Foucault, Habermas, and the Debate That Never Was

Posted on July 17, 2013 by

For the last thirty years my filing cabinet has contained two letters dating from the fall of 1983: one from Jürgen Habermas, the other from Michel Foucault. They were written in response to my attempt to see if they would be interested in presenting talks at Boston University (which, thanks to the efforts of Tom McCarthy, I’d joined two years before) to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?”

Foucault LetterHabermas expressed interest in the topic, but declined, explaining that he didn’t think he would have to time to write an adequate paper on the subject. But he indicated that he would be in the Boston area (where he would deliver the lectures that would eventually become The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity) during the autumn of 1984 and would be able to serve as a commentator or discussant. Foucault thanked me for the invitation, explained that Kant’s article had “long been of interest” to him, and indicated he had “begun an study on the subject.” But he went on to say that though he would have liked to speak on the topic, “unfortunately the state of my health is not very good.” At this point, I was unaware that plans were already underway in Berkeley for a more ambitious discussion of Kant’s article involving Habermas, Foucault, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty. Nor, at that point, was the seriousness of Foucault’s “état de santé” apparent to those of us who do did not have the good fortune to have known him.

The Berkeley conference, scheduled for the autumn of 1984, never took place: Foucault died on June 25, 1984. He was, however, able to give a lecture on Kant’s essay (a lecture that Paul Rabinow beautifully characterized as “a kind of gift to Berkeley”). It was subsequently published in The Foucault Reader. There has been much written about this remarkably rich text. And there remains more to be said: it is perhaps the only discussion of Kant’s essay that is its equal. I’m not sure that I have much to add to what has been already been written. But there are some questions about the text that strike me as worth exploring, beginning with the context that gave rise to it.

On the Peculiar Career of the Debate that Never Was

The absence of an actual colloquy involving Foucault and Habermas has not prevented the emergence, some three decades later, of a large body of literature on what has come to be known as the “Foucault/Habermas Debate.” That there was something amiss about the debate that never was (for the sake of brevity, let’s designate this from now on as the “DtNW”) was already apparent in the subtitle of one of the earliest collections devoted to it: Michael Kelly’s Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), which — ten years after the DtNW — indicated that it was already in need of reconfiguring. It seems like we’ve been “recasting” it at regular intervals ever since.

Matthew King’s 2009 article “Clarifying the Foucault-Habermas Debate” began by asking

Do we really need to rehash the so-called Foucault–Habermas debate? Is there really anything left to be said, after so many years and so many articles, which so often quote so many of the same lines?

Since the article continues for another twenty-three pages, it is hardly surprising that he continues,

I think, in fact, there is, because it seems to me that what is at issue in the debate – or, rather, what ought to be at issue, given the positions held by the two figures at issue – has never been clearly explicated.

For King, then, what was (or, at least, “what ought” to have been) at stake in the DtNW was “the relationship between political judgments (the purpose of which is to motivate political action) and their non-political (but still normative) bases,” an issue that he regards as grounded in “a fundamental political problem: how ought normative ideals to be translated into political practice?”1

In reframing the DtNW in this way, King continues a line of interpretation that was initiated in a flurry of criticisms of Foucault’s work dating from the late 1970s that were subsequently taken up by Habermas in the discussion of Foucault that was first sketched in the 1983-1984 lectures that eventually became The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Drawing on Barry Allen’s discussion in Jeremy Moss’s The Later Foucault, King sees this critique as arriving in “three waves” (the fact that, ever since Plato, it has been customary for waves always to come in threes makes me wonder whether there might have been a lost dialogue between Socrates and an Athenian surfer).

Central to that first wave was Habermas’ charge that Foucault’s work is guilty of the ‘arbitrary partisanship of a criticism that cannot account for its normative foundations.’
The second wave … consisted of responses on Foucault’s behalf, which tried to answer Habermas’ challenge on its own terms by, in Allen’s words, ‘suggesting that the missing normative premise had been there all along’.2

Allen only was able to catch two waves, but King spots a third:

Certain writers have refused Habermas’ terms of engagement and suggested that Foucault’s critical tools be turned on the very idea of normative foundations. These writers agree with Habermas that the nature of Foucault’s work is such that it could not have any normative foundations.

Those agile souls who have ridden this wave (King includes Wendy Brown and others in their number) “agree with Habermas that Foucauldian political judgments must be arbitrary, but they regard this simply as a fact, obscured by people like Habermas, about political judgments.”3 For his part, King argues that Foucault’s “nonfoundational project” and Habermas’ “foundational” one are “not necessarily incompatible” (since they deal with “two different aspects of politics”) and may even be “actually complementary.”

A similar sequence of moves is executed in another 2009 article, this one by Amy Allen.4 It opens with similar misgivings about the entire affair, observing that the “Foucault/Habermas debate was a nonevent”:

no formal exchange of ideas between Foucault and Habermas ever occurred; instead, what is commonly known as the Foucault/Habermas debate is largely a product of the secondary literature on these two thinkers.

She goes on to note that, in the ensuing discussion, Habermas and his defenders “seemed to have the upper hand.” First, while Foucault offered only a few passing (and generally favorable) comments about Habermas in some late interviews, Habermas “actually offered a sustained critique of Foucault’s work.” As a result, he was able to set the terms of the discussions that followed. Second, those interested in Habermas’ work have been “more interested in engaging with Foucault’s work than the Foucaultians have been in engaging with Habermas’s critique.” The result is that “The Habermasians seem to think they have won, while the Foucaultians act as if they were not even playing” (1-2).5

Like King, she goes on to argue the debate was not quite the “non-event” that it initially appears to be (let’s face it: journals tend not to be interested in articles that are content to argue “Nothing to see here folks, move along”). But where King tends to frame the terms of the debate more or less the way that Habermas saw it (i.e., as a question about normative grounding), Allen tends to approach it from Foucault’s side, focusing on what the exchange might teach us about the process of “subjectivation.”6 In Allen’s view, seeing Foucault and Habermas as both involved in an attempt to clarify what is involved in the shaping of subjects allows for a productive dialogue between “Foucault and Habermas’s broader philosophical projects,” since an adequate account of the process of subjectivation “necessarily entails both communicative rationality and power relationships” (4-5).

While the efforts by King, Allen, and others to extract something useful from the DtNW have much to recommend them, there remains a more basic problem that appears to have dogged the affair (or, if you prefer, nonaffair) from the start. Michael Kelly did a nice job of flagging it at the start of the brief introduction to Critique and Power, but it seems to have been overlooked in the discussions that followed, both in his collection (and I would include the essay that Tom Wartenberg and I contributed to it in this judgment) and in the various essays that have appeared over the last twenty years. Rereading the documents that Kelly collected, I realized for the first time the extent to which neither Foucault nor Habermas seem to have been clear about what exactly the point of their discussing Kant’s essay was supposed to be (obviously, this was clear to Kelly from the start — sometimes my obtuseness amazes me). While this confusion is hardly as theoretically weighty as the various issues that have come to be seen as central to the DtNW, it is not insignificant for those who share my peculiar obsession with Kant’s response to the question What is Enlightenment? and its implications.7 After all, hobby-horses, like waves, are there to be ridden.

What Did Habermas and Foucault Think They Were Going to Discuss?

The best-known discussion of what the DtNW was supposed to be about was offered by Habermas in the brief eulogy that appeared a few weeks after Foucault’s death.

I met Foucault only in 1983, and perhaps I did not understand him well. … When he suggested to me in March 1983 that we meet with some American colleagues in November 1984 for a private conference to discuss Kant’s essay What Is Enlightenment?, which had appeared two hundred years earlier, I knew nothing of a lecture on that very subject that Foucault had just given. I had understood his invitation as a call to a discussion in which we, along with Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, would debate various interpretations of modernity, using as a basis for discussion a text that in a certain sense initiated the philosophical discourse of modernity. But this was not exactly Foucault’s intention in his proposal; I realized that, however only in May of this year, when an excerpt from Foucault’s lecture was published (Kelly 149-150).

Three points about this account are worth noting:

  1. Habermas’ assumption that the conference would be concerned with “interpretations of modernity”
  2. His characterization of Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” as “a text that in a certain sense initiated the philosophical discourse of modernity”
  3. His subsequent realization, upon reading the text (drawn from the first hour of Foucault’s January 5 lecture at the Collège de France) that appeared in the special issue of Magazine littéraire published shortly before Foucault’s death8 — that “this was not exactly Foucault’s intention in his proposal.”

I will come back to these points in a subsequent post. But, for now, it may be enough to note that Foucault’s own account casts some doubt on Habermas’ characterization of the proposal as “Foucault’s.”

Foucault’s account appeared in the course of a 1983 interview with Gérard Raulet that, as Richard Lynch notes, is available in seven different places under three different titles.9 In response to Raulet’s observation that the term “postmodernity” functions as a sort of “hold-all” concept, Foucault wryly asks “What are we calling postmodernity? I’m not up to date.” Raulet went on to summarize Habermas’ distinction, in his Adorno Prize lecture, between different strains of “conservative” thought, including his infamous characterization of Foucault as a member of the “Young Conservative” branch that runs “from Bataille to Derrida by way of Foucault.” To this Foucault responds,

I’ve never clearly understood what was meant in France by the word “modernity.” In the case of Baudelaire, yes, but thereafter I think the sense begins to get lost. I do not know what Germans mean by modernity. The Americans were planning a kind of seminar with Habermas and myself. Habermas had suggested the theme of modernity for the seminar. I feel troubled here because I do not grasp clearly what that might mean, though the word itself is unimportant; we can always use any arbitrary label. But neither do I grasp the kind of problems intended by this term – or how they would be common to people thought of as being “postmodern.” While I see clearly that behind what was known as structuralism, there was a certain problem – broadly speaking, that of the subject and the recasting of the subject – I do not understand what kind of problem is common to the people we call postmodern or poststructuralist. (Kelly 124)

What we have here is a somewhat different account of the origins of the DtNW.

  1. The initiative for the seminar comes from various unnamed “Americans”
  2. The “theme” for the seminar — “modernity” — was suggested by Habermas
  3. There is no suggestion that the seminar will focus on Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” (Though, of course, it is clear that Foucault has a longstanding interest in the text).

Confusions of this sort are, of course, hardly unusual, especially when we are dealing with scholars with as many demands on their time as Foucault and Habermas. Indeed, even those of us at the lower levels of the academic food chain are usually not entirely clear what we have agreed to talk about when someone invites us to talk about something until we have actually written the damned thing (a process that, in at least some cases, is completed in a state approaching panic on the way to the scene of the crime). But, obsessed as I am with the long history of the question “What is Enlightenment?”, it might be useful to achieve some degree of clarity about how the DtNW developed in the year or so between the meeting between Habermas and Foucault in Paris in March 1983 and Foucault’s death in June 1984. Unfortunately, there is a paper that I need to write for a talk that I am supposed to give at the end of August and (more importantly) the Clover-brewed Starbuck’s Reserve that has been fueling me as I write is now but a pleasant memory. So, it is time to schedule this post for publication (6 AM on Wednesday morning seems like as good a time as any), and continue the discussion next week.

But if any readers have any light to shed on the Debate that Never Was, I would be deeply indebted. The comments section is open for business.

