In this work, I will examine the fundamental concepts of the Enlightenment and analyze the extent to which they have stood the test of time. I will focus in particular on the definitions provided by Kant, Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as some modern interpretations of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, I will explore the role of media and information gathering in the digital age and assess if our society still lives up to the ideals of the Enlightenment.

As Kant said, Enlightenment is the emergence of man from his self-imposed immaturity, which is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another (1). This sentence implies that man has imposed certain limitations on himself from which he cannot free himself or whose overcoming requires great effort. It is not that man is ignorant and lacks knowledge, but that he lacks courage and determination. Enlightenment lies in this courage to use one’s own understanding. A life of laziness and cowardice makes people subject to guardians. It is so comfortable for people to be immature, for they do not have to think; their guardians think for them. Here Kant compares people to docile cattle, which have been made stupid by the guardians and locked in a control wagon. Moreover, the guardians show people the dangers that threaten them if they try to walk alone. Therefore, people do not even dare to learn to walk. It is not only difficult for each individual to work their way out of immaturity, but they have even grown fond of not using their own understanding. It is dogmatic rules and formulas that are an abuse of reasonable use and have replaced rational thinking for people.

Kant states that a public can only slowly achieve enlightenment (2). Not even a revolution would change this state. A revolution will not bring about a true reform in the way of thinking, because new prejudices will, just like the old ones, serve as guidelines for the thoughtless masses. Nevertheless, the enlightenment of the public is almost inevitable if only freedom is granted to it. There will always be some independent thinkers, even among the appointed guardians of the great masses. They will throw off the yoke of immaturity themselves and spread the spirit of independent thinking. Here Kant implies that a public can only enlighten itself under the leadership of an enlightened monarch. Only such a guardian will cease to plant prejudices. But it is not the freedom as it is that the enlightened monarch offers, but the freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. He says: “Reason as much as you want and about whatever you want, but obey!” By this, Kant means that the public use of one’s reason must always be free. On the other hand, the private use may often be very narrowly restricted without thereby hindering the progress of enlightenment significantly. As an example of public use, Kant names a scholar who makes use of his own reason before the entire audience of readers. By private use, Kant means the use of reason that someone may exercise in a certain civil position or office entrusted to him. In the interest of the artificial uniformity aimed at by the government for public purposes, or at least to prevent the destruction of these purposes, it is naturally not allowed to reason; one must obey. Nevertheless, Kant is optimistic that if everyone is granted the freedom of a scholar, people will gradually work their way out of ignorance by themselves. The government does not have to artificially intervene to maintain this process. One of the main signs that a monarch himself is enlightened consists in that he sees it as his duty not to prescribe anything to people in religious matters but to leave them full freedom (3).

