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Introduction: A Critical Answer to the Question, What Is Enlightenment?
- State University of New York Press
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Introduction A Critical Answer to the Question, What Is Enlightenment? T his book presents an argument about Kant that can also be read as an interpretation of a particular Enlightenment project. Kant’s philosophy belongs to an intellectual context in which the meaning, orientation, and possible limits of “enlightenment” were the subject of intense debate. Kant sought to answer the increasingly pressing questions concerning the theoretical underpinnings and practical consequences of philosophical criticism by construing rational enquiry itself as a form of self-criticism. He consequently defines enlightenment not in terms of rational certitudes, but rather in terms of the freedom to engage in public argument. Through an account of what I term a “culture of enlightenment,” Kant describes a social ideal that is rooted in, but at the same time represents an advance on, the earlier Enlightenment ideal of intellectual independence. By approaching Kant’s thought from the perspective of its social and cultural commitments , I seek to formulate a cohesive account that does not succumb to the limitations of a reductively formalist interpretation. At the same time, by tracing the critical and self-reflective strands that are internal to it, I hope to provide a plausible alternative to revisionist accounts of Enlightenment thinking. I start from the assumption that the question, what is enlightenment ? posed over two centuries ago by German Aufklärer, remains a live question for us today. In asking it, we do not simply seek to satisfy our curiosity for a period of European intellectual history. We look, rather, to discover “what is still at stake when we argue about ‘enlightenment ,’’’ or, perhaps, more hesitantly, “what’s left of enlightenment?”1 1 But why, we might ask, does “enlightenment” remain in continuing need of clarification? The simple answer, as Michel Foucault claimed in the early eighties, is that the “event that is called Aufklärung . . . has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today.”2 The question, what is enlightenment? is Janus-faced, directed both at the present and at the past. In this book, I seek to sustain this double perspective. Although in providing an answer, I turn to Kant and to debates conducted in the latter half of the eighteenth century, I hope to show that the solutions put forward remain live options for us today. This book is therefore both a contribution to an ongoing argument about the legacy of the Enlightenment and an investigation of the relevance of this legacy to our current political and philosophical concerns. But is it not already too much to speak of a “legacy” or an “inheritance”? Lawrence Klein has argued that this “metaphorical array”—within which he includes Foucault’s own, circumspect use of the term “genealogy”—is “an invitation to anachronism because it interprets aspects of the past by reference to what they are alleged to have led to.”3 The point is well taken: present-centered approaches to the Enlightenment can be not only historically naïve but also philosophically obtuse. In a different context, David Charles has observed that if the historian of philosophy takes “what is currently fashionable as the sole criterion of what is philosophically important or worthwhile ...she is working not too much but too little as a philosopher.”4 But to pose the question, what is enlightenment? is precisely to initiate a process of reflection about our philosophical as well as our historical assumptions. Indeed, if we are to pay close attention to historical context as Klein urges us to do, then we must also acknowledge the present historical context in which enlightenment becomes a question for us today. This context is informed by the self-image of contemporary Western culture as, for good or ill, the inheritor culture of the Enlightenment. I say “for good or ill” because the value of this inheritance is a matter of fierce contestation. In these competing assessments what is presented as philosophically important or worthwhile is set programmatically against a particular diagnosis of our inherited gains and ills. While some authors continue to view enlightenment as a process of emancipation from the external authority of church and state, and as a discovery of the “inner light” of reason, others focus on the Enlightenment’s “shadows,” identifying destructive consequences that are still felt today. The advanced procedures for the “domination” and “manipulation” of nature that drive contemporary technology are identified as a disastrous result of the emancipatory promise held out 2 INTRODUCTION [44.200...