  1. Matthew King, “Clarifying the Foucault–Habermas Debate: Morality, Ethics, and ‘normative Foundations’,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 35, no. 3 (March 1, 2009), 288-289. ↩
  2. The first internal quote comes from Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 276; the second comes from Allen 164. ↩
  3. At the risk of exposing my denseness: why is it always “Foucauldian” rather than “Foucaultian”? Who gets to decide these sorts of things? ↩
  4. Amy Allen, “Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation: The Foucault/Habermas Debate Reconsidered,” Philosophical Forum 40, no. 1 (2009): 1–28. Allen has also written an interesting article on Foucault’s stance towards Kant, “Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal,” Constellations 10, no. 2 (June 2003): 180–198, which I’ve touched on in an earlier post, along with a book, The Politics of Our Selves : Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), that draws on some of these discussions. I’m much indebted to them. ↩
  5. And let us not fail to note one small victory for “Foucaultian” over “Foucauldian.” Naturally, I couldn’t resist making an Ngram. ↩
  6. A similar approach can be found in yet another attempt at “recasting” the debate, Samantha Ashenden and David Owen, eds., Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory (London: SAGE, 1999). ↩
  7. This may be the place to note the publication of an interesting new study on this question by Samuel Fleischacker, What Is Enlightenment? (London; New York: Routledge, 2012). I hope to have more to say about it when I get the chance. ↩
  8. The Magazine littéraire article has been translated under at least two titles. The initial translation was done by Colin Gordon under the title “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution” and appeared in Economy and Society 15:1 (1986). Kelly includes it in his collection under the title “The Art of Telling the Truth,” which seems to have been the title used in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (New York Routledge: 1988). ↩
  9. The interview, which is #300 in Dits et Écrits, initially appeared in Telos in 1983 as “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” and was then reprinted in Kelly’s volume as “Critical Theory/Intellectual History.” It went on to appear in other venues as “How much does it cost for reason to tell the truth?” The one happy result of confusions of this sort was the creation of Richard Lynch’s online bibliography, an essential aid for anyone interested in Foucault’s work (especially those who prefer not to read the same interviews several times without realizing it). See Lynch’s discussion in Foucault Studies, No 1, pp. 71-76, December 2004. ↩
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 9 Comments

What Was Theodor Adorno Doing in Thomas Mann’s Garden? — A Hollywood Story

Posted on July 9, 2013 by
Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

The American exile of the Weimar intelligentsia has, like other exiles, left behind a corpus of stories. Not surprisingly, the stories told by those who wound up Los Angeles (which, more often than not, tends to be designated as “Hollywood” in order to enhance the effect) tend to be the most memorable. There is something (as they say) Unheimlich about the likes of Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, and Theodor Adorno wandering through neighborhoods that are better known today as the backdrop for episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Everything seems misplaced, which may explain why one of the more familiar paradigms for the Hollywood exile story consists of a German émigré turning up in an unlikely location, misjudging what is required, and coming off the worst for it. Take, for example, the locus classicus of the genre: Salka Viertel’s famous account of Arnold Schoenberg’s meeting with the Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg. Hearing Transfigured Night on the radio, Thalberg got it into his head that Schoenberg was just the man to score his upcoming version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. He directed the émigré actress turned screenwriter Salka Viertel to summon Schoenberg to his office. Her account of what ensued goes as follows:

I still see him before me, leaning forward in his chair… his burning, genius’ eyes on Thalberg, who, standing behind his desk, was explaining why he wanted a great composer for the scoring of the Good Earth. When he came to: “Last Sunday when I heard the lovely music you have written …” Schoenberg interrupted sharply: “I don’t write ‘lovely’ music.”

Thalberg looked baffled, then smiled and explained what he meant by “lovely music.” It had to have Chinese themes, and, as the people in the film were peasants, there was not much dialogue but a lot of action. … I translated what Thalberg said into German, but Schoenberg interrupted me. He understood everything, and in a surprisingly literary though faulty English, he conveyed what he thought in general of music in films: that it was simply terrible. The whole handling of sound was incredibly bad, meaningless, numbing all expression; the leveling monotony of the dialogue was unbearable. He had read the Good Earth and he would not undertake the assignment unless he was given complete control over the sound, including the spoken words.

“What do you mean by complete control?” asked Thalberg, incredulously.

“I mean that I would have to work with the actors,” answered Schoenberg. “They would have to speak in the same pitch and key as I compose it in. It would be similar to ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ but, of course, less difficult.” He turned to me and asked if I remembered some of verses of the Pierrot and would I speak them. I remembered very well: “Der Mond den man mit Augen trinkt ….” … I reproduced it quite faithfully, watching Thalberg’s face. He must have been visualizing Luise Rainer and Paul Muni singing their lines in a similar key. But be did not move a muscle of his face. “Well, Mr. Schoenberg, ” he said, “the director and I have different ideas and they may contradict yours. You see, the director wants to handle the actors himself.”

“He could do that after they have studied their lines with me,” offered Schoenberg magnanimously.1

Rather quickly Thalberg realized where this was likely to lead and decided instead to use some Chinese folk tunes that were already in the studio’s music library.2

We find much the same model, this time with Theodor Adorno in the role of the émigré who does not quite understand how things are done, in Katia Mann’s Unwritten Memories. It differs from the paradigm only in assigning the role of the American to her husband, the novelist Thomas Mann. Cobbled together from recorded interviews and television broadcasts, transcribed and then further revised in 1973 by her son Michael Mann, the book was published in German in 1974 by Fischer Verlag and promptly translated into English and published by Knopf in 1975. It is unclear that the final product was worth the effort. Katia Mann was no Salka Viertel: devotion to her husband drips from every page, merging with a desire to settle some old scores with Adorno, a desire that does not appear to have been tempered by the passing of time or an interest in historical accuracy.

Mann in the Bedroom, Adorno in the Garden, and Katia Out for Revenge

Thomas and Katia Mann

Thomas and Katia Mann

Katia Mann’s story about Adorno was part of a broader series of attacks on Adorno in which she and her daughter Erika (who, it appears was not a woman to cross — she was devoted to her father and on good terms with the FBI) were engaged in the wake of what they appear to have regarded as Mann’s overly generous treatment of Adorno in The Story of a Novel, his book about the writing of Doctor Faustus, a novel that incorporated a significant chunk of Adorno’s unpublished Philosophy of New Music into its pages and for which Adorno produced extended sketches describing the musical compositions written by the novel’s principal protagonist.3

Katia Mann’s general point was that Adorno “acted positively foolishly with his pretentiousness and conceit” (unlike her husband, who’d figured out how to be seriously pretentious and conceited?) and that he had a fixation on Thomas Mann, which resulted in his thinking of himself as the actual author of Doctor Faustus (think Single White Female as it might have been remade by Fassbinder).

It was a peculiar attitude, this self-identification with Thomas Mann. One afternoon my husband had lain down to rest after lunch, as he always did, and I was busy with something or other. The room where I was sitting had a door leading to the garden; the door was open, and suddenly I saw Wiesengrund-Adorno coming through the yard wearing a dark suit. He came in, and I said, “Herr Doktor, all dressed up and coming through the yard?” But he looked very serious and formal. “Yes, it’s a very unpleasant matter,” and then he asked if he could speak with my husband. I answered, “No, you know that he’s sleeping, but if you will wait for half an hour . . .” So he sat down with me, and while we were talking he suddenly began to speak of his grave concern: my husband hadn’t mentioned Horkheimer in The Story of a Novel. I said, “What do you mean? Herr Horkheimer is a dear friend, but he doesn’t have anything at all to do with The Story of a Novel or with Dr. Faustus. The fact that you helped my husband has surely been fully documented.” But Wiesengrund-Adorno said, “No, no, it’s impossible. Horkheimer is going to be deeply offended.”

I: “Well, what shall we do then?”

He: “I see only one possibility-that your husband at least review Horkheimer’s new book now, perhaps in The New York Times.”

And that’s the way the matter was handled. The book turned out to be by Horkheimer and Adorno: it was their Dialectic of Enlightenment. My husband received a copy, and he said to Golo, “I don’t understand anything about this. Couldn’t you write the review?” Golo wrote it, and it was published in The New York Times under his father’s name.

Upon reading this for the first time, my reaction was that the story made no sense. In no universe with which I am familiar would the New York Times publish a review of a book that was written in German. But I figured that I should — to modify the (alleged) Russian proverb made famous by the man who, around this time became President of the Screen Actor’s Guild — “distrust but verify.”

I checked the Historical New York Times database and, as expected, found no review of Dialectic of Enlightenment by Mann or, for that matter, by anyone else. Undeterred, I sent emails to the archivists at the Times and to the Mann Archive in Zürich to see if, perhaps, a review might have been written but not published. The Times reported that they could neither confirm nor deny that such thing existed because their records for that period were either long vanished or impossible for them to search (I’ve forgotten which). The Mann archive reported that they were familiar with Katia Mann’s claim but had no copy of such a document in their possession. Wondering whether there might have been some confusion in the transcribing of her story, I bought access to the Los Angeles Times database and found no review of Dialectic of Enlightenment there, either (but I did learn a bit more about the escapades of certain other associates of the Frankfurt school — more on that in a latter post, perhaps).

In order to figure out what is going on here, it helps to break Katia Mann’s down, examine it more closely, and see what’s wrong with it. She makes six claims:

  1. Sometime after the publication of The Story of a Novel, Adorno turned up in Mann’s garden with a copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
  2. He noted that Horkheimer was upset for not having been mentioned in Mann’s Story of a Novel and insisted that something had to be done about it
  3. He asked Mann to write a review of it, “perhaps for the New York Times.”
  4. Mann tried reading the book, but (like everyone else who has ever tried to read Dialectic of Enlightenment) found himself confused.
  5. So he passed it off to his son Golo, who read the book and wrote a review.
  6. Golo’s review was published in the New York Times under his father’s name.

Now, claim 6 is certainly untrue: no review of Dialectic of Enlightenment appeared in the New York Times. But this still leaves the possibility open that claims 1-5 are true, but that the New York Times had no interest in the review. It is, however, highly unlikely that claims 1-4 are true, a fact that fatally undermines the plausibility of claim 5. Once we’ve worked our way through all this, however, we will see that a version of claim 6 might have been accurate after all, but thisfact is hard to reconcile with anything else in the story.

Claims #2 & 3: Chronological and Tactical Difficulties

The simplest problem involves claim #2. The German text of Story of a Novel was first published in 1949. Dialectic of Enlightenment was published in 1947. For Katia’s story to make sense, Horkheimer would have had to (1) read Story of a Novel, (2) discover that he wasn’t in it, (3) become upset about this, and (4) hatch the scheme that sent Adorno running over to Mann’s garden to beg Mann to write a review of Dialectic of Enlightenment for the New York Times. Were Horkheimer to have read Story of a Novel it is possible that he would have been offended by his not appearing in it (Horkheimer, after all, appears to have been a rather difficult man, but — then again — he was dealing with a lot of very difficult men). It is also plausible that Horkheimer was under the impression that it was within Mann’s power to get Dialectic of Enlightenment reviewed in the New York Times — he seems to have taken to heart the account that he and Adorno had given of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment and was convinced that the entire industry was one massive racket. With the right friends and the right connections, anything was possible.

But the dates just won’t work. By 1949 the time would have passed for a review of Dialectic of Enlightenment. While it is conceivable that Horkheimer was dense enough not to realize this, there is one further argument against claim #2: over the course of 1949 it seems that, if anything, Horkheimer and Adorno were interested in suppressing reviews of Dialectic of Enlightenment. From their correspondence (both the published material in the Horkheimer-Adorno Briefwechsel and in other materials that I’ve seen in the Lowenthal Papers at Harvard) it is clear that he was concerned that the not entirely suppressed radicalism of the book (which had been subjected to a massive elimination of Marxist terminology prior to its publication) might complicate the efforts to find a new home for the Institute for Social Research either at UCLA (where the plan seems to have been to enter into some sort of affiliation with the newly established Sociology department) or back in Frankfurt. It would appear, then, that the last thing Horkheimer might have wanted in 1949 would have been a review that called attention to Dialectic of Enlightenment.

This still leaves open the possibility that, as later as 1949, he could still have held out hope that a review of Eclipse of Reason might be placed in the Times. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, Horkheimer was quite concerned that Oxford University Press wasn’t doing enough to “plug” the book (is there anything quite as pathetic as an academic trying to sound savvy?).4 But by 1949 he appears to have resigned himself to the fact that the book was not going to garner the coverage in the popular press for which he was hoping.

Claim 4: Thomas Mann and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

There are also good reasons for doubting Katia Mann’s claim — however plausible it might initially seem — that Mann tried to read Dialectic of Enlightenment but couldn’t make sense of it. It turns out that the Thomas Mann owned a copy of Philosophische Fragmente — the 1944 mimeographed version of Dialectic of Enlightenment — and that it contains markings on eleven pages.5 The annotations cover the first chapter and the two excursuses, suggesting that Mann made it at least as far as the chapter on the culture industry before giving up. It is hard to square Katia Mann’s story with this evidence: it seems hardly plausible that it would have taken Mann 141 pages to realize that he didn’t understand what he was reading. It is far more likely that he stopped reading the book at this point because, by then, he had found what he needed to find.

