"Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice.
When Europe designed itself as the centre of "Enlightenment", also know as the Age of Reason, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it did so with the knowledge that an "unenlightened periphery" was thereby constructed. Thus an irreducible and fundamental bipolar structural opposition was constructed. "Enlightenment", by definition, was characterised by light, and assumed that all human beings were equal in so far as they were led by the light of reason. As such it was distinguished from the darkness, which supposedly characterised the Middle Ages, but also "primitive" peoples. Kant, one of the last Enlightenment thinkers, said that the enlightenment is the emergence of man from his self-imposed infancy. .
In this way and in the context of imperial expansion, we are left with the image of a totalitarian system that seeks to subsume cultural difference and create a cultural monologue. Radical critical theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer, reveal that: "For civilisation, pure natural existence, animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger." They further argue that in the spirit of enlightenment, Indigenous societies, and in fact, "any living reminiscence of olden times, not only nomadic antiquity but all the more of the pre-patriarchal stages, was most rigorously punished and extirpated from human consciousness." .
The modernist classic Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, offers a critique of modernity by breaking down the terms in which European thought distinguished itself from the "primitive". Conrad shows that the otherness of Indigenous societies is precisely the otherness of a civilised Eurocentric community itself, that is, "the West's Other is the West itself." Marlow, the central character, comes to understand that society is protected from its own truths, and that the enlightenment is a form of barbarism, which cloaks greed, destruction, injustice and, paradoxically, the return of irrationality; captured by Kurtz's last words, "The horror! The horror!" .