The Society of Friends of Enlightenment, which existed in Berlin between 1783 and 1798 and was commonly known by the name “Wednesday Society,”¹ was founded at the high point of the “society movement” of the Enlightenment.² Organized as a circle of friends, it belonged to a common type of enlightened learned societies and had a special significance because of the official status and intellectual influence of the majority of its members. In his autobiography, the important Prussian jurist Ernst Ferdinand Klein characterized not the Royal Academy of Sciences (of which he was also a member) but rather the Wednesday Society...

Immanuel Kant is often thought of as a timid philosopher who never dared to defy the political authorities. It is a fact of his career that he apparently meekly submitted to a rebuke from the civil authorities in 1793 and promised never to write on religious matters again. Most of his political works were written in the form of light occasional pieces; none was written as a revolutionary manifesto.

This essay argues, however, that Kant’s writings on politics were indeed subversive. There was a thread of common vocabulary that tied many of them together. That vocabulary, in Kant’s day, was...

In early 1789, months before the meeting of the Estates General in Paris, Christian Daniel Erhard launched a new journal,Amalthea,with a lengthy polemic on the state of enlightenment.¹ His use of the term “enlightenment” was not uncommon: enlightenment, he wrote, concerns the abolition of prevailing prejudices and errors among individuals and entire peoples.² Erhard’s article acquired a certain originality, however, when he differentiated between “true” and “false” and “unlimited” and “limited” enlightenment, in order to examine why enlightenment “collides with the self-interest, craving for power, and arrogance of certain classes.”³ He concluded that these defects were to be...

When Immanuel Kant announced his famous definition of enlightenment in 1784, he enshrined a metaphor that had long been a favorite self-definition of European modernity and was destined—in large part as a result of Kant’s essay—to become the quasi-official criterion of what it means to be modern. Kant definesAufklärung,as virtually every textbook tells us, as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” and goes on to explain immaturity as “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.”¹ At the heart of Kant’s definition is a metaphor—or, as we shall see, a combination...

If Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi is remembered at all today, it is probably as the instigator of the pantheism controversy, in the context of which he presented the first formulation of an exceedingly fruitful criticism of Kant: that one cannot get into theCritique of Pure Reasonwithout the concept of the thing in itself, and one cannot remain in theCritiquewith it.¹ Richard Kroner calls this discovery “the starting point of German idealism,”² and I have discussed the implications of this claim elsewhere.³ However, it will be my thesis in this essay that Jacobi is both misunderstood and diminished...

It is a commonplace of intellectual history to regard the birth of German romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century as the death of the Aufklärung.¹ Supposedly, romanticism was the reaction against the Aufklärung, its self-conscious opposition and antithesis. Hence the growing popularity of romanticism in the early 1800s spelled the end of the Aufklärung, which accordingly should be relegated to the eighteenth century.

If we carefully examine the secondary literature, we find that at least three reasons are given why romanticism broke with the Aufklärung. First, it attempted to replace the rationalism of the Aufklärung with aestheticism.

Rather...

A return to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement and to the French Revolution requires no particular justification, for it is suggested by the very theme of “Progress: Ideas, Skepticism, and Critique.” Still one must be warned from the start of potential misinterpretations. An incontrovertible relationship most certainly existed between the French Revolution and the European Enlightenment; yet the Revolution cannot be understood as the result of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment cannot be understood as the legacy or burden of the Revolution. Both views are true only in a very limited sense. Even linking the idea of progress to the Enlightenment...

“Enlightenment,” in the first instance, is something people do. What results from these doipgs is called enlightenment as well. And a historical epoch for which these doings are said to be characteristic also bears this name. Only the first of these three is the topic of discussion here.

This is in line with the usage of the authors collected in this volume. For the most part they did not investigate the characteristic marks of their own age. They wanted to know what a person does who is doing enlightenment. Admittedly, to use the term in this way allows judgments that...

The collapse of a large part of the intellectual foundation of our civilization is to a certain extent the result of technical and scientific progress. Yet this progress is itself an outcome of the fight for the principles which are now in jeopardy, for instance, those of the individual and his happiness. Progress has a tendency to destroy the very ideas it is supposed to realize and unfold. Endangered by the process of technical civilization is the ability of independent thinking itself.