1882170_1_lTo understand why he was reading the manuscript it helps to know how he got it in the first place. Copies of the Philosophische Fragmente had been sent to five hundred friends and associates of the Institute for Social Research at the end of 1944. Given Mann’s stature in the exile community, it is reasonable to assume that he would have been sent a copy. The fact that he lived a few blocks away from Horkheimer makes it even more likely. And the fact that, while working on Doctor Faustus, Mann had been reading Adorno’s work and meeting with from from 1943 onwards makes it almost certain that Mann would have received a copy as soon as it became available. This means that Mann would have possessed a draft of the Philosophische Fragmente four years before Katia Mann’s story has him receiving a copy of the book from Adorno and being asked to review it for the New York Times.

Without going into too much detail about his annotations in the manuscript, the passages that he noted fit into the general set of themes that Doctor Faustus shares with Dialectic of Enlightenment — magic, myth, mimesis, etc. What Mann was probably doing with the Philosophische Fragmente was exactly what he did with Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music and the other works he was reading at this point: he was looking for passages that he could use in Doctor Faustus. His practice of inserting verbatim extracts into the text of the novel (particularly his use of Adorno’s unpublished work and, by extension, with the Philosophische Fragmente) falls on the far side of what we would today see as fair use of others’ materials. Mann, of course, saw it rather differently: he viewed himself as engaged in the process of constructing a “montage.”

This practice might be excusable in the case of materials that were already published, generally recognized, and — as he put it in his letter to Adorno of December 30, 1945 — “in the public domain.” After laying out his general approach to such material, Mann’s letter makes it clear that even he was aware that he had crossed a line with Adorno’s work. Reflecting on the “more difficult — not to say more scandalous” case of his “brazen — and I hope not altogether doltish” appropriation of Adorno’s “Philosophy of New Music” he observed,

These borrowings cry out all the more for apology since for the time being the reader cannot be made aware of them; there is no way to call his atten­tion to them without breaking the illusion. (Perhaps a footnote: “This comes from Adorno-Wiesengrund”? It won’t do!).6

Adorno’s reasons for putting up with the theft of his own work can be explained, at least in part, by the considerable difference in status between our two protagonists. At this point Adorno was a forty-year old German academic who had written a considerable body of material but, as a result of the disruption of exile, had been able to publish rather little of it. Mann was old, internationally recognized, and widely viewed as the leading figure in the émigré community. Adorno’s letters to his parents from this period suggest not only did he realize that Mann was an Important Figure, but that he also enjoyed working with him. And, perhaps, Mann had already offered assurances that his debts to Adorno would eventually be acknowledged, as indeed it was in The Story of a Novel. Finally, it is worth noting that Horkheimer also seems to have had a stake in Adorno’s collaboration with Mann: in the reports on Institute activities that he dutifully filed with Columbia University (with which the Institute retained a tenuous connection, despite Horkheimer’s having decamped to Los Angeles) he listed Adorno’s service as a “consultant” to Thomas Mann as evidence of the work in which the Institute was engaged.

All of this is enough to suggest that (1) Thomas Mann was quite familiar with Dialectic of Enlightenment prior to Adorno’s alleged appearance in his garden and (2) Horkheimer may well have thought that he was owed something for the services that Adorno had performed for Mann. But the service in question does not appear to have been a review of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Claim 6: The Devils Strike a Bargain?

Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer

There was, in fact, a book review that appeared under Thomas Mann’s name in the New York Times Sunday Book Review of December 11, 1949, though Katia Mann was mistaken about the title of the book and its author. The book in question was Paul Massing’s Rehearsal for Destruction. A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany and Horkheimer would have had considerable interest in having it reviewed in prominent places. Massing was an associate of the Institute for Social Research and Rehearsal for Destruction was one of the volumes that appeared as part of the “Studies in Prejudice” series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the same series that would soon produce the work that would gain fame for Adorno: The Authoritarian Personality.

In 1949 Horkheimer had ample reasons for trying to call attention to the works that were appearing in this series. He was under considerable pressure from Columbia to demonstrate that the Institute for Social Research was, in fact, capable of producing important and widely recognized works. He also had enemies at the American Jewish Committee and it was important for him to demonstrate that the money the AJC had provided was not being wasted. And the fact that it was becoming clear that Columbia was no longer interested in continuing its connection with a Horkheimer-led Institute for Social Research also argued for trying to garner as much publicity for the series as possible. The interest attracted by the series might aid in the negotiations with UCLA and could also make the case for the reestablishment of the Institute at Frankfurt as a center for the dissemination of “American style” social science.

Let me, then, come to Katia Mann’s aid and try to work up a more plausible version of her story. Horkheimer could well have sent Adorno to Thomas Mann’s house with a copy of Rehearsal for Destruction, reasoning that Mann owed Adorno and the Institute a favor. But, pace Katia, it is hard to see why Mann would have found anything in Rehearsal for Destruction that might have proven difficult for him to understand (after all, he’d read Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music and known which passages were good to steal and also seems to have attempted to do the same thing with the Philosophische Fragmente). It is, on the other hand, quite easy to see why Mann might have had little interest in reading it: there was nothing in it that was relevant for his current writing. So, he could very well have farmed it out to his son Golo and then passed it off to the New York Times as his own work. But his doing so makes for a different (and, dare we say, crasser?) story than the one Katia Mann told: in place of a great, if baffled man, confronted by a strange request from a former collaborator, we have a deal being worked out between two émigrés who are behaving in exactly the same way as Hollywood studio heads operated in a vertically organized monopoly where writers and actors were bound to exclusive contracts with studios but could be lent out, for short periods of time, with the expectation that similar compensation might be offered. Horkheimer, having lent Adorno out to Mann, had every reason to expect something in return. Mann recognized that compensation was owed and farmed it out to a member of the family. For all of its failings as a historical document, Unwritten Memoirs turns out, in the end, to be a familiar Hollywood story.

800px-Aerial_Hollywood_Sign

  1. Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston: 1969) 206-7. ↩
  2. I’ve discussed it in an unpublished conference paper, which can be downloaded from Academia.edu. ↩
  3. I’ve discussed the Mann-Adorno collaboration in, “Mephistopheles in Hollywood: Adorno, Mann, and Schoenberg,” in Thomas Huhn, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 148–180. For a brief discussion of Adorno’s subsequent relationship with Erika Mann, see Stefan Muller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Polity, 2005) 318-319. ↩
  4. James Schmidt, “The ‘Eclipse of Reason’ and the End of the Frankfurt School in America,” New German Critique no. 100 (January 1, 2007): 47–76 [open access version]. ↩
  5. I’m much indebted to the Thomas Mann Archiv in Zürich for providing me with information about this text, including the page and line references for Mann’s notations. ↩
  6. Letter to Theodor Adorno of December 30, 1945 in Letters of Thomas Mann 361-2 ↩
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

On Foucault’s Review of Cassirer’s Philosophy of the Enlightenment

Posted on July 2, 2013 by
Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer

It is unfortunate that no one has gotten around to translating Michel Foucault’s 1966 review of the French translation of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophie der Aufklärung.1 Granted, it is a short text and – prior to its reprinting in Foucault’s Dits et Ecrits – finding it required some (though not much) digging. But it is a text worth knowing: sensitive to the political context of Cassirer’s study of the Enlightenment and sympathetic to his general approach. Had it been more widely known, it might have complicated certain assumptions about Foucault’s stance towards the Enlightenment. All of this is more than enough to suggest that the editor of What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions was guilty of a significant lapse in judgment when he failed to include it in his collection. The accused is not inclined contest that verdict and will try to make amends in this brief discussion of a text that deserves to be better known.

Foucault, A Counter-Enlightener?

Foucault was (and, in some quarters, still is) viewed as a critic and perhaps an outright enemy of the Enlightenment. In his 1980 Adorno Prize lecture Jürgen Habermas infamously classified him, along with Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida, as a “young conservative.”2 The political implications of the term, which initially puzzled Anglophone readers, would not have been lost on Habermas’ Frankfurt audience: it had been used to designate those Weimar “conservative revolutionaries” (including Ernst Jünger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ludwig Klages, Ernst Niekisch, Oswald Spenger, Othmar Spann, and Carl Schmitt) who, drawing on an unstable mixture of cultural pessimism and biologistic vitalism, mounted an attack on liberalism that valorized myth, violence, and actionism and provided intellectual support for National Socialism. 3

Once Habermas had the opportunity to meet Foucault, he tempered his rhetoric. But though he no longer implied that Foucault was a proto-Fascist, he continued to have reservations about what he saw as Foucault’s Nietzschean-inspired tendency to reduce all moral valuations to questions of aesthetic taste. Hewing closely to Habermas’ general argument, Richard Wolin placed Foucault among the latter-day members of the “Counter-Enlightenment.”4 Foucault also figures in Graeme Garrard’s Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth-Century to the Present (despite my general reservations about Berlin’s misguided notion, Garrard’s use of the plural is encouraging: if, as J. G. A. Pocock has emphasized, there are a variety of enlightenments, then it follows that there ought to be a diversity of counter-enlightenments).5 Finally, Foucault puts in a brief appearance in Vincent Descombes’ Barometer of Modern Reason – though Descombes’ charge that Foucault’s political positions demonstrate the same hypocrisy that Reinhart Koselleck sees as fundamental to the Enlightenment would appear to make Foucault a disciple of the Enlightenment, rather than a critic.6 The list could easily be extended, but without much profit.

Foucault, A Kantian?

Matters became much more confusing when, shortly before his death, Foucault began to invoke Kant’s essay on the question “What is Enlightenment?” and eventually went so far as to suggest that he thought what he was doing had something in common both with the work of the Frankfurt School and with Kant.7 This left Habermas to wonder how “Foucault’s self-understanding as a thinker in the tradition of the Enlightenment can be compatible with his unmistakable critique of precisely this form of knowledge, which is that of modernity?”8

He conjectured that Foucault, having recognized that he was caught in a contradiction (a contradiction that Habermas had himself diagnosed in his lectures on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), had been driven to reassess his position.

Only complex thought produces instructive contradictions. Kant became entangled in an instructive contradiction of this kind when he explained revolutionary enthusiasm as a historical sign that allow an intelligible disposition in the human race to appear within the phenomenal world. Equally instructive is the contradiction in which Foucault becomes entangled when he opposes his critique of power, disabled by the relevance of the contemporary moment, to the analytic of the true in such a way that the former is deprived of the normative standard it would have to derive from the latter. Perhaps it is the force or this contradiction that drew Foucault, in this last of his texts, back into a sphere of influence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of modernity.9

This conjecture, as John Rajchman argued, is premised on Foucault’s actually attempting to do what Habermas claimed he was attempting to do and failing to do it.  This overlooks the possibility that Foucault was simply doing something else.10 Rajchman’s complaint has its merits: at a minimum, it might make sense to consider whether Habermas and Foucault might have been engaged in two different projects. That one project might seem more promising than the other hardly counts as evidence that the less promising project was attempting to do what the more promising one was doing, but failing.

More recently, Amy Allen has argued that those who, like Habermas, see Foucault’s final discussions of Kant as amounting to a repudiation of his earlier, more critical stance, have misinterpreted Foucault’s treatment of Kant in Les mots et les choses.11 She sees Tom Wartenberg and me as having fallen into the same error in our contribution in Michael Kelly’s collection Critique and Power.12 Her argument rests, in part, on an analysis of Foucault’s account of Kant in the unpublished introduction to his 1964 secondary thesis (a translation of Kant’s Anthropology), a work that helps to clarify the discussion of Kant in Les mots et les choses.13 Foucault’s review of Cassirer (which Allen does not discuss) would also seem to lend support to what I take to be the general thrust of her argument.