This formulation of Enlightenment in Kant is fraught with a number of problems. First, Kant emphasizes that a person, in their capacity as a scholar, should freely and publicly present their thoughts to the world for examination. That is: if people are granted the freedom to express criticism as scholars, this contributes to Enlightenment.
But where does Kant get the idea that every person possesses the innate ability to produce scientific and critical works? A teacher may do their job well and still be dissatisfied with the education system.
But she would not write about it in a philosophical treatise, since she lacks the competence for such an analysis. Here, Kant clearly confuses wishful thinking with reality. That he is able to think critically and express his thoughts in scholarly works does not mean that everyone is capable of doing the same. The next problem is that Kant gives no answer to how a person, as a scholar, can avoid prejudices. Why can a revolution never bring about a true reform of the way of thinking, and thus stop planting prejudices by replacing old ones with new ones, while the enlightened monarch would have the power to prevent this? (4) The monarch can grant people the freedom to address the public through writing in the proper sense.
However, this freedom will not be able to prevent a person from continuing to reason based on prejudices. That is to say, Kant’s assumption that, once a person is granted the freedom to think for themselves, they will begin to do so independently and free themselves from prejudice, has no rational basis. And at this point, no monarch can help, not even the most enlightened of them all. This brings us to the third problem. In order to make Enlightenment possible, Kant relies on a few independently thinking individuals who spread the spirit of autonomous thought. For some reason, however, such a self-thinking person appeared only in Kant’s time, in the figure of Frederick II, whom Kant calls an enlightened monarch. That’s why Kant answers the question of whether we live in an enlightened age by saying that we live in an age of Enlightenment. (5) But why not earlier? Why did Enlightenment not arise already during the Athenian democracy in ancient Greece, or under the rule of the Roman emperors? If Frederick II was the first monarch to throw off the yoke of immaturity himself, then there is no certainty that other monarchs followed him, or that equally enlightened rulers emerged later. The fact that he supported the arts and philosophers—including Kant, who was invited to the Berlin Academy—as well as granted freedom of the press and of literature, does not necessarily mean that the era of Enlightenment had thereby begun. It might have been merely a rare local case of Prussian governance in Kant’s time—a phenomenon doomed to remain local, never spreading beyond the borders of the state, and to disappear with Frederick’s departure. That is to say, perhaps Enlightenment never began, and humankind continues to leave its thinking to the guidance of others. Finally, Kant reshuffles the cards and claims that the strange and unexpected course of human affairs is revealed precisely in the Age of Enlightenment. A higher degree of civil freedom places insurmountable barriers on the spirit of the people, whereas a lower degree, on the other hand, leaves it room to unfold in all its possibilities. (6) In other words, Kant intends to express that freedom must be met with special responsibility and restraint, and only under these conditions does it bear fruit. However, from this one could conclude that any restriction of freedom might be considered a logical progress of Enlightenment, while its expansion would appear as a regression.

The criticism of the Enlightenment by modern philosophers is primarily based on the fact that no real progress is actually achieved. Some of the most well-known critics of the Enlightenment were Horkheimer and Adorno, who formulated their famous thesis that humanity is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. (7) Disgusted and shocked by fascism, Stalinism, and the Holocaust, but also highly critical of their refuge, the USA, they declared that progress is ultimately a disguised regression. The darkest part is that the Enlightenment’s program aimed at disenchanting the world and liberating the individual, yet in the end, the Enlightenment only created new forms of slavery and a totally administered world. Yet even the very goal of the Enlightenment—to cleanse the world of all superstition—was paradoxical in itself. Myth itself already contains the seed of Enlightenment, since myths serve the purpose of interpreting the inexplicable. In other words: conceptually, the Enlightenment must devour itself, because the myths were already its own product. According to the slogan “Reason shall rule!”, formulas and rules take the place of old mythological narratives and explanations. The Enlightenment became a dictator that manipulated nature and turned it into a mere tool of human instrumental reason. (8) Shamans and oracles were replaced by scientists and industrialists, while the common people were degraded to galley slaves. In modern economic division of labor, there are no more feelings, no connection to reality—only mere functioning. Isolation and anonymization shape modern society, in which the individual no longer counts, while the masses count for everything. Enlightenment and thought thus become instruments of domination by economic mathematics, organizations, and machines that force humanity under their yoke.

Using the example of Homer’s Odyssey, Horkheimer and Adorno show that the Enlightenment makes the individual free only to the extent that they can bring themselves under control. (9) In contrast to the powers of myth, Odysseus appears modern and enlightened. He travels through a world that is still entirely mythological, but he does not yield to belief in the mythological world of the gods. In order to return to his wife Penelope and his kingdom, he uses cunning. He knows that he could be led to ruin by the voices of the Sirens. Therefore, he seals his companions’ ears with wax and has himself tied to the mast of the ship. The fact that Odysseus wants to listen to the song of the nymphs shows that he cannot resist the call of myth. Only at the price of self-restraint does he deceive the mythical beings, who, horrified by this cunning, must throw themselves into the sea. This means that the enlightened individual manipulates archaic nature but must simultaneously submit to it because they cannot do otherwise. The dialectic of Enlightenment lies in the fact that it attempts to eliminate myth, yet is itself permeated by it. In the end, Horkheimer and Adorno tend to argue that the Enlightenment, defined as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” ultimately led to a perverted bourgeois morality. In place of religion, reason took hold, but reason recognizes no substantive goals. It thus degenerates because it becomes pure formalism. As shown, for example, by the protagonists of Marquis de Sade, it is possible to be so enlightened and rational and still, or perhaps precisely because of that, become depraved. (10) De Sade considers this natural and typically human. His depraved Juliette rejects all religion while idolizing science. She praises reason and power, as Nietzsche later proclaimed in his works. His overmen replace God because monotheism has become transparent as mythology. (11) Nietzsche seeks to belong to a higher self, while the old ascetic ideals are praised as self-overcoming in the service of developing dominant power. The overman proves to be a desperate attempt to save God, who is said to have died. They bring forth a new moral ideal in which compassion is the ultimate sin. It is a weakness, born from fear and misfortune, a weakness that must be overcome especially when one is working to overcome excessive sensitivity. Compassion perverts the universal law as soon as it leads us to disrupt an inequality demanded by the laws of nature. (12) In this despotic principle, where kindness and charity become sin and domination and oppression become virtue, the dark sides of the Enlightenment are revealed.

