The Question of Enlightenment - Theory and Practice in Eighteenth ...

The Question of Enlightenment 14
Enlightenment: namely, to see it as standing on the threshold of modernity. 53 Rather than simply
presupposing this understanding of significance of the Enlightenment, this book is interested in
seeing how the Enlightenment came to be cast in this role.
The history that will be traced here differs from the accounts that populate the
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe in one final respect. As Skinner has emphasized, the history of
concepts is, among other things, a history of the way in which words have been used as weapons
in struggles to alter the way in which the world is described and, hence, understood. 54 Because of
the amount of ground that Koselleck and his colleagues have attempted to cover it is sometimes
easy to lose sight of extent to which the transformations that they have been mapping were often
the upshot of contests in which the meaning of terms underwent dramatic reversals. An attempt
to trace the history of concepts may, from time to time, catch the echoes of what Michel Foucault
once described as “the distant roar of battles.” If we are to gain a better sense of what is at stake,
it will be necessary to narrow our focus and take a closer look at the contestants.
Collecting the Prejudices
We do not normally think of dictionaries as battlefields. Yet, for over a century, the
Oxford English Dictionary has offered a definition of the noun enlightenment that bears the scars
of old contests. It reads as follows:
1. The action of enlightening; the state of being enlightened ….
[I]mparting or receiving mental or spiritual light.
2. Sometimes used [after Ger. Aufklärung, Aufklärerei] to designate
the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c., or of
others whom it is intended to associate with them in the implied charge
of shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for
tradition and authority, etc. 55