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

The Question of Enlightenment 18
sometimes used in this sense as well, though Stirling generally employs it to designate those
philosophical tendencies associated with the French philosophes (i.e., the second of the two
definitions of Enlightenment in the OED): hence his use of the formulation the Illumination. 63
In using Illumination a way of referring to whatever it is that the German term
Aufklärung designates, Stirling was drawing on a convention that was in place well before he and
his colleagues began their struggle with “the uncouth unintelligibleness” of the “extraordinary
new German” that they confronted in the pages of Hegel's works. 64 Translations appearing in The
German Museum – an important, albeit short-lived, periodical that between January 1800 and
July 1801 translated a wide range of late eighteenth-century German texts into English –
typically rendered Aufklärung as mental illumination. For example, Georg Joachim Zollikofer's
1783 sermon “Der Werth der grössern Aufklärung der Menschen” appeared in The German
Museum as “An Estimation of the Advantages arising from the Progress of Mental Illumination”
and, in a listing of the most important German literature from the 1780s, the Berlinisches Journal
der Aufklärung is referenced as The Berlin Journal, intended to promote mental Illumination. 65
There was, however, at least one important place where the editors broke with this convention:
their translation of Moses Mendelssohn's response to Zöllner’s request for a definition of
Aufklärung opted for the phrase “enlightening the mind.” 66 A similar use of enlightening —
rather than enlightenment — can also be found a few years earlier in John Richardson’s
translation of Kant’s essay “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” 67 He rendered the
famous opening sentence of the essay as, “Enlightening is, Man’s quitting the nonage occasioned
by himself,” and concluded the opening paragraph as follows: Sapere aude! Have courage to
make use of thy own understanding is therefore the dictum of enlightening.” 68
However
awkward these translations may sound to our ears, they faithfully captured a crucial feature of
late eighteenth-century usage: enlightenment, like Aufklärung, generally denoted an activity in
which one engaged, not a period in which one lived.
This is not to deny that these terms, especially in their adjectival forms, could sometimes
be used to characterize historical periods. If enlightenment referred to an activity, it was but a