Foucault’s Cassirer

Foucault’s discussion begins by noting that, though Cassirer’s study of the Enlightenment dates from the 1930s, it is very much a work of our own time, provided we learn how to hear its message through the “background noise” that it sought to oppose, but which quickly engulfed it. He goes on to clarify this enigmatic claim by discussing the particular historical circumstances in which the book was published – “the Nazis stood at the gates of the Chancellery” – and to note Cassirer’s subsequent flight to Sweden (where Foucault also spent some time in the 1950s). Fleeing Germany, Cassirer left behind a “vast scholarly work” that, in reality, was a “manifesto.” Lest readers underestimate the significance of Cassirer’s gesture, Foucault goes on to stress the importance of the German university system in shaping the “moral conscience” of the nation: 1933 marks what he sees as an “irreparable defeat” in this effort and Cassirer’s study played an honorable role in the “final combat.”

At this point, the review shifts its focus in a way that makes the relevance of Cassirer’s study for Foucault’s own work abundantly clear. What is at stake is the implication of the almost hackneyed characterization of Cassirer as a “neo-Kantian.” For Foucault, this familiar term amounts to something more than the name of a school of thought. Instead it signifies

the inability of Western thought to overcome the break (coupure) effected by Kant; neo-Kantianism (in this sense, we are all neo-Kantians) is the ever-repeated injunction to reiterate this break – both to recover its necessity and to take its measure.

Cassirer’s study of the Enlightenment matters for Foucault, then, because in contrast to his other works it grapples with historical, rather than epistemological, questions, with those “fatalities of reflection and of knowledge” that Kant made possible and which have gone on to become fundamental for the constitution of modern thought.

Interrogation doubles back on itself: Kant asked how science could be possible, Cassirer asked how this Kantianism to which we appear to belong was possible.

This is, in many respects, a familiar, and not always charitable, way of reading Cassirer’s study: as Quentin Skinner once quipped, the book reads as if the entire Enlightenment had been struggling to make Kant possible. But, for Foucault, the proleptic character of Philosophy of the Enlightenment is not a weakness: it is the source of the book’s importance.

Medusa, Nietzsche, and Other Monstrosities

Kantianism, Foucault argues, stands as “the Medusa of western thought”: the modern medusa_10701_mdworld was born at the close of the eighteenth-century with the release of what he characterizes as a “double nostalgia”. The eighteenth-century closes with both a renewed nostalgia for the Greek world and a nostalgia for the certainties of the eighteenth century itself. The former gave rise to a series of reflections on the Hellenic legacy that runs from Hölderlin to Heidegger. The latter spawned the regime of the modern Aufklärer (a word that, like Aufklärung itself, Foucault consistently left in German), which runs “from Marx to Levi-Strauss.” Nietzsche – a “monstrosity” (in the sense in which the term was used in eighteenth-century natural philosophy) – belongs to both camps. This means that what Habermas would later dub the “philosophical discourse of modernity” was, for Foucault, defined by a fundamental dilemma:

Being Greek or Aufklärer, on the side of tragedy or the Encyclopédie, on the side of poetry or the well-made language, the side of the morning of being or the noon of representation, that is the dilemma that modern thought … could never escape.

In this reckoning Cassirer, of course, belongs to the party of the Aufklärer and there is an understandable tendency to assume that Foucault belongs with the Greeks. After all, he prefaced Folie et Déraison with the announcement that this massive and complex study would be:

only the first, and probably the easiest, in this long line of enquiry which, beneath the sun of the great Nietzschean quest, would confront the dialectics of history with the immobile structures of the tragic.

But it might be better to see Foucault, like Nietzsche, as a “monstrosity” with feet in both camps. Or, to dispense with the metaphors and speak more plainly (a skill that, as his lectures at the Collège de France demonstrate, Foucault would later master), confronting the “dialectics of history” with “the immobile structure of the tragic” is not necessarily the same thing as opting for the one instead of the other. The value of such confrontations may lie in their helping us to understand those things that escape the necessarily limited perspectives of the contestants.

With Cassirer, Contra Hazard, and Perhaps Alongside Habermas

Paul Hazard

Paul Hazard

For Foucault, then, what Cassirer was offering represented a useful corrective to the French tendency to accord too much prestige to psychology. Their approach to cultures and systems of thought was captive to the metaphor of “the individual,” with the result that epochs and civilizations were assumed to be individual subjects writ large:

an ‘age’ (siècle) has, like everything else, consciousness, opinions, anxieties, aspirations; Paul Hazard, in Cassirer’s time, described the crisis of the European consciousness.

Cassirer, in constrast, worked according to what Foucault characterized as a “fundamental abstraction.” He dispensed with any discussion of individual motivations, biographical accidents, and minor thinkers and, at the same time, suspended any discussion of economic and social determinants. This left him with “an inextricable web of discourse and thought, of concepts and words, of énoncés and affirmations,” which he then proceeded to analyze “in its own configuration.” His object of study was an “autonomous universe of ‘discours-pensée‘” that “isolates from all other histories the autonomous space of ‘the theoretical’.” In this way, Cassirer uncovered “a history that had remained silent.”

In studying the texts of the eighteenth century, Cassirer grasped, in the unity of its historical forms, the organization of the “discours-pensé” that characterizes a culture, defining the forms of its knowledge.

In short, the author of Les mots et les choses appears to have felt that the author of Die Philosophie der Aufklärung was very much a kindred spirit:  both were attempting to understand how cultures were shaped by an a priori that was historical, rather than transcendental.

While granting that Cassirer’s approach — particularly in the emphasis that it placed on philosophy — still betrayed the lingering influence of the “traditional history of ideas” (a problem that Foucault would attempt to remedy in his Archaeology of Knowledge), Foucault nevertheless saw it as an approach that might serve as a model for current work, and not just because it avoided the use of concepts such as “the concrete,” “lived experience,” and “totality” — all of which belonged, in Foucault’s view, to “the realm of not-knowing.” What he saw Cassirer as providing was an account of the Enlightenment that did not limit it, as had been the tradition, to England and France and which steadfastly refused to play the game of looking “for missing pieces and warning signs of the future.” The great achievement of The Philosophy of the Enlightenment was to have

restored the simultaneity and generality of all that was contemporary in the eighteenth century: atheism and deism, materialism and metaphysics, conception of morality and of beauty, multiple theories of morality and of the state, and shows how they belong together.

In the work of Cassirer, that great Kantian, Foucault found an understanding of the Enlightenment that might profitably have been brought into confrontation with the account of the “Project of Enlightenment” that Jürgen Habermas, marrying Kant and Max Weber, would sketch in the same lecture in which he misidentified Foucault as a “young conservative.” Fortunately, they would later discover that they had a good deal in common, including an interest in Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” Sadly their discussion of this question would never take place.

  1. Foucault, “Une histoire restée muette,” La Quinzaine littéraire n° 8, 1er-15 juillet, 1966, pp. 3- 4. ↩
  2. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity:  An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’ Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 38–55. ↩
  3. For discussions of the concept, see Hans-Jurgen Puhle, “Conservatism in Modern German History,” Journal of Contemporary History 13, no. 4 (October 1978): 709-10 and Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) 154-5. ↩
  4. Wolin’s most extensive account of Foucault is in his The Terms of Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). He also figures, in passing, in Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, which is launched by an Introduction that carries the title, “Answer to the Question: What is Counter-Enlightenment?” – as far as I can see, it doesn’t appear to give an answer. ↩
  5. Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). ↩
  6. Vincent Descombes, The Barometer of Modern Reason (New York: Oxford, 1993) 37-40. ↩
  7. The relevant texts have been collected in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997). ↩
  8. Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present,” in Michael Kelly, ed.. Critique and Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 152. ↩
  9. Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present” 154 . ↩
  10. John Rajchman, “Habermas’s Complaint.” New German Critique, no. 45 (1988): 163-191. I’ve attempted to elaborate this general argument in “Habermas on Foucault” in Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves, editor, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). ↩
  11. Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves : Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). ↩
  12. I’m inclined to think that Tom and I weren’t quite as guilty as she suggests: the opening two paragraphs expressing skepticism about Foucault’s “Kantianism,” like the third paragraph, which discusses Foucault’s reputation as a critic of the Enlightenment, were intended as premises that we would be criticizing. Perhaps that could have been made clearer. I should mention, though, that thanks to discussions with Manfred Kuehn I now realize that what I said about Kant and maxims on p. 306 is just wrong (this idiocy was my doing, not Tom’s). ↩
  13. Robert Louden has written a detailed critique of Foucault’s account of the Anthropology, which helps to clarify some of its misinterpretations (perhaps inevitable, given the time when it was written). It will be appearing in a Spanish translation in the journal Estudos Kantianos. One can only hope that it will be made available in English as well. ↩
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Out of Unmündigkeit – Final Thoughts on Translating Kant on Enlightenment

Posted on June 23, 2013 by

I will take my leave from this series of posts on the translation of the first sentence of Kant’s answer to the question “What is enlightenment?” with a consideration of how translators have handled Ausgang,the word that characterizes the passage out of the state of selbtsverschuldeten Unmündigkeit in which human beings have found themselves. Unlike Unmündigkeit, the Ausgang has no legal or philosophical implications. My big Langenscheidt suggests exit, way out, egress, going out, outing (in the sense of picnics), time off, end, termination, close, result, issue, outcome, upshot, starting point, outgoing, termination, outlet, mouth, debouchment, denouement, entrance, output, and a few other words.

Here is how the eleven translations I’ve been considering deal with the word.

  1. emergence
    John Richardson, in Kant, Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, Religious, and Various Philosophical Subjects (London: William Richardson: 1798-99)
  2. emerges
    Sarah Austin, Fragments from German Prose Writers (New York: Appleton, 1841)
  3. advance
    Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant translated under the author’s supervision by J. Frederick Smith (London: MacMillan & Co. 1890)
  4. leaving
    Carl Friedrich, The Philosophy of Kant, (New York: Modern Library, 1949)
  5. release
    Lewis White Beck, in Kant, On History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963)
  6. emergence
    H. B. Nisbet in H. Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
  7. emergence
    Ted Humphrey in Kant,Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1983)
  8. release
    Leo Rauch and Lieselotte Anderson, in Kant, Foundations of Ethics (Millis MA: Agora Publications 1995)
  9. exit
    James Schmidt, in What is Enlightenment? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
  10. emergence
    Mary J. Gregor, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  11. emancipation
    David Colclasure and Pauline Kleingeld, in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (New Haven, Yale 2006)

The clear favorite is “emergence”, which was first used by John Richardson, the first translator of the essay. If we include Austin’s “emerges” in our tally — Richardson’s choice was taken up in five other translations. After that, we have two uses of “release” and one for each of the others: “advance,” “leaving,” “exit,” and “emancipation.”

At first glance, it is not clear that much hangs on how the word is handled. Austin’s translation (“A man is enlightened when he emerges from a state of self-imposed pupilage”) is the most problematic of the lot, but for reasons that would appear to have little to do with her translation of Ausgang. As I mentioned in the second post in this series, her translation makes it appear as if “enlightenment” a state that one achieves, as opposed to an action that removes one from a condition (that of a selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit), but doesn’t specify the condition at which we arrive as a result of the activity known as “enlightenment.” It is worth recalling that later in the essay Kant poses the question as to whether we are now living in an “enlightened age”, to which he answers: “No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” He also, in an important discussion in §40 of the book whose title is now translated as Critique of the Power of Judgment, defined Aufklärung in terms of “not being passive with his reason but always being legislative for himself …” and then went on to explain that this “merely negative manner of thinking” was rather difficult to maintain.1 In other words, “enlightenment” is best thought of as an escape from something, rather than a particular destination.

But our understanding of how to characterize the condition at which we arrive as the result of our efforts at enlightenment may have implications for the translation of Ausgang, the term that characterizes the process that brings us to that condition. Since the opposite of Unmündigkeit is, of course Mündigkeit, we might be tempted to use that term as a way of specifying what “enlightenment” achieves. This suggests that, had Austin been consistent, she might have translated the opening sentence as “A man is enlightened when he is no longer in a state of pupilage.” But she didn’t and, indeed, couldn’t: the sort of Unmündigkeit on which enlightenment works is an Unmündigkeit that is selbstverschuldet, i.e., an “immaturity” for which the individual is in some way responsible. There are, then, a variety of different forms of “pupilage” and it is possible to leave some behind and still not be enlightened.

