The Epistemologia Imaginabilis in Eighteenth-Century Science and Philosophy

This chapter examines the change in science's image and the revelation of the philosophers of science's so-called epistemologia imaginabilis in the context of eighteenth-century science and philosophy. Many eminent scholars, from Thomas Hobbes to Denis Diderot, have engaged in the epistemological debate over extending the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human experience. The idea of the unity of knowledge across all disciplines on the basis of scientific methodology reached its peak with Immanuel Kant. Among the great historians, Marc Bloch was the one who best understood the role that a radically new conception of science could play in redefining and reviving the legitimacy of historical knowledge. The chapter considers the intense intellectual debate between historians of science and philosophers of science on the foundations of knowledge and how modern science acquired definitive legitimacy as a new form of knowledge over the course of the eighteenth century.

Kant: Was ist Aufklärung?

This chapter focuses on Immanuel Kant's analysis/view of the cultural phenomenon called Aufklärung and his argument that the Enlightenment was “a great act of courage, a passionate invitation never to be afraid of emancipation.” In 1784, Kant published a short essay advancing an “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” The article discussed the growing importance of the Aufklärung and distinguished between the traditional “work of practicing empirical historians” and the effort to draft instead an “[i]dea of universal history.” The chapter considers Kant's views on the “enlightenment,” whether we now live in an enlightened age, and the clash between faith in God and Enlightenment reason. It also examines Kant's description of the Enlightenment as a precise modality of the exercise of reason, which was animated by a strong “spirit of freedom” and intimately connected with mankind's natural need for knowledge.

What Was the Enlightenment?

This chapter examines the unifying element, and the ultimate defining trait of, the Enlightenment style of thought that pervaded the new humanism of the moderns: a radical cultural reform of the European identity that was implicit in the Enlightenment idea of civilization. It also considers the Enlightenment's critique of traditional revealed religions in relation to its humanism of the moderns in the context of Ancien Régime Europe. The chapter first considers the effects of the traditional reading of Immanuel Kant's philosophy and the historical discontinuity between the humanisms of earlier centuries and Enlightenment humanism before discussing Voltaire's view of religion as a necessity and a useful tool in the life of man.

Postmodern Anti-Enlightenment Positions

This chapter examines the debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger over the question “What is man?”—and thus, indirectly, the authentic meaning of Immanuel Kant's philosophy—and relates it to Pope Benedict XVI's views on the complex relationship between Christianity and Enlightenment culture. What was at stake in the Cassirer–Heidegger debate was the very existence of the Enlightenment and the legitimacy of its epistemological foundation. Cassirer accepted the need to redefine the relationship between the a priori and experience, in view of an idealistic conception of Kantian transcendentalism that was both more complex and problematic. His position remained firmly within the universalistic tradition of Enlightenment humanism. Heidegger, on the other hand, saw the Enlightenment as the final phase of the vilified trajectory of Western metaphysics that had resulted in the enthronement of man. The chapter also considers the Catholic Church's anti-Enlightenment positions.

Foucault

This chapter examines how Michel Foucault reformulated the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment by moving from a deliberate rereading of the Hegelian Centaur to an advocacy of the “death of man”—the extinction of a rational platform of knowledge along the lines developed by Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. It considers Foucault's genealogical historiography, a new and original tool for the analysis of history, and his arguments against the idea of a necessary and defining connection between knowledge and virtue, which had been the core identity of the Enlightenment, the link between power and knowledge, and the rise of disciplinary violence in the history of the Western world. Finally, it explores Foucault's view that “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its exercise of power, and to question power on its discourses of truth.”

Marx and Nietzsche

This chapter examines Karl Marx's claim that the Enlightenment was an ideology artfully created by the bourgeois class and Friedrich Nietzsche's argument that modernity obfuscated through reason and rationality the true face of human nature and its dominant instinct, the will to power. Marx based his analysis of the Enlightenment on the so-called materialist overthrow of Hegelian dialectical idealism, without abandoning the so-called paradigm of the Centaur. Within the framework of a new historical and dialectical materialism, the Enlightenment was examined from two dialectically linked perspectives: structural, analyzing the Enlightenment as a decisive generative moment of modern European society, and suprastructural, which insisted that it was the bourgeois society that produced the Enlightenment as an ideology.

For a Defense of Historical Knowledge

This chapter argues that historians must go beyond the premises of the paradigm of the Centaur and uphold the autonomy and prerogatives of historical knowledge with respect to the Enlightenment. It suggests that the correct question to ask a historian is not “What is the Enlightenment?” but rather “What was it?” and that we should ask what is it that we know about the Enlightenment's significance in the history of Europe during the Ancien Régime. On the other hand, the historian questioned should not think of the Enlightenment as a kind of philosophia perennis. The chapter also considers Ernst Cassirer's declaration of faith in Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton's scientific rationalism and Michel Foucault's attempt to revive the paradigm of the Centaur as “historico-philosophical practice” in the wake of the great German historiography of the Aufklärung.

Horkheimer and Adorno

This chapter examines the claim by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, articulated in their work Dialektik der Aufklärung that the Enlightenment underwent a dialectical reversal that paradoxically transformed it into a new form of myth, a totalitarian religion devoted solely to an instrumental rationalism whose final aim was to creatie a dehumanized society dominated by science and technology. Dialektik der Aufklärung began with the adventures of Odysseus (the first Dialektik der Aufklärungrer) and traveled on all the way to Adolf Hitler's totalitarianism and the American mass consumerism in their own day. Horkheimer and Adorno indicted what they saw as the historical failure of the Enlightenment's emancipation project. They took issue with the philosophy of the subject as described in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, appropriating both Karl Marx's critique of ideologies and Friedrich Nietzsche's unmasking of subjective reason as a smokescreen for the will to power.

Hegel

This chapter examines how Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel addressed the major philosophical issue of the Enlightenment—the dilemma of man— in terms of the “dialectical moment,” linking it to the theme of the self-foundation and sublation of the crisis opened by modernity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel laid the foundations of what is known as the philosophers' Enlightenment in the name of a concept of philosophy entirely different from that of Immanuel Kant and other Enlightenment figures: he shifed the focus from the primacy of the subject to that of the spirit. Hegel placed the emphasis on the organic union of man and universe, within which eternal nature operates, rather than on an abstractly determined individual tending towards his own happiness. The chapter also considers Hegel's philosophy of unification and “conciliation.”

Politicization and Natura Naturans

This chapter examines two major phenomena that had a profound influence on the Late Enlightenment: the sudden and momentous politicization of the Republic of Letters, and the gradual move towards neonaturalism in all fields of knowledge. Over the course of more than a hundred years, the Enlightenment had evolved into a cultural revolution directed against the Ancien Régime, culminating in the significant transformation of Western identity. The crisis of the Ancien Régime arose in step with the Late Enlightenment, setting off a process of cultural hegemony that has rarely been witnessed in any other time or place. The chapter considers how the actual enthronement of man and all his faculties as preached by the Encyclopédie and by Enlightenment humanism went hand in hand with the emergence of the new paradigm of a natura naturans.