In the context of modern crises and wars, many of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s criticisms still seem frighteningly relevant even after 40 years. For example, Matthias Zehnder expresses his views on the achievements of the Enlightenment with pessimism in his article “Enlightenment 2.0 – Have the Media Messed It Up?” and calls for reflection (13). Zehnder writes that independent thinking requires giving free rein to the mind and enabling access to knowledge. The Enlightenment played a decisive role in this by significantly facilitating this access. Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert are mentioned, who from 1751 published an Encyclopédie to collect and represent all the knowledge of their time. Compared to 1751, it is easier today than ever to acquire knowledge and inform oneself. In addition to the information offered by universities and libraries, we now have access to millions of Wikipedia entries, countless websites, and an almost unlimited source of information through AI generators. It seems as if we are living in the age of Enlightenment 2.0, yet Zehnder admits that he can no longer look his students in the eye. Kant, Diderot, and Voltaire fought for the freedom of thought and information. With the Enlightenment, citizens awoke and freed themselves from the absolutist constraints of church and crown. And what is the result? Our society has merely created new churches and submitted to new crowns. Modern society swallows everything the media offers, like an obedient herd: lots of advertising and disinformation, fake news, and a new superstition in conspiracy theories. The Enlightenment has failed, for our world is guided by power and money, and not by the principles of the Enlightenment, that is by sober reason and rational thinking. These are above all the consequences of blind faith in progress. People assume that the Enlightenment is a self-runner. Kant said that Enlightenment is the ability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another. But that is not a given. It is not enough to abolish church and kings and thus give people the opportunity to think for themselves. They must actually do it. Zehnder concludes that the fact that we live today in a world that sometimes seems dystopian does not mean that the theses of the Enlightenment are wrong. The Enlightenment is an opportunity—we have it in our hands. Access to knowledge and information has never been easier, but we also need to learn to use media meaningfully.

One can agree with Zehnder that Enlightenment is not a given. However, his solution raises questions. First, Kant’s theses on Enlightenment do not include a call to overthrow kings and churches. Kant fully recognized the church and the king in their role as guardians of the public, provided that they themselves are capable of Enlightenment. Kant explicitly praises Frederick II and calls him a brilliant example of an enlightened monarch who allows his subjects to make public use of their own reason and to publicly present their thoughts on a better constitution of the world (14). Likewise, Kant is not against the church, provided it gives a clergyman full freedom to communicate all his carefully examined and well-meaning thoughts about grievances and proposals for better organization of religious and church affairs to the public. In other words, Kant’s ideals of Enlightenment are not in contradiction to authoritarian governance. In fact, they can even contribute to its promotion. If the head of state is an enlightened monarch or pope, who else but him could compel or motivate the public to speak out publicly as scholars against immorality or injustice? Second, Zehnder writes that the Enlightenment facilitated access to knowledge in order to promote the use of one’s own reason. He mentions the French encyclopedists who published the first modern encyclopedia in 1751. Kant, on the other hand, does not assign a central value to access to knowledge and information. His most important appeal was rather to free oneself from dogmas, beliefs, and prejudices (15). Although Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert, who lived in monarchic France under Louis XV, indeed helped in the fight against prejudices, the same cannot be unequivocally said of modern sources of knowledge. An encyclopedia that provides definitions is not the same as a contribution in a social network or messenger app expressing opinions about those definitions. Media, social networks, or AI chats do not contribute to Enlightenment in any way—they think and judge on our behalf. Precisely they have become the main source of dogmas, beliefs, and prejudices. As Deleuze said: Every piece of information is a collection of slogans (16). When we are informed, we are told what to believe. In other words, to inform means to spread slogans. Information is conveyed to us, that is, we are told what we should or must believe. Ultimately, this means that information is the system of control. In this case, it is impossible to use one’s own reason without the guidance of another, unless there is counter-information. Counter-information here must be understood as resistance against the information system itself. It is only effective if it becomes an act of resistance and art plays a central role in this. A work of art is not a means of communication, and it certainly does not contain information. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental affinity between the artwork and the act of resistance. Deleuze here draws on Malraux’s concept, saying that art is the only thing that resists death (17). A statuette from 3000 years before our era is an impressive example of this resistance. It follows that, in the era of Enlightenment, art would have to completely replace information. Since Kant’s time, this has never happened, and it is hard to believe it ever will, unless an authoritarian ruler with fanatical reverence for art enforces it and shuts down all sources of information.

