Sapere aude — dare to use your own reason: with this formula Kant summarized the programme of the Enlightenment in 1784, and with it a loss began that reverberates to this day. It was an emancipatory imperative, directed against the self-incurred immaturity of intellectual tutelage. The call to think for yourself rather than let others think for you belongs to the most powerful things European intellectual history has produced. And yet it tells only one half of the story. The other half is about what was lost on the way to the emancipation of reason.
#The New Cave
The conceptual metaphor that drove the Enlightenment was Plato’s cave. Humanity sits in a dark chamber, sees shadows on the wall, takes them for reality. The enlightener leads one out of the darkness into the light, reveals the mechanisms behind the shadow play and the sun of the true beyond the illusion. So much for the image.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff formulated the counter-thesis in her doctoral exposé Der andere Ausgang (Freie Universität Berlin, 2012): the modern relation to being, she wrote, is “by no means less cave-like” than the so-called pre-scientific one. On this reading the Enlightenment did not free the human being from the cave — it erected a new one, one that takes itself for the open air (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2012, sec. 3.2). The liberation from the tutelage of religious dogma and obedience to authority was real. But it went hand in hand with an ontological narrowing: an equation of the knowable with the measurable, of the real with the quantifiable. The price of this liberation was a new imprisonment in the abstract.
Three features characterize the new cave. First, chorismos: the radical separation of subject and object, inner and outer. The interior becomes the space of illusion; the exterior, the sole site of the real. Second, lethe: the sceptical shielding of the human being from reality, from their own body and from other people. With it, by Hume at the latest, the idea that the world naturally communicates itself disappears, and a pure sensualism is all that remains. Third, simulation: science produces models, increasingly confuses them with reality, and loses the distinction between map and territory (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2012, secs. 3.1–3.3).
The structure of this artificial cave, Gwendolin Kirchhoff writes in the same exposé, could be called a “megamachine” with Lewis Mumford. An “autonomisation of the principle of the (calculating) machine” of the kind the Matrix films play out would then be only the externalisation of an already accomplished “ideal” imprisonment of the human being within a fragment of themselves: abstract rationality (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2012, sec. 3.2). Mumford himself pinned the ontological reduction at the start of the modern age on Galileo: his real crime, Mumford argues, was to exchange the totality of human experience for the tiny part that can be interpreted in terms of mass and motion (cf. Mumford, 1977, pp. 399 f.).
#Four Standpoints, One Underlying Problem
In Der andere Ausgang Gwendolin Kirchhoff distinguishes four stances that the research literature takes toward the ambivalence of the Enlightenment. The totalitarian standpoint (Adorno and Horkheimer) marginalizes the positive and reads the Enlightenment primarily as an instrument of domination. The neurotic standpoint (Wolfgang Giegerich) diagnoses a repression: the West denies the real consequences of its own relation to being. The dualistic standpoint distinguishes good from bad thinking within the Enlightenment; so far, she notes, it has been argued convincingly only for the understanding of nature, above all by Karen Gloy and in studies that find an insufficiently recognised alternative in the natural philosophy of the Renaissance and Romanticism. The fatalistic standpoint (Sloterdijk, Blumenberg, Heidegger) understands the Enlightenment as a painful birth out of the “beautiful semblance” of the mythic-metaphysical cave into the harsh light of scientific reality, and asks whether it was inevitable and legitimate (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2012, sec. II).
Each of these stances, in Kirchhoff’s view, stresses an aspect of the Enlightenment that cannot be dismissed. The real obstacle lies deeper: in the gap between the ethical and the ontological dimension of the world, which makes the search for a way out so hard and “perhaps is even the problem itself” (Kirchhoff, G., 2012, sec. I). The crisis of the Enlightenment is then not merely a political or psychological problem. It concerns the question of what kind of world we live in: a dead one that we measure, or a living one in which we participate.
#Which Two Perfections Does the West Seek?
The West seeks two perfections, according to Gwendolin Kirchhoff: perfect rationality and perfect love. “Those are the two perfections that people seek,” she says: the perfect “I love everyone”, just as it says in the Bible, and the “I am super rational, perfectly rational, like the ultimate scientist” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, 47:23–47:35). Speaking with Elisa Gratias on TransitionTV (September 2026), she turns to “what lies at the root of our civilisation” (ibid., 45:39–45:43) and speaks of two ideas, “a kind of grip on two levels” (ibid., 45:45–45:51).
One concerns the intellect: she names Socrates, Aristotle, the beginning of abstract natural science and the idea “that we want to found an empire of pure reason” (ibid., 45:54–46:05), at the Enlightenment’s start, or rather already in the Renaissance, with Francis Bacon’s Nova Atlantis (cf. ibid., 46:06–46:13): “a utopia, then, where everything builds on science” (ibid., 46:12–46:16). In it, she says, everything else, the irrational, the whole emotional life, the inner life, is too imperfect and is simply overcome (cf. ibid., 46:15–46:26), so to speak: “this imperfection must not be, we have to be completely perfect, at this point completely, perfectly rational” (ibid., 46:26–46:32). And: “even if we are modest and say that knowledge goes further, it still goes further in the direction of perfect rationality” (ibid., 46:31–46:38).
