What is Enlightenment?

I began making preliminary reading notes on Foucault’s essay What is Enlightenment? in February. Unfortunately, I just discovered that the initial post was a casualty of the crash at VisibleDarkness.com—I suppose I’ll have to try to reconstruct it as best I can. Whatever brainwaves were there, are gone now. This blog entry will largely be an interpolated paraphrase of Foucault’s essay, not an evaluation.

The essential question of the essay is contained in the title. Foucault observes that modern philosophy has never succeeded in answering, or getting rid of this question. Foucault suggests that it is perhaps the essential question that modern philosophy attempts to answer. In the English translation, the word that Foucault uses to characterize this question is curious—he calls the question “imprudent.” I wonder if it is paradoxical nature of the inquiry that drives him to use this label.

Foucault begins with a minor text by Kant, written as a response to this question. But he quickly digresses (in his usual way) to bring up that Moses Mendelssohn had responded to the same question just two months earlier. I’m not familiar with the Jewish enlightenment in the eighteenth century. So I researched it a little. What the digression underscores is the question of finding a place for knowledge—there is an interesting pattern here. First, there is the question of the worth of modern philosophy. Then, the development of a more integrated rather than separatist Jewish culture. Other sources indicate that Mendelssohn and Kant were friends. But according to Foucault, Kant was unaware of Mendelssohn’s answer to the question—which I was unable to locate anywhere online.

In effect, the answer supplied by Kant and (I assume) Mendelssohn’s project of Jewish enlightenment share the common character of finding a place for the present in relation to the past. The second point is immediately punctuated by an allusion to Plato’s The Statesman— that the present is vertiginous, and that the world is spinning backwards. Finding the relevant section, I find myself in deeper appreciation of the situation which Foucault is carefully painting:

For when this whole order of things had come to its destined end, there must needs be universal change once more. For the earthborn seed had by now become quite exhausted—each soul had run through its appointed number of births and had returned as seed to the earth as many times had been ordained for it. And now the pilot of the ship of the universe—for so we may speak of it—let go the handle of its rudder and retired to his conning tower in a place apart. Then destiny and its own inborn urge took control of the world and reversed the revolution of it. Then the gods of the provinces, who had ruled under the greatest god, knew at once what was happening and relinquished the oversight of their regions. A shudder passed through the world at the reversing of its rotation, checked as it was between the old control and the new impulse which had turned end into beginning, and beginning into end. (272d-273a)

Of course, all that Foucault says is “Thus, in Plato’s The Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they belong to one of those revolutions of the world in which the world is turning backwards, with all the negative consequences that may ensue.” The story I quoted above comes from an interlocutor simply called “the stranger”— it strikes me as similar to Foucault’s larger project— the mechanics of the transfer of power. But Foucault uses it instead to highlight traditional views of historical transition. This is an example of a catastrophic change. His next allusion is to Augustine, who saw in history a tableau that might be read in a predictive manner. The third allusion is to Vico, who saw the potential dawning of a new science. Foucault regards Kant’s definition of the nature of enlightenment as almost entirely negative— “what difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?”

However, now that I’ve read Kant’s text I wonder at the convoluted way that Foucault shifts it. The opening of Kant’s answer is:

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage s man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”- that is the motto of enlightenment.

Foucault restates it: “Kant indicates right away that the ‘way out’ that characterizes Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of immaturity.” At least the way I read it, Kant seems to call the current status of man as nearly stupid rather than immature. Kant’s essay to is a polemic on the moral courage to step outside authority, to “dare to know.”

There are several points raised by Kant which Foucault deals with. First, that the way out of immaturity (or, as I would prefer, stupidity) is just that— a way out—a release of the dumb captive animal that the majority of humans are. Second, that it is a process, not a moment of escape. This is because we are at once individuals and members of society—Kant is not advocating the severing of social ties. The nature of public and private “obedience” (a slippery and counter-intuitive definition is given by Kant) is noted by Foucault. The catch-22 explored by Kant is figuring out when to obey, and when to disobey. Kant notes that in many ways, totalitarian societies actually result in a greater freedom—because people exert more time thinking of freedom, and less time obeying than they do in complacent “free” societies.

The major principles that Foucault extracts from Kant’s text is that enlightenment is an attitude, rather than an epoch and that man must be free in his public exercise of reason and constrained in his private exercise of reason. The use of “reason” in Kant’s text is reason for its own sake. Kant contrasts the scholar as the exemplar of “public” reason and the bureaucrat as the exemplar of “private” reason. There is an ethos—a combination of both public (societal) and individual ethics reflected by Kant. He seems to promote a certain subjugation of the individual in the service of the greater good—the real paradox of the sort of freedom that he seems to be promoting. I was reminded of the Cave of Demogorgon scene in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound— “Who Rules?”

The oddness of Kant’s argument is left aside in the second part of the essay, as Foucault turns to consider Baudelaire. I have been dwelling on this essay for a while. Hopefully, I’ll be able to finish writing about it someday.