Much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the 'threat' of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning - characterized as the defining feature of human existence - from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment. In the first chapter of his Nihil Unbound Enlightenment and Extinction Ray Brassier, explores this dialectic in terms of Wilfred Sellars manifest and scientific image, as we saw in this earlier post Brassier says that:

It should come as no surprise then that the manifest image continues to provide the fundamental framework within which much contemporary philosophizing is carried out. It encompasses not only ‘the major schools of contemporary Continental thought’ – by which Sellars, writing at the beginning of the 1960s, presumably meant phenomenology and existentialism, to which we should add critical theory, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism – but also ‘the trends of contemporary British and American philosophy which emphasize the analysis of “common sense” and “ordinary usage” For all these philosophies can be fruitfully construed as more or less adequate accounts of the manifest image of man-in-the-world, which accounts are then taken to be an adequate and full description in general terms of what man and the world really are’ (Sellars 1963a: 8). Despite their otherwise intractable differences, what all these philosophies share is a more or ess profound hostility to the idea that the scientific image describes 'what there really is’

Brassier observes:

Thus, although they are the totems of two otherwise divergent philosophical traditions, the two ‘canonical’ twentieth-century philosophers, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, share the conviction that the manifest image enjoys a philosophical privilege vis-à-vis the scientific image, and that the sorts of entities and processes postulated by scientific theory are in some way founded upon, or derivative of, our more ‘originary’, pre-scientific understanding, whether this be construed in terms of our ‘being-in-the-world’, or our practical engagement in ‘language-games’.

Sellars adamantly refused this instrumentalization of the scientific image...even if the scientific image remains methodologically dependent upon the manifest image, this in no way undermines its substantive autonomy vis-à-vis the latter....Sellars [insisted] that philosophy should resist attempts to subsume the scientific image within the manifest image. At the same time, Sellars enjoined philosophers to abstain from the opposite temptation, which would consist in trying to supplant the manifest image with the scientific one. For Sellars, this cannot be an option, since it would entail depriving ourselves of what makes us human.