Analyses of the Enlightenment

Immanuel Kant, "What is Enlightenment?" [1784]

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is mans' inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! -- 'Have courage to use your own reason!' -- that is the motto of enlightenment."

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ [1944, 1947]

"In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy ... What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. Power and knowledge are synonymous."

Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity" [1981]

"[The Enlightenment had hoped that the emanciatory potential of cognitive (or scientific), moral and aesthetic values could ultimately be harnessed for practical purposes.] The twentieth century has shattered this optimism. The differentiation of science, morality and art has come to mean the autonomy of the segments treated by the specialist and at the same time their splitting off from the hermeneutics of everyday communication . This splitting off is the problem that has given rise to efforts to 'negate' the culture of expertise."

Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" [1983]

"What is at stake is this: How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?"