What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Philosophical Traditions)

by James Schmidt

This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present.

In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions.

Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.

Genres: Philosophy, History

580 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Diego · Rating 3 out of 5]

have fun reading this

[Nicole ✨Reading Engineer✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

First book of 2019, and I can say that this made some very good points, but I found it uninteresting at times. I have to reread again for another class later this semester, so yay! *sarcastically*

[Stacy Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books collect modern intellectual questions and put them in one place. The essays in this book stimulate my mind. I look at it all the time when I feel like thinking. Call it the bathroom journal.

[Adam Carnehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schmidt's now-classic work is a portable library of essays from mainly German thinkers who all tried to answer in various ways the question in the title. Beginning in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, several learned societies and journals began a discussion on enlightenment as an activity or project (not as an historical designation for age or epoch). Kant penned the most famous answer, and though at the time it had very little impact outside of certain philosophical circles in German-speaking lands, over the last century it has been extremely significant. This book then collects the articles leading up to Kant's response, as well as his own short essay, then some other responses to Kant, before moving on to twentieth century interpretations from a variety of hands, including Horkheimer, Habermas, and Foucault.

What is endlessly interesting (or frustrating, depending on one's point of view) is that the answer to the question will never come, but that this is the point. No answer can come, but in trying to answer it, humanity moves forward in progress, or something like this. Kant believed enlightenment was a matter of gaining autonomy. Habermas continues this with his emphasis on the freedom of debate in the public sphere. Others, the Popularphilosophen, argued that enlightenment was a gradual dispersion of religious superstition and philosophical and political obscurity which would lead to human betterment. Few then, except for Hamann, held to the ancient view that enlightenment came from above and was received as a gift. All these secular definitions of enlightenment amount to a seizure or self-chosen and self-orchestrated project, usually with utilitarian goals. Basically the call is, "Let us enlighten and improve ourselves but according to no objective standard except those which we ourselves create: an expansion of the 'public sphere,' discovery of 'common sense,' emphasis on 'universal rights,' expansion of 'cosmopolitanism,' etc." (Gen. 11:4).

The book has some shortcomings. For example, several of the later essays from the 1980s and 1990s are repetitive and unoriginal interpretations of Kant's work; they could have been dispensed with. I also wish Schmidt had included some writings from the nineteenth century on 'enlightening.' Perhaps he didn't because the philosophical conversation had already changed; frankly no one cared about the question in-between Kant and his twentieth-century popularizers. However, in his lectures on religion, Hegel does discuss Kant's thought and the notion of Aufklärung. It's a pity that was left out of this.

Finally, it is ironic (and to my knowledge no one else has pointed this out) that Kant's answer to the question, which essentially amounts to an elevation of individual autonomy expressed in the political and religious language of 'maturity' and 'liberation' leads him to cosmopolitanism in the end, that is, an erasure of the identities of individual principalities and states and eventually of individuals themselves. It's doubly ironic because, taking Kant's own definition seriously, it then implies that Kant himself is a tutor to the masses, or, in other words, the very type of authority figure he denounces.

I also want to point out that Kant's system (after his critical turn) is Lutheranism minus the Logos, the creative Word. It's a secularized Lutheranism. His dichotomy of public versus private reason, that is, cosmopolitan debate and obedience in one's vocation, is a secularization of Luther's two kingdoms teaching, where, in the invisible (global) Church one experiences true freedom while in the state one must remain obedient while serving in one's particular office. Kant's emphasis on the limits of all knowledge is right out of Luther's Heidelberg Disputation. His aversion to metaphysics (Aristotelianism, Scholasticism) is likewise solidly in the Lutheran camp. His aversion to authority (with the necessary seizure of authority for himself) is a very Lutheran protest against ecclesiastical, specifically papal, power. One can go on and on like this. Kant had a Lutheran envelope to his thinking but with Christ jettisoned.

[James Dempsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

letter from Hamann to Kraus much good. Forget all the haberdashery and historiography, this is quintessential enlightenment reading.

[Neil Breukelman]

Audio Book format.

[Madeline]

I read the Kant, Foucault, Habermas, and Hinchman pieces for a reading group.

Also, that subtitle. Come on, academics.