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

The Question of Enlightenment 6
Kant cast his net more widely and, focusing on the role of public deliberation, sketched a
conception of enlightenment whose influence shows no signs of diminishing.
Despite the differences in the definitions those who responded Zöllner’s question offered,
they shared one assumption: they assumed that they were being asked to characterize a process
rather than define an historical period. The second part of the book explores how, in the wake of
the French Revolution, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (a thinker who had, in his youth,
absorbed much of the debate that had been spawned by Zöllner’s question) sketched the broad
outlines of the epoch that he designated as the Enlightenment (die Aufklärung). We will retrace
the path that led Hegel to construct an image of the Enlightenment that would have a pervasive
influence on both subsequent criticisms of the aims and aspirations of the period and on
subsequent historical studies of the period.
The third part of the book deals with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic
of Enlightenment. Written in the darkest hours of the Second World War, this dense and
frequently enigmatic work saw the triumph of barbarism in Europe as the consequence of a fatal
intertwining of myth and enlightenment. While the book was, in large part, patterned on the
model that Hegel had provided in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Horkheimer and Adorno
notoriously expanded the reach of enlightenment beyond the boundaries Hegel had set in his
Berlin lectures on the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy from the 1820s.
Returning to an earlier convention of usage, Horkheimer and Adorno viewed enlightenment
chiefly as a process, rather than an historical period, a peculiarity of the book that has been alltoo-often
overlooked, both by those who, in the decades that followed, would draw on the book
for support in their criticisms of the Enlightenment and by those who have sought to defend the
Enlightenment from what they took to be Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique.
A history of this sort necessarily involves a set of conjectures about how a series of
attempts – undertaken at a number of different historical moments – to make sense of
enlightenment and the Enlightenment fit together into a broader narrative. It also involves a
series of decisions about how this history – a history of concepts, authors, and contexts – should