Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment

Notes

Notes
Introduction: A Critical Answer to the Question, What Is Enlightenement? 1. See, James Schmidt, “What Is Enlightenment? A Question, Its Context, and Some Consequences,” in James Schmidt (ed.), What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 31, and Keith Michael Baker and Peter Reill (eds.), What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 2. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” Catherine Porter (trans.), in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 32. 3. Lawrence E. Klein, “Enlightenment as Conversation,” in Baker and Reill, What’s Left of Enlightenment? 163. 4. David Charles, “Method and Argument in the Study of Aristotle: A Critical Notice of the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle,” in C. C. Taylor (ed.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 15 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 234. I owe this reference to Sophia Connell. 5. Max Horkheimer, “The Revolt of Nature,” in The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974, originally published in 1947), 92–127. I discuss this and other criticisms in greater detail in chapter 5. 6. Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1987), 39. 7. The kind of present-centered approach I discuss here is to be found in John Gray’s recent book, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995). Gray surveys what he considers to be the ruinous legacy of “the Enlightenment project of universal emancipation and a universal 187 civilization” (viii), arguing that “we live today amid the dim ruins of the Enlightenment project, which was the only project of the modern period” (145). But, at the same time that he upholds this position, he castigates other political philosophers for turning to the Enlightenment in order to justify present practices: “recent political philosophy has been what Wittgenstein called ‘bourgeois’ philosophy—philosophy devoted to the search for ‘foundations’ for the practices of particular communities” (144). This argument is uninformative both about the Enlightenment and about the present, for it leaves unclear in what exactly the legacy of Enlightenment consists and why some appeals to this legacy, namely those that consider it to be destructive, are legitimate , while others are not. 8. The inadequacy of referring to the Enlightenment as a unified pan-European project has been brought out by a number of historical studies of the period. See, for example, Norbert Hinske, “Die Grundlinien der deutschen Aufklärung,” in Raffaele Ciafardone (ed.), Die Philosophie der deutschen Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), 407–58; see also Roy Porter and Mikulàš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). A complex intellectual map of the Enlightenment emerges from the essays collected in Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova (eds.), The Enlightenment and its Shadows (London: Routledge, 1990). 9. Klein, “Enlightenment as Conversation,” in Baker and Reill, 164. 10. Simon Schama, “The Enlightenment in the Netherlands,” in Porter and Teich, The Enlightenment in National Context, 54. 11. Johann Friedrich Zöllner, a leading member of the Berlin “Wednesday Society,” put the question, what is enlightenment? in a footnote to his essay “Ist es rathsam, das Ehebündniß nicht ferner durch die Religion zu sanciren?” (Is it advisable not to provide a religious sanctification of marriage?), Berlinische Monatsschrift (1783), reprinted in Norbert Hinske (ed.), Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der Berlinsichen Monatsschrift (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 107–116. Although Zöllner’s question provided the occasion for Kant’s and Mendelssohn’s replies, the debate about the nature of enlightenment was, as I show in chapter 1, already under way. 12. Richard Rorty, “The Continuity between the Enlightenment and Postmodernism,” in Baker and Reill, What’s Left of Enlightenment? 19. 13. Rorty, “The Continuity between the Enlightenment and Postmodernism,” 23. 188 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 14. Rorty, “The Continuity between the Enlightenment and Postmodernism,” 19. 15. Rorty, “The Continuity between the Enlightenment and Postmodernism,” 27. 16. CPR Axii, n.␣. Although Kant develops his own interpretation of criticism as a form of critique, this quotation can also be understood as expressing the intellectual attitude we find in the article entitled “Fact” authored by Diderot in the Encyclopédie: “Facts may be divided into three classes: divine acts, natural phenomena, and human actions. The first belong to theology, the second to philosophy, and the last to history properly speaking. All are equally...