The Eighteenth Century as the “Age of Enlightenment”
In order to interrogate and reach a conclusive destination regarding this question, we need to look at Kant’s seminal essay in German titled ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’. The title can be loosely translated as ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’. The eighteenth century was the “Age of Enlightenment”. The most significant and ‘appropriate” philosophical question would have revolved around the definition and explanation of the term Aufklärung or Enlightenment. To (mis)quote Marx, the philosophers have only interpreted the word (Aufklärung) in various ways, Kant being one of them.
Kant's answer in this regard appeared in the December 1784 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, a German monthly. As Kant indicates, the September issue contained an essay on the same topic by Moses Mendelssohn. The reason for these two essays could have been another essay by Johann Zöllner entitled ‘Is It Advisable to Sanction Marriage through Religion?’. Zollner’s essay contained the passage: “What is Enlightenment? The question, which is almost as important as the question what is truth? should be answered before one begins to enlighten others. And yet I have never found it answered anywhere.”
Kant's and Mendelssohn's answers were not in agreement. Mendelssohn had located enlightenment in the cultivation of what Kant would call the theoretical use of one's intellectual powers. To this extent, Kant's reply to Garve in “Theory and Practice” would serve against Mendelssohn as well.
The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals, especially the French Revolution of 1789. The energy created and expressed by the intellectual foment of Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the growing wave of social unrest in France in the eighteenth century. The social unrest comes to a head in the violent political upheaval which sweeps away the traditionally and hierarchically structured ancient regime (the monarchy, the privileges of the nobility, and the political power of the Catholic Church). The French revolutionaries meant to establish in place of the ancient régime a new reason-based order instituting the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality.
Though the Enlightenment, as a diverse intellectual and social movement, has no definite end, the devolution of the French Revolution into the Terror in the 1790s, corresponded, as it roughly does, with the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of opposed movements, such as Romanticism, can serve as a convenient marker of the end of the Enlightenment, conceived as a historical period. For Enlightenment thinkers themselves, however, the Enlightenment is not a historical period, but a process of social, psychological, or spiritual development, unbound to time or place.
