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

The Question of Enlightenment 2
become so divorced from any clear conventions of usage that the discussion of the concept had
degenerated into “a war of all against all” between combatants who marshaled their own
idiosyncratic definitions. 5
It is fitting that this first attempt to answer the question “What is enlightenment?” began
with a complaint and ended in confusion. Two centuries later, neither the complaints nor the
confusions show any signs of abating. A host of commentators, from a staggering assortment of
intellectual orientations and ideological commitments, have found one point of agreement: the
Enlightenment is to blame for much of misery that plagues the modern world. Within a decade
of Zöllner’s question, the first contributions to what would become an increasingly bizarre
literature tracing the origins of the French Revolution to the writings of the philosophes had
begun to appear. 6
By the close of the twentieth century, critics had added both Nazi genocide
and the Soviet Gulag to the list of atrocities allegedly inspired by the Enlightenment. 7 From the
Romantics onward, critics have repeatedly accused the Enlightenment of fostering a
“disenchantment” of the world that views nature simply as an object to be dominated,
manipulated, and exploited and charged that, by stripping nature of any moral significance, the
Enlightenment has reduced moral reasoning to the instrumental calculation of individual
advantage. 8 Other critics have maintained that the Enlightenment’s emphasis on individual rights
and liberties shatters any sense of community and creates a world in which nothing binds
individuals together aside from a motley collection of contracts and entitlements. 9 Still others
have raised the specter that the Enlightenment’s skepticism towards absolute values erodes the
capacity of distinguishing between good and evil and have charged that its hostility towards
history and tradition impoverishes our understanding of the moral and spiritual claims that the
past makes upon us. 10 The Enlightenment’s alleged assumption that all problems have simple
and unequivocal solutions has, according to some critics, blinded us to potentially irreconcilable
conflicts in the values we pursue; its affection for “master meta-narratives” has, according to
others, only compounded the problem. 11 And over the last several decades it has been regularly
condemned as racist, sexist, and incapable of appreciating “the Other.” 12