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.
Jochen Kirchhoff, in Der andere Ausgang (Kirchhoff, 2012), formulated the counter-thesis: the Enlightenment did not free the human being from the cave — it erected a new one, one that takes itself for the open air. 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: what is experienceable inwardly — innate ideas, bodily knowledge, cosmic participation — is erased. The tabula rasa becomes the epistemological ideal. Third, simulation: science produces models, increasingly confuses them with reality, and loses the distinction between map and territory. The autonomization of the principle of the calculating machine is, as Lewis Mumford showed, the exteriorization of an already accomplished intellectual imprisonment of the human being within a fragment of themselves — abstract rationality.
#Four Standpoints, One Void
Kirchhoff distinguishes in Der andere Ausgang four stances 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 destructive consequences of its own relation to being. The fatalistic standpoint (Blumenberg, Heidegger) accepts self-destruction as historically inevitable. The dualistic standpoint, finally, distinguishes good from bad thinking within the Enlightenment and locates in the natural philosophy of the Renaissance and Romanticism a genuine counter-current — one directed not against reason but toward an expanded reason. Kirchhoff, and with him Gwendolin, stands in this fourth position.
What all four lack — and what Der andere Ausgang brings to language — is the connection of the ethical with the ontological dimension. The crisis of the Enlightenment is 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.
#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 Haertel, 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, C.H. Beck) 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
- Kant, I. (1784). Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? In: Berlinische Monatsschrift, December 1784.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2012). Der andere Ausgang — Was die Aufklärung hat liegen lassen.
- Schelling, F.W.J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Haertel.
- Schiller, F. (1795). Ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen.
- Goethe, J.W. (1810). Zur Farbenlehre. Tuebingen: J.G. Cotta.
- Spengler, O. (1918). Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Munich: C.H. Beck.