Kant goes on to note that the natural process of growing older removes us from our state of “natural immaturity” and thereby makes us “mature” in the natural and, perhaps, legal sense (Kant, following the legal conventions of his day, assumes that it doesn’t work that way for women). In these cases, we have achieved a state of Mündigkeit, but it is not at all clear that we are necessarily “enlightened”: Kant suggests that there are any number of adult males who are incapable of thinking for themselves. Achieving the particular state of Mündigkeit that is associated with having “achieved enlightenment” (assuming, for the moment, that this is a formulation that Kant permits) requires something more than attaining the condition of “natural majority” at which we arrive simply by checking off the required number of birthdays (few things are as passive as growing older: it’s not something we do, it’s something that happens to us). This suggests that the sort of Mündigkeit we are attempting to achieve through the process of enlightenment requires further specification. That further specification will need to take the form of a modifier that is the opposite of “selbstverschuldeten” — e.g., what we are trying to achieve would seem to be a state of maturity that we bring about, rather than one that is imposed on us by the natural process of growing older

Some Help from Habermas

HabermasWe can get a sense of the sort of word we need by taking a look at what Habermas’ translators have done. The term Mündigkeit looms large in Jürgen Habermas’ writings from the 1960s. Indeed, in a famous passage from his Frankfurt Inaugural lecture, that sketched the outlines of the argument he was to present in his book Erkenntnis und Interesse (which, for reasons that once puzzled me, was translated into English as Knowledge and Human Interests2), he stated:

The human interest in Mündigkeit is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, Mündigkeit is posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus. Mündigkeit constitutes the only Idea that we possess a priori in the sense of the philosophical tradition.3

In his translation of Knowledge and Human Interests, Jeremy Shapiro employed the phrase “autonomy and responsibility”, a few years later, John Vietel used “mature autonomy” and offered the following explanation of Mündigkeit in his Translator’s Note:

literally “majority” in the sense of “legally of age.” For Kant mankind’s “majority” is the historical goal of enlightenment (in “What is Enlightenment?”). To preserve this developmental connotation I have generally preferred “mature autonomy.4

Solutions such as these are a bit more understandable in light of the difficulties of understanding what condition we are in when we have overcome a state of “self-incurred immaturity”: it would have to be a maturity for which we were ourselves responsible, a maturity that we brought about as a result of our having the courage to think for ourselves.

What to Do About Ausgang

Because Kant does not burden the concept of Mündigkeit with these sort of considerations (the burden, instead, falls on the concept of “autonomy” itself), he did not pose quite the same problem for his translators as Habermas did for his. As a result, none of the translations we have been looking at have to come up with a way of indicating that the maturity that we arrive at through the process of enlightenment is a maturity for which we ourselves are responsible. But this issue strikes me as having significant implications for the translation of Ausgang, implications that might not have been immediately apparent to the translators (and I suppose this is as good a place as any to confess that none of this occurred to me until I started writing these posts).

800px-Cetoine_globalWhat troubles me about “emergence” is that it is too passive, a passivity that is only enhanced, in Austin’s case, by her use of “pupilage,” which set me to thinking about the pupa emerging from cocoons as butterflies: a nice image, perhaps, but not at all what Kant was after. “Release” and “emancipation” have much the same problem. We do talk about “releasing” ourselves from various external encumbrances (e.g., releasing seat-belts), but we also talk about people releasing us from certain obligations or, indeed, working with us to show us how we can free ourselves from certain impediments we might have. This does seem to be where Kant winds up when he moves on to emphasize the ways in which enlightenment is a collective undertaking, practiced by a “public.” But exploring that point (and talking about its possible tension with the opening paragraph) is beyond the limited scope of these posts, though I have touched on it in the brief discussion of Horace’s sapere aude that launched this blog and may have to revisit it in later discussions. “Emancipation” is, if anything, more problematic: unless I’m missing something (and that happens quite a bit), it is typically an act that others perform for those who have been subjugated (which explains why we need, in particular cases, to use the phrase “self-emancipation”). This leaves us with Carl Friedrich’s “leaving” and my “exit,” both of which strike me as avoiding the passivity that plague the other translations of Ausgang and convey, however weakly, the sense that enlightenment is an activity that we ourselves perform on ourselves.

Where Foucault Got it Right

Foucault5In opting for “exit” I allowed my reason to be guided by one particular discussion of Kant’s essay: that of Michel Foucault. In his Berkeley lecture on the question “What is Enlightenment?” he argued that, for Kant, the concept of Aufklärung

it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an “exit,” a “way out.”5

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, there are a few minor problems with Foucault’s interpretation of Kant’s essay. But they pale in comparison with how much he got right, which means that his lecture has much to tell us both about how to translate Ausgang and, more importantly, about how to think about the question Kant was trying to answer. And, while I’ve have (at last) finished thinking about how to translate the opening sentence of Kant’s little essay, I’m far from finished thinking about Kant’s essay. And I’ve come to think that the best account of why it is so difficult ever to be finished with thinking about the questions that Kant’s answer poses in the one that Foucault offered. I hope to say more about that in future posts.

  1. AA 5:294 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 174 ↩
  2. Tom MacCarthy once told me that the rationale for translating it this way was to stress that the “interests” that concerned Habermas were interests that were central to the reproduction of the species, as opposed to the various more specific interests that individuals may have. I suppose this makes sense, though I’ve come to wonder whether translating the title as Knowledge and Interests might have allowed English readers to see that this book was — perhaps unintentionally — inviting a contrast with several other famous books whose titles also included two nouns joined by the conjunction “and.” In any case, it’s a book that gets nowhere near enough love these days. ↩
  3. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans; Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 19 ) 314 (translation modified). ↩
  4. Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973) viii. ↩
  5. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Random House, 1984) 34. ↩
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

“Voluntary Nonage”? — Translating Kant on Enlightenment (Part 4)

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

Kant’s talents as a writer tend to be greatly underestimated. Granted, the Three Critiques are no walk in the park, but even when Kant’s prose struggles because it is forced to do rather difficult things, there are striking passages (e.g. A395-A396 in the First Critique which culminates in the image of the Pillars of Hercules). When addressing the readers of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, he was operating under a less demanding set of constraints. What is perhaps most striking here was his ability to construct formulations that succeed in fusing contradictory notions into remarkably evocative concepts. Consider, for example, “ungesellige Geselligkeit” (“unsociable sociability”) — the notion around which the argument of his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” turns.1 Or, more to the point: selbstverschultdeten Unmündigkeit, the great train wreck of syllables standing at the close of the first sentence of Kant’s answer to the question “What is enlightenment?”

It would seem that what Kant had in mind with this paradoxical formulation is clear enough: a state of what, for now, we’ll call “immaturity” for which the immature individual is responsible. But finding the right English words to render it is considerably more challenging than it might first appear (and here I should confess that I’m suspicious of the words I’ve just used in translating the phrase). Here’s how the various translations I’ve been comparing deal with Kant’s phrase:

  1. self-imposed nonage
    John Richardson, in Kant, Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, Religious, and Various Philosophical Subjects (London: William Richardson: 1798-99)
  2. self-imposed pupilage
    Sarah Austin, Fragments from German Prose Writers (New York: Appleton, 1841)
  3. voluntary immaturity
    Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant translated under the author’s supervision by J. Frederick Smith (London: MacMillan & Co. 1890)
  4. self-caused immaturity
    Carl Friedrich, The Philosophy of Kant, (New York: Modern Library, 1949)
  5. self-incurred tutelage
    Lewis White Beck, in Kant, On History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963)
  6. self-incurred immaturity
    H. B. Nisbet in H. Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1970)
  7. self-imposed immaturity
    Ted Humphrey in Kant,Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1983)
  8. self-imposed dependence
    Leo Rauch and Lieselotte Anderson, in Kant, Foundations of Ethics (Millis MA: Agora Publications 1995)
  9. self-incurred immaturity
    Schmidt, in What is Enlightenment? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
  10. self-incurred minority
    Mary J. Gregor, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  11. self-incurred immaturity
    David Colclasure and Pauline Kleingeld, in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (New Haven, Yale 2006)

There’s quite a bit of variation here, with a very thin plurality going to “self-incurred immaturity” (four out of the eleven translations). Looking at the individual words, we get the following:

  • For selbstverschuldeten: “self-incurred” (5), “self-imposed” (4), “self-caused” (1), “voluntary” (1)
  • For Unmündigkeit: “immaturity” (6), “minority” (1), “tutelage” (1), “pupilage” (1), “nonage” (1), “dependence” (1).

A Brief Sketch of Kant’s Argument

What Kant was attempting when he jammed these two words together is not all that difficult to understand. In keeping the general tenor of the opening two paragraphs, Unmündigkeit carries legal connotations, which Kant proceeds to cash out in the second paragraph of the article when he indicates that, in the normal course of events, “nature” sets individuals free from this state (he deploys the phrase “naturaliter majorennes to denote this process of coming of age). There is a discussion worth consulting in his Anthropology, which explains that Unmündigkeit designates both “minority of age” (Minderjährigkeit) and “legal or civil minority” (AA VII:208-209). His subsequent talk about “guardians” (Vormund)in the next paragraph fits neatly into the legal terminology he’s employing (sorry, Straussians, he’s not thinking about Plato here).

Following the legal sense of the term, there are two different ways of being Unmündig:

  1. All individuals below a certain age are Unmündig and will need a Vormund to represent them in any legal proceedings.
  2. There is another class of individuals who, though above the age at which the some of the individuals (i.e., many of the boys) in category 1 attain Mündigkeit, remain in a state of legal or civil Unmündigkeit and, hence, will also require a Vormund to represent them. In Kant’s day, this group would have included women as well as various categories of adult males who continue to face legal or civil disadvantages.

Kant creates a third group, and the article is concerned with them:  (3)  those whose condition of Unmündigkeit is selbstverschuldeten — which has been translated as “self-incurred,” “self-imposed,” “self-caused,” “voluntary.” As Kant goes on to explain, the individuals in this category have brought this status upon themselves through their failure to make use of their own reason, a failure that is demonstrated by their continued dependence on a Vormund long after they have ceased to be “naturally” Unmündig. Matters are considerably complicated by his using examples of a “Vormund” that go well beyond what one would expect to find in a court of law: his examples are a doctor, a clergyman, and a book.

There is more to say about what Kant is arguing but that is not my chief concern in these posts. Instead, I’m curious about the choices that those of us who have tried to put Kant into English have made and what they might tell us about how we understand the question that he was attempting to answer in his essay.

Nonage, Pupilage,Tutelage, Minority, and Immaturity

As I suggested in the first post in this series, in translating Unmündigkeit, Richardson had an advantage that all subsequent translator (with the possible exception of Austin) lacked: the word “nonage.” It fits perfectly: we depart from our nonage, we come of age, and if we stick around long enough, we enter into our dotage. These terms neatly map both the biological course of a life and the way in which our legal systems respond to it. Children need guardians to speak for them; so do the incompetent elderly.2

Austin used another word that, while not entirely lost to us, is foreign to most Americans: “pupilage.” Like nonage, the word has a good enlightenment pedigree. Locke used it in the Second Treatise  during a discussion of paternal power: “The Father might thereby punish his transgressing Children even when they were Men, and out of their Pupilage” (§105). Daniel Defoe employed it, in tandem with nonage in 1712 in his Reasons Against Fighting. Being an Enquiry Into this Great Debate, Whether it is Safe for Her Majesty, Or Her Ministry, to Venture an Engagement with the French, Considering the Present Behaviour of the Allies: 3

Will they still suppose us in our Non-age and Pupil-age, that we must be led about Blindfold, and be made Tools and Engines to the Dutch Avarice and Imperial Ambition?

The idea of being “led about” blindfolded aligns nicely with Kant’s invocation of children being placed in a “Gängelwagen” — a sort of eighteenth-century baby walker.

