Kant’s Concept of Enlightenment and Its Alternatives

Abstract

The modern popularity of the Kantian definition of enlightenment often leads to a distorted notion that his understanding of enlightenment was dominant already during his lifetime, expressing the quintessence of all-European Enlightenment. This turns our attention away from entire layers of philosophical thought, since the Kantian definition of enlightenment in the late eighteenth century was neither the only one nor the preeminent one. The study of alternatives represented in the German philosophy of that period gives a deeper insight into the originality of the Kantian approach with regard to both its merits and demerits. The presentation of the Kantian definition of enlightenment as the standard turns out to be a rather late historical phenomenon. Even Kant’s closest followers did not turn to his interpretation of enlightenment and, indeed, were sharply critical of the phenomenon as a banal and superficial one, opposed to faith. Further transformation of the views on the Enlightenment led to the emergence of the inauthentic terms of “Enlightenment” and Lumières applied post factum to the eighteenth-century philosophy in Europe. As a result, the essence of the enlightenment was defined not so much by the eighteenth-century Enlighteners as by historians and philosophers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who constructed a model notion of enlightenment against which philosophical figures were then compared. This approach ignored, first, the authentic definition of enlightenment (in Germany and Russia in the eighteenth century there were authentic terms “Aufklärung” and “prosveshcheniye”, and in France the proto-term “eclairé”) and, second, important national differences in the interpretation of the phenomenon. The emasculate Kantian definition of enlightenment used to legitimise the proposed approach. A closer look at the authentic view of eighteenth-century philosophers and a comparison of the Kantian approach to enlightenment with its alternatives that existed at the time might perhaps demonstrate that the philosophical and heuristic potential of the allegedly overcome and discredited Enlightenment is far from exhausted and is still relevant today.

Keywords

• enlightenment
• aufklärung
• age of enlightenment
• kant
• mendelssohn
• zöllner
• cassirer