Reason today seems to suffer from a kind of disease. This is true in the life of the...

“Enlightenment,” according to the famous statement by Kant, “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Enlightened thinking has always understood itself accordingly as thinking that, in the process of emancipation from guidance [Bevormundung] by theology and church, has achieved consciousness of itself and its freedom, hence consciousness of its own maturity [Mündigkeit]. Out of this historical process, which finds its first high point in Europe with the Renaissance and then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries finds the course on which we are still moving today, there emerged that new form of culture, society, and the state that we are...

I would like to express my deep gratitude to you for inviting me to this meeting of the society. If I am not mistaken, I spoke here almost ten years ago on the subject “What Is an Author?”¹

I do not have a title for the question on which I would like to speak today. M. Gouhier was kind enough to say that this was because of my stay in Japan.² To tell the truth, that is an amiable mitigation of the truth. Indeed, until the last few days, I could hardly find a title; or rather I had been...

“The One and the Many,” unity and plurality, designates the theme that has governed metaphysics from its inception. Metaphysics believes it can trace everything back to one. Since Plato, it has presented itself in its definitive forms as the doctrine of universal unity; theory is directed toward the one as the origin and ground of everything. Prior to Plotinus, this one was called the idea of the good or of the first mover; after him, it was calledsummum ens, the unconditioned, or absolute spirit. During the last decade this theme has taken on renewed relevance. One side bemoans the...

Just as the fool was driven from his social position,¹ so the Enlightenment also banishes fantasy from philosophy. Although the imagination had always been met with caution, and in philosophy precautions had been taken from the start against its deceptions, even into the seventeenth century it still had its ancestral place among the faculties of knowledge. It lost this position with Kant—once and for all, one might say, if one views the philosophy of the romantics as an intermezzo. Of course, it experienced a rebirth in the manifold relations to the not-yet-conscious in Bloch.

In return for being disqualified...

In a well-known account of the role of transcendental imagination in Kant’s philosophy, Martin Heidegger practically accused Kant of intellectual cowardice. That is, Heidegger argued that Kant’s refusal in the second edition of theCritique of Pure Reasonto grant that the imagination was a fundamental faculty was a result of Kant’s having originally identified the transcendental imagination with the “common root” of sensibility and understanding, and of his subsequently being unwilling to grant such basic status to a faculty whose obscure nature frightened him: “He saw the unknown,” Heidegger says, and “he had to draw back.”¹

In what has...

Enlightenment is one of the most debated themes of contemporary intellectual discourse. The eighteenth-century claim that progress is possible through the use of reason and the advancement and spread of knowledge is summed up in Kant’s dictum, “Have courage to use your own reason!”¹ This view has been reiterated and updated by contemporary defenders of enlightenment such as Jürgen Habermas. In Habermas’s view, the Enlightenment tradition is the only possible source of rational judgment in the face of the irrationality, prejudice, blind obedience to authority, and violence that characterized the darkest days of German history under Hitler. It is only...

The quest for autonomy has been a pervasive, though scarcely uncontested, motif in much of twentieth-century moral philosophy. And most of the philosophers who have defended some version of autonomy have acknowledged the affinities between their own inquiries and those of certain Enlightenment thinkers, above all Kant.¹ However, as one compares recent work on autonomy to Kant’s remarks about it, important differences emerge. Kant had presumed, in hisGroundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the literal meaning of autonomy: obedience to a self-imposed law. He treated it as a constraint, a rule of moral conduct that is “objective” in the...

One of the aims of the Enlightenment was to introduce clarity into thought and morality into practice. In so doing, it also called for anovus ordo sæculorum, a “new world order” that would facilitate that aim. Now if enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its self-incurred immaturity on the basis of the courage to use its own understanding, the implication is that this same humankind should have the courage to call for the political order that makes maturity and understanding possible. Already in Kant’s essay on enlightenment one begins to make out a politics proper for the life...