Austin’s formulation seems to have enjoyed a modest popularity during the nineteenth century. In 1844, Samuel Bailey quoted extensively from the translation (including the appearance of the phrase towards the end of Kant’s essay) in one of the notes for his Essays on the Pursuit of Truth and the Progress of Knowledge (261-3) and, perhaps following Austin’s lead, John Ware employed the phrase in The Philosophy of Natural History, Prepared on the Plan and Retaining Portions of the Work of WIlliam Smellie, (Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1860) (327).4 I have, however, found no use of Richardson’s “self-imposed nonage” in any of the nineteenth-century texts scanned by Google.

An Ngram comparing “pupilage” and “nonage” suggests “pupilage” had begun to become a bit more frequent than “nonage” a decade or so before  Austin’s translation appeared (but turning off the smoothing would likely complicate this picture).

Nonage&PupliageI suspect that she was unaware of Richardson’s work, but had she been considering “nonage” as a possible translation for selbstverschuldeten what might have tipped the balance in favor of “pupilage” was that the term had (and, indeed, in the UK still has5)  currency in the legal profession: it refers to a period of apprenticeship that lawyers undergo as part of their training. As the wife of the jurist and philosopher John Austin, she surely would have been quite familiar with the word. This usage, however, ought to have been a decisive reason for her to avoid using “pupilage.” There is nothing inherently contradictory or, indeed, particularly unusual about voluntarily entering into a state of pupilage. Would-be lawyers, seeking to enter the legal profession, subject themselves to the guidance of another, with the hope that they will, after this period of training, exit from this state of “voluntary pupilage.”

171px-Brian_Wilson_2009

Brian Wilson

Much of the problem with finding a suitable translation for Unmündigkeit may follow from certain problems in Kant’s argument itself.6 Perhaps the composer Brian Wilson’s relationship with the psychologist Eugene Landy, who came to control almost every aspect of Wilson’s life, counts as an example of selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit (I’ll offer some reasons why this example might not work shortly). But I would assume that my relationship with the physical therapist who is working on my shoulder doesn’t. Using “pupilage” only makes matters worse by employing a word that suggests cases that don’t seem to match up with the ones that Kant wants to highlight. In other words, if the term we pick to translate Unmündigkeit doesn’t contradict whatever it is that we are using to capture selbstverschuldeten, we’ve done a serious disservice to Kant.

The appeal of Lewis White Beck’s “tutelage” is that, unlike nonage and pupilage it is a word that is in current usage and, like them, carries the meaning of subjection to a state of “guardianship.” In principle, it also suffers from some of the same problems as pupilage. Consider this example: I enter into a tutorial relationship with a language instructor, who advises me that, if I am going to master Italian, it will be necessary for me spend a month in Italy and, while there, speak nothing but Italian. Because I want to perfect my Italian, I comply with the suggestion. It’s hard to see how this rises to the level of selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. It is possible, however, that the current use of “tutelage” has changed to the point where we no longer associate it with voluntary decisions of this sort and, instead, take it to be descriptive of a state of subjection that we could not conceive as voluntary.

Rauch and Anderson used “dependence,” which captures part of what Kant seems to have in mind, but is a bit weak in picking up the juridical connotations (though we do speak of “dependents”). The other modern translations have shuffled back and forth between “immaturity” or “minority.” “Minority” has a lot to recommend it: it is probably the closest we are going to come to Richardson’s “nonage” and, unlike “immaturity” (which I used, but which I’ve never been entirely happy with), keeps us focused on the state of being a child, rather than simply acting like one (anyone who has ever tried to chair a university department will be well aware that “voluntary immaturity” is not unfamiliar among the ranks of the professoriate). But it sounds odd to me, perhaps because of the prevalence of its use in describing voting results and the status of parties in legislatures. This may have been what led me to use “immaturity” and to resign myself to inserting a long footnote explaining what I was doing. But I would really have liked to have had “nonage” still available.

Self-incurred, self-imposed self-caused, voluntary

Hamann

J. G. Hamann

So, at last, we come to what Kant’s great critic Johann Georg Hamann dubbed the “accursed adjective”: selbstverschuldeten.7 As Hamann recognized, Kant’s initial characterization of “enlightenment” stands or falls on his ability to distinguish between a state of Unmündigkeit for which the individual is to blame and the subjection of individuals to what might be characterized as “self-appointed guardians.” To return to the unhappy (and musically catastrophic) relationship between Brian Wilson and Eugene Landry: does the fault lie with the childish composer or the devious psychologist?8 Or, to consider a practice for which we have recently gained a word: when a quite competent woman (e.g., Hilary Clinton) finds herself listening to a significantly less competent man (e.g, Ted Cruz) explaining matters about which she is already quite familiar, what we have is an example, not of selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit, but rather of mansplaining.9

Surveying our translations of Kant’s “accursed adjective” we see that “self-incurred” (5) barely beats out “self-imposed” (4), with “self-caused” (1) and “voluntary” (1) bringing up the rear. What attracted me to “self-incurred” was that it seemed to capture something of the sense of liability or guilt that selbstverschuldeten, thanks to the presence of Schuld, carries. Also, “incurred” sounded suitably legalistic. But a translator whose work I greatly admire recently pointed out to me that “incurred” is already reflexive, which makes the “self” in “self-incurred” somewhat redundant. This suggests that, in principle at least, I could have translated Kant’s phrase as “incurred immaturity.” But, of course, I couldn’t: the contemporary usage of “incurred” doesn’t, at least to my ear, refer to something that an agent is doing to itself (e.g., “incurring damages,” “incurred interest,” etc.). This, I suppose, suggests that Richardson was (as usual) on the right track with “self-imposed.” The crucial distinction in Kant’s essay, as Hamann recognized, is between the paradoxical condition of a minority, immaturity, or nonage that (1) one imposes on oneself and a similar state that is either (2) natural (i.e., actual children as opposed to childish adults) or (3) has been imposed on an individual by an other. Kant sees enlightenment as concerned with the first of these cases, rather than the second or third.

“Self-caused,” like “self-imposed” captures something of this, though it doesn’t quite capture the echoes of Schuld that I think (perhaps wrongly?) need to be conveyed. “Voluntary” also has its appeal, especially since we make distinctions in courts of law between “voluntary” and “involuntary” homicide and so on. It also suggests a link, which might be worth pondering, between Kant’s essay on the question “What is Enlightenment?” and Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire.

This leaves us with one word to discuss: Ausgang. I’ll deal with that next time and then, finally, make my Ausgang from this set of posts.

  1. For a discussion of the concept, and some thoughts on the proper translation of the term, see Allen Wood, “Kant’s Fourth Proposition: The Unsociable Sociability of Human Nature,” in Amelie Rorty and James Schmidt, eds., Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 112-128. ↩
  2. The idea of having someone speak for you in court suggests possible etymological links between Mund and Mündigkeit, but the only discussions I’ve seen of this question the connection. Any light that readers could shed on this for me would be greatly appreciated. ↩
  3. I should confess that I have a weakness for eighteenth-century titles. It’s unfortunate that we can’t still do things like this. ↩
  4. Removing the quotes around “self-imposed pupilage” turns up even more examples of the two words being used in close proximity. ↩
  5. See, for example, this discussion. ↩
  6. For a concise discussion of this issue, see Rüdiger Bittner, “What is Enlightenment?,” in Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment?345-358. ↩
  7. J. G. Hamann, “Letter to Christian Jacob Krauss,” translated by Garrett Green in Schmidt, ed. What is Enlightenment?” 146. ↩
  8. I suspect that most readers are less bothered than I am by the absence of a more effective bridge in “Love and Mercy” (one of Wilson’s better later efforts). Irrationally, I place all the blame for this on Landry. ↩
  9. I’m indebted to CJ Pascoe for pointing this out. ↩
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Whose Buttock? Which Enlightenment? – Thoughts on Anthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters

Posted on June 12, 2013 by

PagdenAnthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House, 2013) is perhaps the most ambitious account of the period published by a major commercial press since Peter Gay’s two-volume survey from the 1960s. Like Gay, Pagden’s aim is to demonstrate the ways in which the Enlightenment made Europeans modern. And, in keeping with the current emphasis on global history, Pagden shows how Europeans became modern by learning what it was that they shared with the rest of the world. As a result, his book devotes considerably more attention than Gay did to the role of modern natural law theories in the development of the Enlightenment and features a fine discussion of the ways in which the attempt to articulate the “science of man” implied by these theories was informed by and tested against the strange peoples and stranger customs that voyagers across the Pacific encountered. And where Gay’s account culminated in an examination of the ways in which the Enlightenment inspired the creation of a republican government on the North American continent, Pagden traces the legacy of the Enlightenment down to the present, arguing that

although the central Enlightenment belief in a common humanity, the awareness of belonging to some world larger than the community, family, parish, or patria, may still be shakily primitive and incomplete, it is also indubitably a great deal more present in all our lives — whoever “we” might be — than it was even fifty years ago. “Global governance,” “Constitutional Patriotism,” globalization, multiculturalism are not only topics of debate; they are also, in many parts of the world, realities. Cosmopolitanism, expressed as a firm belief in the possibility of a truly international system of laws, has been the animating principle behind both the League of Nations and the United Nations and is the main assumption that underlies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (413).

We are, he concludes,

inescapably, the heirs of the architects of the Enlightenment ‘science of man.'” For this, then, if for no other reason, the Enlightenment still matters (415).

In the face such an ambitious, informed, and energetic account of the Enlightenment it is perhaps pedantic to note that the book has a minor problem: it misplaces a buttock.1

On the Displaced Buttock

Recounting the sufferings inflicted on the protagonists of Voltaire’s Candide, Pagden observes,

Pangloss, his face half eaten away by syphilis, one buttock cut off, insists that, all appearances to the contrary, this world is nonetheless the ‘best of all possible worlds’ … (114).

He’s is right about Doctor Pangloss’s unflagging optimism and unrelenting syphilis. The lessons in “experimental physics” performed on the “very pretty and very pliable” servant girl by Pangloss’s “sufficient reason” (and let us pause here to ask: has anyone other than Voltaire ever used a philosophical concept as a euphemism for the male member?) result CandideOrientalismin his contracting a disease whose genealogy he traces and necessity he demonstrates. But Pagden is mistaken about the fate of Pangloss’s buttocks: at the end of the book, he still has both of them. On the other hand, the Old Lady had one of hers removed (and eaten) by besieged (and starving) Janissaries.

Given all that is going on in Candide, it is understandable that Pagden might lose track of a buttock. Catastrophes pile upon catastrophes and, in the larger scheme of things, the Old Lady’s loss, though obviously important to her, seems but a trifle. Things like this happen with appalling frequency in Candide: the slave that Candide and Cacambo meet in Surinam has lost both his left leg and his right hand (such, after all, is the price of sugar) and Cunégonde is gang-raped and disemboweled (though, somehow, not fatally) by Bulgar troops. The sufferings Candide witnesses would be unbearable were it not for the madcap rapidity with which Voltaire recounts them. The book reads like an attempt to imagine how the world might appear to an Angel of History wasted on amphetamines.

CandideJourney-1dappv1Like Candide, Pagden has a lot of ground to cover and, even though he has 400 pages to cover it, he needs to move rather quickly. Things are not made any easier by his having taken on the additional burden of not only providing an account of the Enlightenment, but explaining “why it still matters.” In that regard, Gay had it easier: Knopf gave him two volumes to explain what the Enlightenment was and, having completed that task, he went on to explore why it mattered in The Bridge of Criticism (a book that has remained out of print for far too long: reprint, please!). Gay also had the advantage of writing at a time when the field of eighteenth-century studies was, at least in retrospect, still in its infancy. We know a lot more about the Enlightenment now than we did in 1969, which makes Pagden’s achievement all the more impressive.

Why it Might Not be Such a Good Thing that the Enlightenment Still Matters

Gay began his first volume by (1) noting that the Enlightenment had no shortage of critics, (2) confessing that he’d enjoyed the “polemics” in which he’d been engaged while defending it from its conservative critics, and (3) suggesting that it was time “to move from polemics to synthesis.” Fat chance: when it comes to the Enlightenment, it’s always Ground Hog’s Day and every historian is Bill Murray. There would seem to be a fair number of people (not all of them on the Right) who are quite convinced that the Enlightenment surely does matter. Unfortunately, some of them have only the faintest understanding of what it actually involved.