Another solution, proposed by Habermas, a successor of Adorno and Horkheimer, also establishes a connection between Enlightenment and art. In his article “Modernity – an unfinished project,” Habermas takes a more lenient stance toward the outcomes of the post-Kantian era and warns against hasty negative conclusions about modernity, such as “irrationality” or “regression” (18). He mentions Walter Benjamin’s concept of post-historicity, which implies a perspective where historical events are no longer understood as a continuous, orderly sequence, but rather as fragmented, with an emphasis on discontinuity and the break from the past. Just as fashion senses what is current while moving through the thicket of the past, modernity also draws on the past by selecting elements from it, not with the goal of faithful reproduction, but to adapt and reinterpret them for the present. Habermas points out that it makes no sense to base a critique of modernity on the assumption of a total regression of society, because the consciousness of time rebels against the frozen museum-like treatment of standards practiced by historicism. Modernity no longer borrows from the authority of a past era, but solely from the authenticity of a past actuality. Whereas what endured through time was once always regarded as classical, modernity now creates its own classicism. A classical modernity no longer seems alien. This new consciousness of time expresses itself in the anticipation of an indefinite future and in the cult of the new. However, this forward orientation and celebration of dynamism ultimately amount to a glorification of actuality. This explains the abstract opposition to tradition, that is, the attempt to neutralize all normative standards as well as what is morally good and practically useful.

Habermas admits that we are witnessing the end of the idea of modern art, but he does not necessarily see this as a farewell to modernity (19). In this spirit, he analyzes the claims of the neoconservatives toward avant-garde art, which penetrates the value orientations of everyday life and infects the lifeworld with the mindset of modernism. Bell, one of the representatives of American neoconservatives, therefore blames the dissolution of Protestant ethics on a culture. This is the culture whose modernism stirs hostility against the conventions and virtues of an everyday life rationalized by economy and administration. Furthermore, the avant-garde is said to be at its end — it is no longer creative. For this reason, Bell wants to tighten the norms, set limits to libertinism, and restore discipline and work ethic by bringing about a religious renewal. Only in this way, it is argued, can the connection to naturally grown traditions be ensured; traditions that are immune to criticism, enable clearly defined identities, and provide the individual with existential security. However, Habermas points out that the extremism the neoconservatives attribute to cultural modernity in no way explains the internal processes of the successful capitalist modernization of economy and society. Cultural modernity has nothing to do with hedonism, a lack to conform to social expectationst, narcissism, or withdrawal from status and performance competition, since it intervenes in these processes only in a highly mediated way. Therefore, Habermas calls for a deeper exploration of the socio-cultural causes from which neoconservatism tries to divert attention. Changed work attitudes, consumption habits, levels of aspiration, and leisure orientations are examples of societal modernization that, under the pressure of the imperatives of economic growth and state organizational efforts, increasingly intervene in the ecology of naturally developed forms of life and the communicative internal structure of historical lifeworlds.

