Introduction

Summary

I now believe that it would be right to begin my book with some remarks on metaphysics as a kind of magic…

For, when once I began to speak of the ‘world’ (and not of this tree or table), what did I wish if not to conjure something of the higher order into my words…

Of course, here the elimination of magic itself has the character of magic.

Work in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more work on oneself. On one's own conception. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one asks of it.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Despite the recognition of different national, cultural, and religious enlightenments, and regardless of recurrent doubts about the utility of the concept itself, a dominant form of intellectual history remains committed to the reality of a single process or project of Enlightenment, even if this is something that has to be synthesised from diverse intellectual expressions, institutional settings, and historical locales. Horst Stuke offers a classic instance of this historiography in his Begriffsgeschichte of Aufklärung, written for that great encyclopedia of German conceptual history, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuke 1972). Despite his illuminating sketch of a variety of different forms of enlightenment – ranging from the Pietists' doctrine of spiritual rebirth to the Wolffian conception of conceptual self-clarification - Stuke's history is one of the progressive unification and conceptualisation of these ‘programmatic’ enlightenments.