Mediation, Genealogy, and (the) Enlightenment/s

So, once again: just what is “enlightenment”? Clifford Siskin and William Warner propose that the twenty essays brought together in their confidently titled volume This Is Enlightenment offer a new answer to this familiar question. They suggest that “Enlightenment” (which they capitalize but typically do not precede with the definite article) was “an event in the history of mediation” (1). It was something that took place in newspapers and magazines (7), creating a world where writers discovered new ways of using printed materials and where readers found themselves struggling to keep up with the flood of texts that swept over them. Sometime around 1800 it became the victim of its own success and was replaced by something called “Romanticism” (19, 164). In contrast, Dan Edelstein maintains that the Enlightenment is best understood not as “an aggregate of ideas, actions, and events,” but rather as the narrative that “provided a matrix in which ideas, actions, and events acquired new meaning” (13). First articulated at the close of the seventeenth century by members of the Académie des sciences, the Académie française, and the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, this narrative has played a leading role in “the story we tell ourselves about our values, our government, and our religions” (1). Indeed, for Edelstein, it has become “more than just a story: it was and remains a ‘master narrative’ of modernity, even a myth” (116).

What is perhaps most striking about these two rather different answers to the question “What is enlightenment?” is that the differences between them are no longer surprising: we are used to seeing this seemingly simple question spawn a diversity of answers. Such disagreements are, after all, as old as “the Enlightenment” itself. One of the more famous attempts to explain what “enlightenment” was began with a 1783 dispute in the Berlinische Monatsschrift over the advisability of ending clerical participation in wedding ceremonies (i.e., a discussion of whether a particular practice might be characterized as “enlightened”), but it quickly turned into a debate over the criteria that might serve as the markers of “true enlightenment.” Though that discussion ended without agreement, it served as the provocation for the 1784 answer from Immanuel Kant that, as Edelstein (accurately) observes, now serves as a “one-stop shop for defining the Enlightenment” (117).

Although the editors of This Is Enlightenment and the author of The Enlightenment: A Genealogy offer diverging accounts of the Enlightenment, they are united in their suspicion that Kant’s familiar definition of enlightenment as “mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity” is not particularly helpful. Edelstein sees it as both mistaken (since “the Enlightenment” was, in his view, less about ridding oneself of the “guidance of another” than with “exchanging one type of guidance for another” [117]) and unoriginal (since he sees Kant as simply repeating a story that had been told by French academicians a century earlier [109]). Siskin and Warner suggest that Kant’s answer—which functions, in their eyes, as a sort of “self-help manual”—points us in the wrong direction: “readers to the present day have seen Kant’s motto as a signpost to modernity, turning Enlightenment into a precursor to be blamed or celebrated” (2–3). Seeking to undo the mischief that Kant’s answer has wrought, both books look backward. Edelstein argues that the paradigm for subsequent accounts of what “the Enlightenment” involved was a narrative that emerged in the wake of debates in French royal academies on the relative merits of the ancients and moderns. Siskin and Warner set the advent of “Enlightenment” at an even earlier date: it was the consequence of a transformation in forms of “mediation” first glimpsed by Francis Bacon (12–15).

Viewing the Enlightenment as “an event in the history of mediation” means that (in intent, if not always in execution) the contributions in This Is...