On the other side, for Kirchhoff, stands Christianity, which makes love “into an imperative” (ibid., 46:41–46:48): “your neighbour you shall love, your enemy you shall love, you shall love” (ibid., 46:52–46:57). “And the error lies in that ‘you shall’” (ibid., 46:57–47:00): there is, so to speak, a kind of “straitjacket put on emotional life” (ibid., 47:03–47:09). Instead of dealing with what emerges organically and is alive, a “you shall” is imposed (cf. ibid., 47:09–47:18), and that leads to a tendency “to bend oneself madly in all sorts of directions” (ibid., 47:17–47:24).
Following her remark on Zhuangzi, Kirchhoff says that things suddenly become simple out of direct contact with phenomena, by not first referring to something formalised that lies before you (cf. ibid., 51:36–51:45). This formalisation, she says, has taken hold in the West in two forms: scientific civilisation and Christianity with its formalised love (cf. ibid., 51:47–51:56). What follows, she says shortly afterwards, is first of all to step out of formalisations and regain a direct, personal relation to the cosmos, one mediated by no one (cf. ibid., 52:11–52:23).
Bacon’s utopia New Atlantis, which Kirchhoff calls Nova Atlantis, appeared in 1627, the year after his death; its order, Salomon’s House, serves “the knowledge of causes” and “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire” (Bacon, 1627).
#Schiller, Schelling, and the Counter-Programme
The counter-movement did not begin after the Enlightenment but within it. Friedrich Schiller formulated it in 1795 in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man as an anthropological diagnosis. The modern human being is torn between sense drive and form drive, between sensibility and abstraction. Only the play drive — the union of both — can restore the whole person. Schiller’s play drive is not a leisure activity. It describes a state in which a person is neither compelled nor undetermined, but shapingly intervenes in what is given. This is philosophically precise: Bildung in the full sense — not as accumulation of knowledge, but as formation of the whole person.
Two years later Schelling laid the foundation for a natural philosophy that attacks the rift between spirit and nature at its root in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Schelling, 1797, Breitkopf und Härtel, Leipzig). The mathematical description of nature offers accuracy, he argued, but no genuine knowledge. It resembles the attempt to describe Homer’s works by counting the printed characters. Of the inner movement one knows nothing at all. Schelling thought nature as a living process in which spirit and matter are not separated. Goethe supplemented the thought with his principle of thinking perception — a seeing that simultaneously thinks, and a thinking that simultaneously sees. In his Theory of Colours (Goethe, 1810, J.G. Cotta) he insisted that the connection with the perceiving subject must never be bracketed out.
Novalis put the connection into a formula: consciousness is a living effective force. And this, Novalis stressed, without in any way throwing reason out the window. The Romantics were not enthusiasts who negated reason. They expanded it.
#Herzensbildung Instead of Cerebral Abstraction
What the Enlightenment lost bears a precise name: Herzensbildung — the cultivation of the heart. What is meant is the cultivation of feeling as an organ of knowledge — the capacity not only to know, but also to sense in what relation one stands to the world. Modernism, as Gwendolin put it in conversation, has taken something away from the heart that in English is aptly called disheartening — a thoughtless exploitation not only of nature but of the entire living environment.
The question is not: Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment. The question is: which Enlightenment? The Promethean project — to rebuild life, to rebuild consciousness, to replace nature through control — is a child of the Enlightenment. But it is not its only child. Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis stand for a different legacy: a reason that includes the living rather than excluding it. Bildung as Herzensbildung and as a cultural project, as Gwendolin understands it following the Confucian Mengzi, means exactly this expansion.
What is needed is the reintegration of a domain of being unjustly pushed out — bodily experience, living perception of nature, the cosmological dimension of human existence. Not at the expense of reason, but as its completion. Oswald Spengler described the Enlightenment in The Decline of the West (Spengler, 1918, Braumüller) as a recurring cultural phenomenon: the phase in which critical consciousness dawns and religious thought recedes. The diagnosis is morphologically apt. It becomes insufficient where it holds the process to be irreversible. The German tradition of thought from Schelling to Jochen Kirchhoff advances a different thesis: the Enlightenment left something behind — and it is not too late to reach for it.
#Sources
- Bacon, F. (1627). New Atlantis. English text with an introductory note: Project Gutenberg eBook #2434, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2434.
- Kant, I. (1784). Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? In: Berlinische Monatsschrift, December 1784.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2012). Der andere Ausgang — Versuch über die Errichtung der platonischen Höhle im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und Ideen zu einem möglichen Ausweg [The Other Exit: An Essay on the Construction of Plato’s Cave in the Age of Enlightenment and Ideas for a Possible Way Out]. Unpublished doctoral exposé, Institute of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “«Das Schicksal ist größer als wir» Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff über Christopher Nolan und das Leben” [Video, German]. Conversation with Elisa Gratias, TransitionTV, YouTube, 18 September 2026. Timestamps 45:39–52:23: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smlQFizE8Lg (the Manova version Die Odyssee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjtervR5tR4, has different timestamps). Quotations translated by us.
- Mumford, L. (1977). Mythos der Maschine. Kultur, Technik und Macht [German edition of The Myth of the Machine]. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.
- Schelling, F.W.J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
- Schiller, F. (1795). Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen.
- Goethe, J.W. (1810). Zur Farbenlehre. Tübingen: J.G. Cotta.
- Spengler, O. (1918). Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Leipzig: Braumüller.
