WHAT ARE ENLIGHTENMENTS?

Abstract

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

“A public can only attain enlightenment slowly,” Kant famously observed. His use of the term “public” (Publikum), of course, is notoriously slippery, and even now, after decades of academic discussion of Öffenlichkeit and l'opinion publique, it regularly trips up the unsuspecting undergraduate intent on answering Kant's central question: What is enlightenment? And yet it is clear that whatever else he meant, Kant envisioned a central role for the scholar (Gelehrter) in constituting the public, and furthering enlightenment. And so we might say, in a Kantian gloss, that scholars attain enlightenment, and knowledge of the Enlightenment, only slowly.