Though reason may be useful for dealing with the practical matters of daily functioning, it is insufficient for addressing the deeper human concerns such as, for example, purpose or values or death. Another leading light of the Age, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), even went so far as to write in his “Treatise of Human Nature” that “Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals”. In fact, according to Hume, reason is subservient to experience, which he claimed is the actual source of all knowledge.
In the end, reason fails us because it is able to provide neither a profound enough understanding of reality nor the sense of being at home in it, both of which had once seemed so imminent. Instead it has led us to a kind of meaningless nihilism. In fact, the term “nihilism” was often used by critics of the Enlightenment, having been popularized by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819), an influential German philosopher and literary figure of the time. By exposing established orthodoxy as merely interpretations that had become entrenched myths, the Enlightenment philosophers introduced the possibility that each human being could use reason to construct his or her own interpretations.
