> if you see Republicanism and the Enlightenment tradition as leading
> inexorably towards colonialism. But that is itself a tendentious
> point, and one that does more to justify anti-rational and anti-
> democratic currents than it does to challenge colonialism.
In contrast, according to Marx it's superstition and prejudice that are the basis of despotism. "Enlightenment" in his sense, a sense different from the sense invoked by those who find it impossible to imagine human relations as other than "despotic" (i.e. other than as various forms of sadistic domination), is the basis of "freedom" elaborated ethically as relations of "mutual recognition", an idea different from Derrida's idea of "respect".
Derrida's idea is based on rejecting the existence of a foundation in human being for this distinction between superstitious and prejudiced feeling, thinking, willing and acting, on the one hand, and "enlightened" feeling, thinking, etc., on the other. Apart from the fact that this claim is inconsistent with their being any basis for treating any ethical principle, such as "respect", as universally valid, the idea itself has absurd implications, e.g. we should "respect" belief in Jewish blood libel, "honour" murder, "witches", "rapture" Christianity etc, Thus, Marx is being "disrespectful" when he judges the political and religious beliefs characteristic of masses of 19th century Indian and French peasants and as superstitious and prejudiced.
The reasonable approach to criticizing "science" in the form that has been dominant since the 17th century is by "aufheben" (as opposed to "deconstruction") as in Marx's "historical materialism", Husserl's "phenomenological" treatment of "the crisis of European sciences and Whitehead's "process and reality". This involves ontological and anthropological assumptions that allow for the possibility of "knowledge" even though as Engels points out in relation to Hegel's "dialectics" (the basis of the idea of "aufheben"), "knowledge" so conceived can never become "absolute". These assumptions are different from and demonstrably more reasonable than those of the "science" they "sublate". Among other things, they limit the applicability of axiomatic deductive reasoning and do not have the absurd implication that nothing can be known.
"All that is real in the sphere of human history, becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality, and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality. In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.
"But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect “state”, are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm
Ted