12 - Toward enlightenment: Kant and the sources of darkness

Summary

The title page of Christian Wolff’s Vernünftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen of 1720, the so-called “German Metaphysics,” shows a brilliant sun beaming through dark clouds above a peaceful rural landscape. A Latin phrase over the sun explains the picture: “light restored after clouds.” Many other philosophy books published in Germany during the first part of the eighteenth century carried similar pictures. In at least two the word Dispellam is shown at the top. Enlightenment or Aufklärung was the sun dispelling the clouds. The sun was reason; the clouds were ignorance and false belief. The darkness they caused was favorable to despotic government, overbearing priests, misguided religiosity, abusive nobility, repressive laws backed by ferocious punishments, unjust taxation, and stultifying economic practices. Enlighteners opposed these by trying to reform legislation, government, and penal systems, to increase religious toleration and the freedom to think and publish, to spread scientific knowledge, to improve education, and to rationalize economic policies. Success, they thought, depended on removing the dark clouds inherited from the past. Reason was the tool for the job. And philosophers were taken to be among those best equipped to show what reason could do and how it could help.