What Is Enlightenment? : Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions

by Schmidt, James

• ISBN13: 9780520202252
• ISBN10: 0520202252
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present. In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions. Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Juuml;rgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: What Is Enlightenment? A Question, Its Context, and Some Consequences	p. 1
The Eighteenth-Century Debate	p. 45
What Is to Be Done toward the Enlightenment of the Citizenry? (1783)	p. 49
On the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784)	p. 53
An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784)	p. 58
Thoughts on Enlightenment (1784)	p. 65
A Couple of Gold Nuggets, from the ... Wastepaper, or Six Answers to Six Questions (1789)	p. 78
On Freedom of Thought and of the Press: For Princes, Ministers, and Writers (1784)	p. 87
On Freedom of the Press and Its Limits: For Consideration by Rulers, Censors, and Writers (1787)	p. 97
Publicity (1792)	p. 114
Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, Who Have Oppressed It Until Now (1793)	p. 119
Letter to Christian Jacob Kraus (18 December 1784)	p. 145
Metacritique on the Purism of Reason (1784)	p. 154
On Enlightenment: Is It and Could It Be Dangerous to the State, to Religion, or Dangerous in General? A Word to Be Heeded by Princes, Statesmen, and Clergy (1788)	p. 168
Something Lessing Said: A Commentary on Journeys of the Popes (1782)	p. 191
True and False Political Enlightenment (1792)	p. 212
On the Influence of Enlightenment on Revolutions (1794)	p. 217
Does Enlightenment Cause Revolutions? (1795)	p. 225
Historical Reflections	p. 233
The Berlin Wednesday Society	p. 235
The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of "Public" and "Publicity"	p. 253
On Enlightenment for the Common Man	p. 270
Modern Culture Comes of Age: Hamann versus Kant on the Root Metaphor of Enlightenment	p. 291
Jacobi's Critique of the Enlightenment	p. 306
Early Romanticism and the Aufklarung	p. 317
Progress: Ideas, Skepticism, and Critique - The Heritage of the Enlightenment	p. 330
Twentieth-Century Questions	p. 343
What Is Enlightenment?	p. 345
Reason Against Itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment	p. 359
What Is Enlightened Thinking?	p. 368
What Is Critique?	p. 382
The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices	p. 399
The Battle of Reason with the Imagination	p. 426
The Failure of Kant's Imagination	p. 453
The Gender of Enlightenment	p. 471
Autonomy, Individuality, and Self-Determination	p. 488
Enlightened Cosmopolitanism: The Political Perspective of the Kantian "Sublime"	p. 517
Contributors to Parts II and III	p. 533
Select Bibliography	p. 537
Index	p. 555
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