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Chapter 1  The Enlightenment in Question 1. Enlightenment as an “Age of Criticism” One of the difficulties encountered when reflecting about the Enlightenment is to determine first of all what the object is. This is not just a demand for geographical and historical precision, but also, importantly, for identifying the set of ideas under discussion, the content so to speak of the term. But therein lies the difficulty: “Enlightenment” is descriptively elusive. There is no date or concept that we can afford to take as our unproblematic, self-evident starting point. Taking our cue from the darkness-dispelling metaphor that is Enlightenment, however, we can begin by asking: How are darkness and light apportioned? How is illumination to be brought about? In terms of what we have come to view as the characteristic concerns and ambitions of the “Age of Reason,” the answer to these questions is obvious: the way to secure intellectual progress and human happiness is by eradicating superstition and by setting the various branches of human knowledge on a sound scientific footing. Familiarity with the aspirations of this optimistic, progress-oriented Enlightenment, however , has tended to obscure a strand of eighteenth-century thinking that offers a more cautious view of the future and questions the nature and achievements of both “enlightenment” and “civilization.” The aim of this chapter is to flesh out the questions this critical Enlightenment raises about the social and cultural context of reasoning, the reliability of reason as a guide for human action, and, finally, the nature, powers, and limitations of human rationality. In his now classic study of the period, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer observes that “‘Reason’ becomes the 13 unifying and central point of the century, expressing all that it longs and strives for, and all that it achieves.” 1 Cassirer marks the intellectual distance that separates his own age from the Enlightenment by focusing on the concept of reason itself. He points out that while for us reason is a variable, often vague concept with a distinctive history of its own, eighteenth-century thinkers were “imbued” with the belief that reason is immutable, “the same for all thinking subjects, all nations, all epochs, all cultures.”2 The works with which I begin my discussion in this chapter, however, treat the claim that reason is immutable as problematic, rather than as axiomatically true. The concerns and aspirations of the critical Enlightenment examined here do not fit our preconceptions about the Age of Reason, they are more appropriately seen as representing an Age of Criticism. Cassirer too employs the term Zeitalter der Kritik, which he uses to describe the remarkable growth of literary and aesthetic criticism that took place during the eighteenth century. Developing an argument made originally by Alfred Baeumler,3 Cassirer maintains that while restricted in its scope and domain of application, literary and aesthetic criticism had important consequences for the age as a whole. Art, Cassirer argues, presented a unique challenge to the “fundamental propensity of the century toward a clear and sure ordering of the details, toward formal unification and strict logical concatenation.”4 Constrained to acknowledge the existence of “an irrational element”5 that it cannot encompass, reason is awakened to its limitations and the age of reason to the limits of its rationalistic aspirations. Although the problematic of the limits of reason is central to the works I want to examine here, Cassirer’s account of its emergence is at best partial. To appreciate this, we need to broaden our view of the Age of Criticism, to encompass not only the criticism of art, but also of religion, morality, politics , philosophy, and of Enlightenment itself, that took place during the eighteenth century. This is well captured by Kant who, in the process of introducing his own project of a criticism of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason, observes that “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit” (CPR A xii). The criticism of “everything,” however, presents us with a different philosophical problem than the one alluded to in Cassirer’s analysis of aesthetic criticism. Cassirer’s account of the encounter between reason and the irrational obscures the less dramatic, but, I will be arguing, very fruitful, internal questioning of reason, which ushers the Kantian thematic of a “critique” of reason. It is the conditions and themes of this internal criticism of Enlightenment reason that I want to outline in this chapter. 14 KANT AND THE...

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