Habermas’ next argument in defense of modernity is based on the failure of surrealism to question art as a whole (20). All attempts to discredit art, for example, by declaring everything art, elevating everyone to the status of artist, abolishing all standards, and understanding aesthetic judgments merely as subjective expressions of experience, have proven to be absurd experiments. Instead of abolishing art, all the categories with which classical aesthetics had defined its object domain were ironically confirmed. After the surrealist revolt broke the vessels of a stubbornly developed cultural sphere, its content dissolved. Moreover, a cultural tradition shaped by communicative practice, cognitive interpretations, moral expectations, forms of expression, and evaluations cannot be replaced by one-sidedness or abstraction. In this sense, Habermas calls for learning from the errors that have accompanied the project of modernity, especially from the mistakes of the exaggerated abolition programs, instead of giving up modernity and its project itself. He suggests that art reception could open a way out of the aporias of cultural modernity. Basically, art reception is understood as a process in which the art-appreciating layperson should develop into an expert. However, he sometimes behaves like a connoisseur who relates aesthetic experiences to his own life problems. This second mode of reception by the layperson takes a different direction than that of the professional critic. Here Habermas quotes Albrecht Wellmer, who noted that an aesthetic experience which is not primarily translated into judgments of taste changes its significance. It enters into a language game by being used exploratively to illuminate a life-historical situation and relating to life problems. This language game is no longer that of aesthetic critique, because with the aesthetic experience it simultaneously intervenes in cognitive interpretations and normative expectations. In this context, art and history are seen as tools for personal and political enlightenment. The process is slow, reflective, and transformative; it requires the layperson to repeatedly rethink ideas and perspectives and integrate them into their own life experience and social context.

However, I believe that art reception will not be sufficient to manage cultural modernity with its own aporias without changing the consciousness of time. In the age of the all-encompassing present, we must finally recognize the futility of elevating the transitory, the fleeting, the ephemeral. Excessive trust in the future predictions of modernity is not a sign of rationalism at the highest level, but rather of charlatan ignorance. The mindset of this era pretends to push into the unknown, expose itself to shocking encounters, and conquer a still unoccupied future — but in reality, it does not advance a single step, instead sinking into the indifferent depths of history. The intention to shatter the continuum of history transforms modernity into a phenomenon without permanence. We cannot claim that humanity has descended into a new kind of barbarism, as this phantom of history lacks any criteria for judgment. At the same time, we cannot say that modernity possesses the prerequisites to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment until humanity returns to the mainstream of history. To create new values, we should rely on enduring values that only the continuum of the past can provide. Therefore, the disenchantment of the cult of the present must consist of a complete rejection of the domination over the future. In simple terms, this means accepting the unknown, disconnecting from the outside world of information—that is, resisting the immediacy and pressure of current events—and giving free rein to one’s own aesthetic experience, in order to finally use one’s own reason without the guidance of others.

References:

  1. KANT, EMMANUEL, Was ist Aufklärung? UTOPIE kreativ, No. 159, January 2004, p. 5.
  2. Ibid., p. 6.
  3. Ibid., p. 7.
  4. Ibid., p. 6.
  5. Ibid., p. 9.
  6. Ibid., p. 10.
  7. HORKHEIMER, MAX / ADORNO, THEODOR W., Dialektik der Aufklärung, Philosophische Fragmente, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, November 2006, p. 14.
  8. Ibid., p. 15.
  9. Ibid., p. 66.
  10. Ibid., p. 95.
  11. Ibid., p. 122.
  12. Ibid., p. 108.
  13. ZEHNDER, MATHIAS, May 2022, https://www.matthiaszehnder.ch/wochenkommentar/aufklaerung-2-0/
  14. KANT, EMMANUEL, Was ist Aufklärung? UTOPIE kreativ, No. 159, January 2004, p. 9.
  15. Ibid., p. 6.
  16. DELEUZE, GILLES, “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?” Conference on March 17, 1987, Femis Foundation, p. 7.
  17. Ibid., p. 9.
  18. HABERMAS, JÜRGEN, “Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt,” Die ZEIT, No. 39/1980, September 19, 1980.
  19. Ibid., p. 3.
  20. Ibid., p. 7.