For example, about a week after The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters appeared, Penny Nance, the President and CEO of the conservative Christian organization “Concerned Women for America” turned up on the Fox News channel and (as I discussed in an earlier post) informed the Foxites that

the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust… Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.

Now, Penny Nance obviously knows considerably less about the Enlightenment than Pagden does, but she seems to be convinced that it still “matters.” She sees herself (or, at the very least, does a good job of making it appear as if she sees herself) as confronting a world that has been laid waste by an Enlightenment that, persistently and relentlessly, keeps on mattering. There is, then, one tiny point on which Nance and Pagden might agree: after some two and a half centuries, the Enlightenment still matters.

And there would seem to have a further point of agreement. Pagden’s aim is to trace how a set of ideas, born in the latter part of the seventeenth century, went on to transform

the most significant, most lasting insights available to the western philosophical tradition in such a way as to make them usable in a world from which God had been finally and irrevocably removed ….

In doing so, the Enlightenment “created the modern world”: it is “impossible to imagine any aspect of contemporary life in the West without it” (408). What Pagden sees the Enlightenment as having achieved is the very same thing that enables Nance to serve as President and CEO of a (tax-exempt?) organization devoted to undoing what the Enlightenment was allegedly trying to do: namely, creating a world in which God is no longer part of “the equation.” Their disagreement lies with whether the Enlightenment’s continuing to matter is a good thing. My reservations have to do with whether this “still mattering” business is a good thing — it might be nice if those of us who work on the Enlightenment could live the sort of quiet life lived by my colleagues in Classics, who study things that, while certainly interesting, are unlikely to turn up on Fox News.

While Nance is convinced that the Enlightenment was bent on removing God from “the equation,” there has been a fair amount of recent scholarship stressing the need to get Him back into the Enlightenment: consider, for example, the fine work that has been done by David Sorkin, Johathan Sheehan, Peter Harrison, Michael Printy, and others.2 Pagden is too good a historian to be unaware of the persistence of various forms of religious belief — many of them interesting, most of them utterly irrelevant for the present 3— during the Enlightenment or of the significant role of clergy, especially in Protestant Europe, in the circulation of enlightened ideas (it is, for example, perhaps significant that clergymen were well represented in the Mittwochsgesellschaft, the Berlin society of “Friends of Enlightenment” responsible for publishing the Berlinische Monatsschrift, an “enlightened” journal that periodically included sermons in its offerings). But The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters tends to marginalize such matters.

Pagden notes that Hobbes insisted he was not an atheist, but then goes on to assure the reader that he “most probably was” (97).4 He grants that were few thinkers “who were 205px-Granville_Sharp_(Hoare_memoire)prepared to contemplate Smith’s ‘fatherless world’ entirely without flinching” (125), but he doesn’t have much to say about the flinchers: the Enlightenment whose history he is tracing does appear to involve them. In a discussion of Granville Sharp, the great opponent of the slave trade, he notes that “For all his devout Christianity, Sharp was as sincere a believer in equal rights for men and women as he was in equality between the races …” (228), thus implying that religious faith was an impediment to a belief in human rights. Likewise, we are told that “the Spanish Benedictine Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, who despite his profession and undoubted faith was in this respects (sic), as in many others, one of the most “enlightened” minds of the early eighteenth century … (265),” which suggests that Pagden assumes that, during the eighteenth century, faith and enlightenment were necessarily antithetical (and also suggests that Random House really needs to hire a few more proofreaders). Not the least of the problems with people like Penny Nance is that they have the capacity to make it seem as if Jonathan Israel’s “Radical Enlightenment” was the only Enlightenment that mattered.

Pagden contra MacIntyre

The prevalence of opinions of the sort that Nance was peddling on Fox helps to explain 178px-Alasdair_MacIntyrewhy Pagden found it necessary to begin his book with a brief discussion of critics of “the Enlightenment project” (16-20) and end it with a chapter on “Enlightenment and its Enemies” (373-415). Fortunately, he has abler critics than Nance with whom to argue: Alasdair MacIntyre plays a leading role in both discussions. Unfortunately, Pagden tends to minimize the differences between MacIntyre (who has some important points to make) and Jean-François Lyotard (who, as far as I can tell, doesn’t).

Pagden credits MacIntyre with having coined the “much-quoted and much abused phrase ‘the Enlightenment project'” (16) — as I’ve suggested in an earlier post, it’s not clear that this is true — and MacIntyre’s “extreme” and “historically eccentric” account of the Enlightenment (397) serves as the perfect foil for Pagden’s closing defense of his particular version of the Enlightenment. For Pagden, the great achievement of the Enlightenment was that it “made it possible for us to think … beyond the narrow worlds into which we are born, to think globally” (408). MacIntyre’s characterization of human beings as homo fabulans — creatures who tell stories — and his argument that our moral sensibilities are “essentially narrative ones” make him seem the very model of the modern counter-Enlightener.

Because the “moral sensibilities” of MacIntyre’s homo fabulans are “essentially narrative ones,”

the stories he tells are not about “humanity” or the cosmos, because although both may, in some sense, be said to have stories, none of them are very pertinent or compelling ones (398).

In other words, if MacIntyre is right, then stories we tell will deal with matters that are local, rather than global (398). Locked into these local narratives, we will be incapable of cultivating those cosmopolitan perspectives that allow us to understand other societies.

For in a world conceived in the way MacIntyre, and many other communitarians, conceive it, justice cannot possibly be “global,” because justice, too, can only ever be a matter of agreement among the members of the tribe, community, nation, and so on to which it applies. MacIntyre’s conception of humans as storytelling animals, and of human social lives as structured by narratives, is also the source of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s critique of what he calls the “cosmopolitical” (400).

With this peculiar coupling of MacIntyre and Lyotard, I fear that The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters jumps the shark. In rapid succession we are told that the line of argument that Lyotard takes over from MacIntyre means that

When confronted with child marriage, slavery, castration, all I can do is stand aside and say, “I have no language with which I can describe, let alone judge, such behavior.” (401)

Which means that:

The true communitarian cannot, therefore, adequately explain how slavery, forced marriages, bearbaiting, or public executions ever came to be considered distasteful (402).

It is possible that Lyotard believes this sort of stuff, but MacIntyre doesn’t.

At the risk of picking nits, it is worth remembering that, though MacIntyre bears some (though, as I’ve suggested, not all) of the credit or blame for popularizing the term “Enlightenment project,” his concern in After Virtue was with one rather specific Enlightenment project. Chapter 5 of After Virtue is entitled”Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail.” Every subsequent right header in the chapter carries the title “Why the Enlightenment Project Had to Fail.” Nitpickers like me think this is a difference worth emphasizing. After Virtue is not suggesting that the Enlightenment somehow eradicated our ability to praise or to damn various practices. From the very start, MacIntyre makes it clear that we continue to employ moral terms. But we are, he insists, incapable of justifying the ways in which we use these terms. He argues that the alleged failure of the Enlightenment to provide a convincing justification of the moral distinctions that we continue to employ explains why our use of moral terms resembles the description of moral evaluation that emotivists provide. In hopes of providing a better account of how we might justify our use of value terms, he proposes that we go back to Aristotle and see how moral philosophy was once situated in a more ambitious account of virtues and practices.

There may be much that is problematic here and MacIntyre has been quite forthright in responding to his critics and in attempting to elaborate, in a variety of ways, the implications of his critique of the various projects that defined the Enlightenment.5 There is much here that friends of the Enlightenment may want to question (including, perhaps, the idea that “the Enlightenment” is the sort of thing that is amenable to “justification”). But nothing in what MacIntyre argues implies that he is incapable of explaining how slavery came to be seen as “distasteful,” much less that our “local narratives” are somehow unable to talk about “global” concerns. To conclude that, one would have to think that our languages are prison houses or windowless monads. Perhaps Jean-François Lyotard thinks they are.  MacIntyre doesn’t.

Back to the Buttock

In the introduction to his translation of Candide, David Wootton offers a brilliant discussion of the significance of the Old Lady in Voltaire’s tale.6 He argues that it is the story of her sufferings, which she recounts as Candide and his friends begin their voyage to the New World, that begins to free Candide from Pangloss’s incessant optimism and TitlePagetempers his beloved Cunégonde’s despair. As the characters begin to tell their stories, Voltaire’s sendup of “every tired convention of contemporary romances” is transformed into “a book about the educative and therapeutic power of storytelling.” The lesson of Candide, Wootton argues, is that most of the ways that we “talk about metaphysics, even about politics, is … worthless.” Pangloss exemplifies an enlightenment that, having managed to explain everything, winds up teaching us nothing. But in writing Candide, Voltaire discovered another way to talk about politics: he would learn “to tell stories of personal disaster,” stories “which inspired sympathy and indignation.”

Several years ago, I persuaded those who administer my university’s Core Curriculum to include Candide in the section of the humanities sequence that (briefly) considers the Enlightenment. After the book was added, a somewhat puzzled colleague who teaches in the Core asked me, “Is Candide an “Enlightenment” text?” Sensing that I was in for a strange conversation, I responded “Yes.”  He looked puzzled and then muttered, “It sure doesn’t seem like one.” All I could say was, “Well, I suppose a lot depends on what you mean by “enlightenment.”7

The sort of enlightenment in which Voltaire was engaged is rather different from the Enlightenment that Pagden presents. Pagden maintains that the cosmopolitan values that “most educated people, at least in the West, broadly accept” (407) are the result of a search for “a scientifically grounded set of premises for a universal law” on which “all reasonable, rational human beings could agree, no matter what their religious beliefs or national allegiances” (340). In this story, Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Wolff, Emer de Vattel, and Immanuel Kant take the lead. Voltaire figures in it as well, but mostly for his battles against religious dogma than for his 1770 tract On Perpetual Peace, which — in contrast to Kant’s more famous treatise on the topic — was concerned with religious toleration rather than cosmopolitan rights.

For Pagden’s critique of MacIntyre to work it is not enough to trace the ways in which the ideas of the various natural law theorists who loom so large in his account came to be appropriated by “an international intellectual elite, much like the kind constituted by the higher echelons of the academic world today” (323).8 MacIntyre is well aware that cosmopolitan elites — both in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries — make use of a vocabulary in which “cosmopolitan rights” play a prominent role. His concern with such expressions is philosophical, not historical. His question is not whether these concepts have won out over their rivals but, instead, whether they deserved to win: that is, whether the heirs of Pufendorf, Wolff, Vattel, and Kant have been any more successful in providing compelling ways of justifying these rights than their eighteenth-century predecessors (who, it should be noted, tried to do this a number of conflicting ways).

My interest, on the other hand, is more historical than philosophical. It’s not at all clear to me that approaches like the one that Voltaire was taking in Candide (a phenomenally successful little book) were of less importance in making the modern world less brutal than it might have been than the approach taken by the spinners of those grand cosmopolitan narratives. After all, Pangloss was nothing if not cosmopolitan:  he was a disciple of Leibniz and Wolff.

Voltaire, as Wootton stresses, tended to focus on particular abuses — for example, his struggle to clear the name of the persecuted Huguenot Jean Calas and his long campaign against judicial torture. When compared to an “Enlightenment project” that marches from Pufendorf through Kant and onward to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Union, this obsession with specific outrages may, like the Old Lady’s concern for her missing buttock, seem rather parochial. But what MacIntyre and some of the other alleged “enemies of the Enlightenment” are suggesting is that explaining why various evils are, indeed, evil by deducing them from “a scientifically grounded set” of cosmopolitan principles may not be the only — or even the most effective — way of coming to see them as wrong.

Let’s close with this: In the Second Treatise, John Locke marshaled the standard natural law arguments against slavery, yet continued to serve the slave-holding Candide19proprietors of the Colony of Carolina.9 And, as Pagden is well aware, the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) — though not particularly well-versed in natural law theories (and, even more inconveniently, an enthusiastic Methodist) — proved to be a uniquely effective opponent of slave trade. Friends of the Enlightenment are lucky to have enemies like MacIntyre: they help us to understand the diversity of enlightenments that have mattered.

