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ON THE CONTEMPORARY CONDITIONOF THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Wojciech KOZYRA1
In Search of New Approaches and Interpretations
Publication language: Polish
Journal article
Transformations No. 1-2 (96-97) 2018, Publication date: 6 June 2018
Keywords: enlightenment, reason, progress, Kant, ethics, science, rationality
Abstract In the article I attempt to defend the concept of enlightenment understood as an unequivocally moral concept. Such defense is needed because in the recent debates the idea of enlightenment has rather been associated with progress conceived not in moral, but in scientific and technological terms instead. I argue that the paradigm of enlightenment as an unreflective, technocratic and calculative endeavor, which was rightly criticized by authors like Adorno and Horkheimer, should give way to the paradigm of enlightenment defined in categories that are unambiguously ethical. I also suggest that such moral concept of enlightenment and reason should become the point of departure for those who do (and there still are such people) refer to reason and enlightenment as valuable entities which merit exploration and development. My point is that these thinkers often put unjustifiably high weight on science as a paradigm of rational inquiry and they charge it (i.e. science) with educational and even quasi-soteric tasks that it is not suited to fulfil. In my analysis I draw upon sources of Kantian ethics, which, I think, can shed some light on the concept of reason and enlightenment, which should appear relevant for the present debate. In particular I distinguish between what Kant called “hypothetical”, or “instrumental” (in Horkheimer’s parlance) and “categorical” reason. The former is what people like Adorno and Horkheimer (and Andrzej Zybertowicz in Poland|) criticize; it is the ideal of reason concerned exclusively with entities like utility and efficiency. The categorical reason, on the other hand, is concerned solely with the moral permissibility of human behavior. The article stresses this dimension of the concept of reason and enlightenment. Such a conceptualization allows me to argue that it was only a hypertrophy of the efficiency-oriented, “hypothetical”reason that was the object of criticism which had been famously expressed in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment, whereas their very critical endeavor as such may be perceived as underpinned by the demands of ethical rationality, which are constitutive for the concept of enlightenment that wish to promote. I do express, however, one self-referential reservation. It consist in a general concern about a mechanism of paradigm-shift. I point out that when, in polemic, we are made into using some conceptual framework for the sake of praising or debunking some ideas, we are often faced with a choic
Instytut Filozofii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
E-mail: wojciechkozyra01@gmail.com