THE ENLIGHTENMENT THE ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORY OF AN IDEA Vincenzo Ferrone With a new afterword by the author Translated by Elisabetta Tarantino PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Originally published in Italian as Lezioni illuministiche, copyright © 2010, Giuseppe Laterza & Figli. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Marco Vigevani Agenzia Letteraria English translation is copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press The afterword to the 2015 edition is © 2015 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Detail of frontispiece of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 1772, by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost, based on an original sketch by Charles-Nicholas Cochin. Book design by Lorraine Betz Donneker. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ferrone, Vincenzo. [Lezioni illuministiche] The enlightenment : history of an idea / Vincenzo Ferrone; translated by Elisabetta Tarantino. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-691-16145-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Enlightenment. 2. Enlightenment— Historiography. I. Title. B802.F4713 2015 001.09'033—dc23 2014015233 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE Via Val d’Aposa 7—40123 Bologna—Italy [email protected]—www.seps.it This book has been composed in Minion Pro and ITC Avant Garde Gothic Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Living the Enlightenment vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvi PART I THE PHILOSOPHERS’ ENLIGHTENMENT: Thinking the Centaur 1 1 Historians and Philosophers The Peculiarity of the Enlightenment as Historical Category 3 2 Kant: Was ist Aufklärung? The Emancipation of Man through Man 7 3 Hegel The Dialectics of the Enlightenment as Modernity’s Philosophical Issue 12 4 Marx and Nietzsche The Enlightenment from Bourgeois Ideology to Will to Power 23 5 Horkheimer and Adorno The Totalitarian Face of the Dialectic of Enlightenment 30 6 Foucault The Return of the Centaur and the Death of Man 34 7 Postmodern Anti-Enlightenment Positions From the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate to Benedict XVI’s katholische Aufklärung 43 PART II THE HISTORIANS’ ENLIGHTENMENT: The Cultural Revolution of the Ancien Régime 55 8 For a Defense of Historical Knowledge Beyond the Centaur 57 9 The Epistemologia imaginabilis in Eighteenth-Century Science and Philosophy 67 10 The Enlightenment–French Revolution Paradigm Between Political Myth and Epistemological Impasse 79 11 The Twentieth Century and the Enlightenment as Historical Problem From Political History to Social and Cultural History 87 12 What Was the Enlightenment? The Humanism of the Moderns in Ancien Régime Europe 95 13 Chronology and Geography of a Cultural Revolution 120 14 Politicization and Natura naturans The Late Enlightenment Question and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime 140 AFTERWORD The Enlightenment: A Revolution of the Mind or the Ancien Régime’s Cultural Revolution? 155 NOTES 173 INDEX 203 INTRODUCTION Living the Enlightenment PARAPHRASING THE GREAT Karl Marx in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, one might say that a specter is haunting Europe: it is the specter of the Enlightenment. It looks sad and emaciated, and, though laden with honors, bears the scars of many a lost battle. However, it is undaunted and has not lost its satirical grin. In fact it has donned new clothes and continues to haunt the dreams of those who believe that the enigma of life is all encompassed within the design of a shadowy and mysterious god, rather than in the dramatic recognition of the human being’s freedom and responsibility. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, some thought that it was time to liquidate what was left of the heritage of the Enlightenment. Surely they could now, finally, lay to rest that ambitious and troublesome cultural revolution, a movement that in the course of the eighteenth century had overcome a thousand obstacles to overthrow the seemingly immutable tenets of Ancien Régime Europe. One could at last put paid to the fanciful Enlightenment notion of the emancipation of man through man, i.e., to the idea that human beings could become enfranchised by their own forces alone, including the deployment of knowledge old and new that had been facilitated by the emergence of new social groups armed with a formidable weapon: critical thought. Sapere aude—dare to know. Come of age. Do not be afraid to think with your own head. Leave aside all ancient auctoritates and the viscous conditioning of tradition. Thus wrote the normally self-controlled Immanuel Kant in a moment of rare enthusiasm in 1784, citing the Enlightenment motto. However in our day, under the disguise of modern liberals, some eminent reactionaries have even entertained the dream that it might be possible to restore all the Ancien Régime’s reassuring certainties without firing a single shot. They would all come flooding back: God’s rights (and therefore those of ecclesiastical hierarchies), inequality’s prescriptive and natural character, legal sanction for the rights of the few, the primacy of duties over rights, the clash of communities and ethnicities against any cosmopolitan or universalistic mirage. In fact, even though pain and injustice still persist and any hope of emancipation seems lost, if one peers closely into the dark clouds of our times a different picture begins to emerge. Those same epochal events of 1989 have had a liberating effect on the old and now sterile interpretative paradigms and imaginary philosophies of history that harsh reality has refuted. The storm raised by those events let through some faint rays of sunshine. The events themselves were positively marked by the end of ruthless communist dictatorships and by a toppling of the violent myth of class struggle, which had been conceived as a necessary tool through which to achieve the various stages of an imaginary material progress that gave no purchase to liberty and the rights of man. Now, that storm has rekindled our hope in a better future, moving us beyond countless illusions and recurring disappointments, it has given rise to new studies everywhere, and to the need for new inquiries into the Enlightenment. Today questions are posed that have never yet been asked about that profound cultural revolution, which sought to emancipate and enfranchise man, and whose width of horizon and long-term effects can be compared only to those of the rise of Christianity and its dissemination across the Western world. We have finally started to untie the crucial knot constituted by the hoary old question of the link between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—which had been a dogma and the beating heart of European historical consciousness until now. We are seeing the