On the other hand, I could easily do without Penny Nance.

  1. There is also an odd collision on p. 376 between the names of Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk (Kant’s disciple) and Arthur Hirsh (who translated Tieftrunk’s essay for my What is Enlightenment? collection) that results in the creation of a pupil of Kant’s named “Johann Heinrich Hirsch.” ↩
  2. David Sorkin. The Religious Enlightenment : Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, Jonathan Sheehan. The Enlightenment Bible : Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, Peter Harrison. “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, and Michael Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ↩
  3. Time for my favorite story about Deists, which I posted to the 18th Century Discussion list back in August 2001 (i.e., a month before the World as We Know It was — temporarily? — suspended):One of the more peculiar road-side attractions in New England is the Traveler Book Restaurant, just over the Connecticut line from the Mass Turnpike in Union, Connecticut.  The first floor of the restaurant looks like it might have escaped from Twin Peaks (notty pine on the walls and lots of good pies in the kitchen).  Downstairs in the basement there’s a used book store, usually staffed by charming older women, who carefully hand-total every order and keep watch on the inventory.  …The book theme is carried over into the restaurant in two ways:  1) everyone who eats there gets to pick a free book from some special stacks in the entryway (I scooped up a copy of The Leopard) and 2) the walls are plastered with little shrines to authors (Steven King, Jackie Collins, Judy Blum, etc.) that, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the restaurant has decided to honor with a picture, a bibliographical note, a bibliography, and — usually — a letter to the restaurant from the author.After a long drive from the Philadelphia area, I found myself seated underneath Doctor Seuss while, on the opposite side of the table, my son was under the shrine to John Toland.  “Who’s John Toland?” he asked, and I explained that there were two of them:  the great Deist and the twentieth-century historian of Germany.  From the biography and the letter, it was clear that it was the latter who was being honored, but my son noted a problem in the bibliography:  the historian  Toland was being credited, not only with a biography of Hitler and various books on Germany, but with “Christianity Not Mysterious,” “Letters to Serena,” “Pantheisticon,” and so forth.  So, at the end of the meal, as the pies were being cleared away and the waitress asked how everything was, I explained that while the meal was fine, there were problems with John Toland’s bibliography.  She listened attentively as I explained their confusion of the two Tolands (probably more attentively than I deserved — driving too much for too long can make one rave a bit) and then she commented, “It’s amazing no one caught this before.” This allowed me to deliver a line that, as it escaped my mouth, struck me as something that one could spend a life-time waiting to get the chance to say:  “Well, I guess you don’t get many Deists in these parts.” ↩
  4. For a good attempt to sort out Hobbes’ religious beliefs, see Richard Tuck,  “The Christian Atheism of Thomas Hobbes.” In Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by Michael Hunter and David Wootton. Oxford University Press, 1992. ↩
  5. The attempt that is most relevant for my own work is his 1995 essay, “Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered,” now available his Selected Essays, Volume 2, 172-185. in ↩
  6. Voltaire, Candide and Related Texts translated, with an Introduction, by David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000) xx-xxiii. ↩
  7. The nice thing about talking with colleagues is that I didn’t have to worry about whether to capitalize “Enlightenment”; I hear that Jacques Derrida wrote something about this. ↩
  8. I’ve pondered whether it is fair to quote this passage, which I suspect is something that, viewed out of context, comes off as a bit smug. For reasons I can’t entirely explain, the sort of cosmopolitanism Pagden winds up defending strikes me as somewhat off-putting. Perhaps I’ve been corrupted by MacIntyre. Or maybe it’s that I always fly in coach. ↩
  9. David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government’.” Political Theory 32:5 (2004): 602–627. ↩
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Making Sense of “Aufklärung” – Translating Kant, Part III

Posted on June 9, 2013 by

I began this series of posts more or less as a lark, thinking that I’d look at how my fellow translators of Kant’s response to the question “What is enlightenment?” handled the opening sentence. But this exercise turned out to be both less interesting and more interesting than I’d thought. The differences between the eight twentieth-century translations that I located are relatively minor: while there are bones to be picked about how this or that translator dealt with one or another of the words, I’m not sure this really amounts to much (except, possibly, the disagreements on what to do with the word Ausgang). What was considerably more interesting, at least for me, were the three earliest translations, which differ quite markedly.

Here, once again, are the first three translations of Kant’s opening sentence on my list:

  1. Enlightening is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. John Richardson, in Kant, Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, Religious, and Various Philosophical Subjects (London: William Richardson: 1798-99)
  2. A man is enlightened when he emerges from a state of self-imposed pupilage. Sarah Austin, Fragments from German Prose Writers (New York: Appleton, 1841)
  3. “Free Thought,” says Kant, “is the advance of man beyond the state of voluntary immaturity.” Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant translated under the author’s supervision by J. Frederick Smith (London: MacMillan & Co. 1890)

It seems to me that the differences here are of greater import than the variations in the later translations and also help fill in some of the gaps in my earlier research on Anglophone struggles to figure out just what it was that the Germans meant by “Aufklärung.”

For twentieth-century translators, it is obvious that “Aufklärung” should be translated as “enlightenment”  — indeed, at this point, it is difficult to think that it could be translated any other way. And there is also an almost irresistible tendency to assume that Kant’s answer can be read as an attempt to define the features of the historical period that we call “the Enlightenment.” This explains why Kant’s essay is almost always cited, if only in passing, at the start of almost every general account of the Enlightenment. What has tended, at least until relatively recently, to receive less attention are the circumstances of Kant’s writing the essay and what lessons might be drawn from them.1 The most important point to make about that context was that the essay was written as part of an attempt to clarify the features of a set of activities whose general character was far from obvious, both to the those whose asked and to those who answered the question “What is enlightenment?” In brief: this was an attempt to clarify a process, rather than define a period.

For much of the nineteenth century, translators were less than clear what the term Aufklärung designated. Richardson, working at a time when it was possible to find occasional essays still trying to explain what Aufklärung involved (the discussion dragged on into the early nineteenth century), correctly assumed that Kant used the word to refer to a process in which one was engaged: “enlightening” (i.e., clearing things up). But, by the middle of the century, Austin turned it into a condition that someone might attain (“A man is enlightened when …”) and, in the footnote I discussed in a previous post, suggested an alternative title for the essay that dispensed with the “very awkward word” Aufklärung altogether: “A plea for the liberty of philosophizing.” Finally, towards the close of the century, J. Frederick Smith decided that Aufklärung was a “terminus technicus that might best be rendered by pressing an English term from the early eighteenth century into service: “Free Thought.”

Two decades later, the following discussion of Kant’s essay appeared in Edward Caldwell Moore’s Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant (London: Duckworth, 1912):

In 1784 Kant wrote a tractate entitled, Was ist Aufklärung? He said: “Aufklärung is the advance of man beyond the stage of voluntary immaturity” (25).

Moore was not unique in opting not to attempt a translation of Aufklärung at all: during the latter half of the nineteenth century this practice had the enthusiastic support of James Hutchinson Sterling, the author of the The Secret of Hegel and the subject of a number of previous posts on this blog. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, he insisted that Aufklärung was one of those German terms that was best left untranslated since it referred to something for which there was no precise English equivalent.

In the face of the Kant translations done by Richardson and Austin, Stirling’s claim seems quite peculiar, but it appears to have enjoyed some support among English translators of Hegel’s works. It is not until Baillie’s 1910 translation of the Phenomenology that “enlightenment” appeared as a translation for Aufklärung in a translation of one of Hegel’s works and the practice in translations of German histories of philosophy was to use such terms as “the Illumination” (and, in a few cases, the “Uplighting”) or simply to leave it untranslated.

What, then, explains why Richardson’s perfectly serviceable translation of Aufklärung (or, for that matter, Austin’s somewhat more problematic one) was ignored by these later translators? It’s possible that later translators were simply unaware of the Richardson and Austin translations. But the explanation may also rest with their assuming —  correctly, I think — that the term Aufklärung carried a different set of connotations in the works they were translating than it did in the text from Kant. As employed in Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy (and on the philosophy of history) and in those German histories of philosophy that he inspired, Aufklärung was used to refer to an historical period that was now complete, rather than a process in which one might still be engaged (as was the case for Richardson) or a state that one might attain (as it was for Austin). It also mattered that was already an English word for this period: “the Illumination.” Some translators used it; others were put off by its political connotations.

Perhaps the most peculiar strategy for dealing with Aufklärung was the one adopted by John Sibree in his 1857 translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Opting to translate a German word with a French one, he explained,

There is no current term in English denoting that great intellectual movement which dates from the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and which, if not the chief cause, was certainly the guiding genius of the French Revolution. The word “Illuminati” (signifying the members of an imaginary confederacy for propagating the open secret of the day), might suggest “Illumination,” as an equivalent for the German “Aufklärung”: but the French “Éclaircissement” conveys a more specific idea.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, Sibree is a bit disingenuous. There was a “current English term” available, but he was reluctant (for the reason that he noted) to use it: “Illumination.” That he might want to avoid linking Hegel with those who embraced the idea that the French Revolution was the product of a conspiracy of Philosophes, Freemasons, and Illuminati, was understandable.  But his choice of Éclaircissement as an alternative baffled me until I tried comparing it to the other options.

An Ngram of the words Aufklärung, the Illumination, the Enlightenment, and Éclaircissement looks like this:

FourTermsThere are quite a few problems here. First (as usual) we are dealing with very few occurrences, so the fluctuations here likely amount to very little. Second, the samples that I looked at suggested that results for “the Illumination” may be distorted by such usages as “the Illumination of the Earth by the Sun.” Since the same may be true for “the Enlightenment” (e.g., “the Enlightenment of the native peoples”), I decided to try again, but subtract those phrases that continue with “of” from my searches for “the Illumination” and “the Enlightenment”. That produced a rather different looking Ngram (the usual caveat applies: small changes in small numbers of cases produce large changes):

FourTermsModified

These adjustments wipe out many of the occurrences of both “the Illumination” and “the Enlightenment,” but they do suggest that, during the 1880s, “the Enlightenment” begins to be used (admittedly, rarely) as a way of referring to an historical period (it is necessary to extend the Ngram into the first decades of the twentieth century to catch the big rise that occurs with the publication of Hibben’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Equally striking is the relative frequency of Éclaircissement vis a vis the other alternatives at the time of Sibree’s translation.

Hence, Éclaircissement‘s appeal for Sibree may have been two-fold. In addition to its freedom from the political connotations of “the Illumination,” it was a term that did much the same work as Aufklärung, but without forcing him into the clumsiness of employing a circumlocution like “the clearing up.” The fact that English readers had a certain familiarity with the term, thanks to its appearance in a number of fictional works in the early part of the century, also argued in its favor. But it is not a term that would have ever occurred to a translator of Kant’s essay. Kant, after all, was talking about something — be it a process, an accomplishment, or an historical period — that had at least some presence in Prussia. But, since the discussion of Aufklärung in Hegel’s Philosophy of History focused on France and on the role of Éclaircissement in the years before the French Revolution, Sibree might have reasoned that it was the best of a bad lot of choices.

This left translators and commentators on Kant’s essay (especially those who adopted Hegel’s general view of the concept) a bit unclear as to what to do with Aufklärung. But by the opening decade of the twentieth century it was becoming more common to see the Enlightenment as a European, rather than exclusively French, event, an event in which Kant had a role to play. Once that had become clearer, it was possible to see Kant not only as part of “the Enlightenment,” but, indeed, as the author of a text that provided one of the more powerful discussions of what the Enlightenment involved. This may explain why no twentieth-century translator has begun a translation of the opening sentence with anything other than “Enlightenment is ….”

Enough about Aufklärung: in the next installment I’ll look at the marvelously contradictory notion of “selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.”

  1. I’ve summarized some of the problems in the way the Kant essay has been used in a 2011 article in the History of European Ideas and Anthony Pagden offers a sensible account of the circumstances surround its origins at the start of his The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters (2013). ↩
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments