Enlightenment (Aufklärung; French Lumières) — The eighteenth-century European intellectual movement that advocated the critical use of reason as the guide to knowledge, morality, and political life. In German, Aufklärung names the act of “clearing up”; in French the movement is that of the Lumières (“lights”). Its protagonists include Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert (Encyclopédie, 1751-1772), Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, and, in Germany, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Kant, building on Newton’s science and Locke’s epistemology. Its typical banners are religious toleration, criticism of superstition and traditional authority, natural rights, and progress. The most famous philosophical definition is Kant’s, in An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784, in the Berlinische Monatsschrift): humanity’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity, understood as the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. Its motto is Sapere aude!, a phrase from Horace (Epistles, I, 2, 40) that Kant renders as “Have courage to use your own understanding.” Moses Mendelssohn answered the same question in the same journal in 1784. The movement was criticized from Romanticism onward and by Herder, and in the twentieth century by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947 edition), which investigates how enlightened reason can turn into domination. Foucault, in “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984), takes up Kant’s text as a critical “attitude.” See Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, Adorno, Horkheimer, reason, and autonomy.
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