from theological dogma to rational autonomy. This essay challenges that narrative not by denying modernity's novelties, but by exposing their structural continuity with premodern forms of control. Drawing on genealogical critique, postcolonial historiography, and the sociology of knowledge, I argue that what emerged after the Renaissance was not rupture, but translation: the re-embedding of older logics of mastery into secular vocabularies of objectivity, method, and progress. I term this process endarkenment—the persistence of epistemic limitation under conditions that present themselves as illumination. Through four domains—historiography, scientific rationalization, temporal consciousness, and capitalist accumulation—I show how modern knowledge practices contain rather than liberate: reducing agency to the individual actor, causality to linear sequence, time to homogeneous chronos, and truth to measurable correspondence. The intensification of control through capitalism extended endarkenment from epistemology into material relations, transforming reciprocal exchange into extraction, common rights into private property, and living knowledge into abstract labor. The result is not emancipation, but a more efficient alienation—one that mistakes inherited momentum for self-determination, and imposed uniformity for discovered universality. Crucially, this essay does not propose ready-made alternatives but rather suspends the demand for substitution, clearing conceptual ground for epistemic repair: a future no longer governed by the inertia of the past, disguised as its overcome.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7128140204
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