There is no reference to God, no appeal to any kind of sacred order. These philosophers lived in a predominantly second world, but they had already detached their discourse from that which provided its foundation. The elites, we might say, were already on the move toward third-world culture. The inward turn at the Enlightenment may not initially have killed God, but it did make him in practice an increasingly unnecessary hypothesis. This inward turn, the turn to the individual, gave the individual a value—a dignity—that eventually came to stand as independent of any sacred order or set of
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