Jahre Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? ed. by Carina Pape and Holger Sederström (review)

Two hundred and thirty is hardly a special anniversary, but when is enlightenment—the big one, uncapitalized—not topical, indeed urgently needed, and the historical Enlightenment not a source of ideas and encouragement? Tobias Rosefeldt’s words of greeting manage to get in, on one page, Vladimir Putin, Edward Snowden, the collapse of democratic values in Turkey, and the distortions of truth in Donald Trump’s America. Moreover, the contributors to this Berlin conference volume are predominantly younger-generation scholars, some still students. So why wait another twenty years?

The emphasis is accordingly on the necessary input of enlightened thinking (academic and scientific) into contemporary society and politics. Kristoffer Klement’s chapter is an anarcho-utopian proposal for a reorganization of science freeing knowledge from the state and the market—a case for generic medications? Holger Sederström’s contribution is a necessary warning about the danger of assuming that we ourselves and our society have achieved enlightenment, when, as Kant warned, we are only ever at best in mid-process.

And sometimes we may even be in retreat, as Martin Davies argues in a fierce critique of British universities for the way they have slid into commercialism and ceased to be teachers or agents of Selbstdenken. Davies is the only senior scholar included in the collection and writes out of a whole career’s experience. Ours in Britain (but we know not only ours) has been a time of steady sellout to government, managerialism, and overpaid vice-chancellors. Davies’s account is powerful, though it understates (as polemic for simplicity’s sake must do) the light that is still kept visibly burning by independent scholars and scientists in their teaching and research.

The range of the other papers is too wide for detailed discussion of each, though they all necessarily circle round Kant. The tone is, appropriately, positive, with no facile denigrators. Some pieces are technical, focusing, for example, on Kant’s teleology (Stephan Strunz and Patricia Zubi), or on his move beyond secular morality to a concept of religion—a pale and undoctrinal religion, it must be said (Kirill Chepurin, in English). Paul Homrighausen’s paper on religion, secularism, and the state does not quite get as far as the insight that where religious freedom is a necessary social and democratic value, religion itself is not. Some take up major social themes and positions: Kant’s centrality as a, or indeed the, Enlightener, despite his acceptance of ultimate obedience—“Räsonnirt, soviel ihr wollt, aber gehorcht!” (Radka Tomečková), an enthusiastic endorsement that would have been aided by some reference to the pressures Kant was working under in Frederick the Great’s Prussia; “Zum ewigen Frieden” as an increasingly influential vision of politics-in-history (Alexey Trotsak and Olga Poznjakova); and Kant’s ideas of sexual relations, where the (in)famous definition, mutual enjoyment of the sexual organs, is rescued because it at least recognizes the possibility of pleasure for women. Nothing can be done, though, to rescue Kant’s acceptance that men too young to marry and father a family ought to still find an outlet for sex, regardless of what that means for the women they must then be using (Carina Pape). Some papers are historical—Wiebke Helm provides a documentation of children’s literature; Christoph Luther’s contribution focuses on the liberalizing of judicial punishment, which is argued to have been contemporary with, but not brought about by, the Enlightenment. The trail even leads into African philosophy in Silvia Donzelli’s chapter on the various ways the postcolonial philosophical debate engaged with the Enlightenment concept of universal reason.

Most concretely and authoritatively social is an interview with Ingrid Mühlhäuser, a professor of health sciences at the University of Hamburg, entitled “Wie viel Aufklärung tut uns gut?” on the need for precise medical knowledge before politicians or others act on...