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

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The Question of Enlightenment 36 his argument that the English, unlike the Germans, had yet to gain the requisite distance from eighteenth-century controversies to allow them to cast an impartial eye on what had occurred: Stirling was incapable of mentioning Paine’s work without immediately taking a pot-shot at it. Far-fetched though Stirling’s argument may seem, there is something to be said for it. The transformation of a process known as enlightenment into a period known as the Enlightenment does appear to have moved at a different pace in Germany and in Britain. In Germany, the transformation was well underway by the time Hegel delivered his Berlin lectures on the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy. For the rest of the century, Aufklärung would have a long and productive career in German histories of philosophy. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, English translators of these histories and of Hegel’s own works struggled to find English equivalents for this curious German word, initially employing the politically charged term Illumination but, by the end of the century, settling on the Enlightenment. A watershed of sorts was reached in 1910 with the publication of John Grier Hibben's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, the first study of eighteenth-century philosophy to employ the Enlightenment in its title. 129 Hibben, an American Hegelian, offered a sensible, comprehensive account of eighteenth-century thought, which exhibits none of the prejudices and distortions that the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary associated with the term. Indeed, twenty years before Ernst Cassirer’s similarly titled work, Hibben produced a survey that exhibited many of the virtues of Cassirer’s now-classic account. 130 Thus, far from carrying — as the OED would have it — an "implied charge of shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority," at the end of the nineteenth century the designation the Enlightenment seems to have had the virtue, unlike the Illumination, of steering clear of the political battles that had raged in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While the Enlightenment might still be criticized for various philosophical shortcomings, it was — unlike the Illumination —not something to be feared and despised.
The Question of Enlightenment 37 Subsequent discussions of the Enlightenment have not, however, followed the course that Stirling projected: the Enlightenment has not remained on the shelf. Critics of various persuasions continue to feel the need to take it down from time to time and bash it around. Despite the best efforts of its admirers, it has come to serve as a convenient scape-goat on which those who are ill at ease in the modern world can vent their frustrations. At the same time, historians working in the area of eighteenth-century studies have found themselves in need of more shelf space. The cubbyhole labeled the Enlightenment has not proved capacious enough for the various Enlightenments that have come into prominence over the last half century. Those who have been taking the Enlightenment off the shelf to slap it have paid little attention to those who have been finding that the Enlightenment does not really fit into the slot into which it was crammed at the close of the nineteenth century. Those who have been busy finding new species of enlightenment in places where its presence was, at best, a rumor, have understandably devoted little time to defending the Enlightenment from its critics. And neither group has had much interest in exploring the vicissitudes of the concept of enlightenment over the last two centuries. Making sense of some of the more important turning points in that history will be the task of the chapters that follow.
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