HISTORIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS

The Peculiarity of the Enlightenment as Historical Category

What do we know about the Enlightenment? Quite a lot, it would seem. The number of studies on this subject from every part of the world is extensive and growing constantly. In the twentieth century a lot of effort was devoted to the analysis of an "Enlightenment question" which proved pivotal in the study of the rise of modern European civilization. On the plus side, this produced new insights, highlighted several sensitive points, brought to the fore neglected or even hitherto unknown personages and facts. But there was a downside. These studies often failed to break free of past schemes and modes of analysis, which were informed by ideological prejudice or by so blatant an apologetic intent that they were capable only of rehearsing well-known themes. Cultural and political battles of an exceptionally intense and passionate character have been fought over the last few centuries for and against the Enlightenment. Our newborn century therefore has the difficult task of rethinking the Enlightenment: this involves investigating its meaning and the many historical forms that it has taken in Western civilization, summing up and reviewing current knowledge, and separating the old from the new, all the while keeping to a minimum the prejudices and spurious influences that constantly tend to contaminate our search for truth and frustrate efforts at gaining a scientific understanding of the past.

One way of achieving these goals might be to investigate both the profound differences and the important points of contact and reciprocal influences between the views of the Enlightenment held by philosophers and those held by historians. This could in fact prove the precious red thread that will help solve many a problem and aid a new generation of historiographers in bringing about the renewal of their discipline that is nothing less than their duty. The starting point has to be an awareness of the double nature of this eighteenth-century epistemological paradigm, caught between history and philosophy, which in turn leads to a discussion of its unique historiographical character.

The Enlightenment, a kind of conceptual Centaur, is unlike any other traditional historical category, different, for example, from humanism, the Renaissance, the Baroque, and Romanticism, which are defined by their philosophical origin to a much lesser extent. The Enlightenment expressly defines itself on a critical and philosophical level. It was, in fact, the first cultural phenomenon expressly recognized by its contemporaries through the name that it gave itself. At the same time, by this very act of self-identification, the Enlightenment also revolutionized contemporary notions of universal history and of historical time, effectively giving rise to the modern Western consciousness of time and launching a debate that still engages us today because it coincides to a large extent with the ongoing investigation into what constitutes modernity. Given the complexity of the issues at stake, let us take one thing at a time.

To call Hegel the "father of the Enlightenment" may seem surprising and even paradoxical, but it appears less so if we consider the history of philosophical thought and the dominant influence of Hegel's interpretation on the way in which many European thinkers see the Enlightenment, i.e., within a dialectical system, as thinking reality, a simultaneously logical and historical category of the phenomenology of spirit. And yet, setting aside the specific case of Hegel and his importance for historical research, to which we shall return later, it was undoubtedly philosophers who first taught historians to think of the Enlightenment as a specific concept and category within the study of the rise of modernity. Thus a gauntlet was thrown down. It was claimed that no effective discussion of the historical dimension of this subject could proceed without both a clear, precise, and theoretically well-founded idea of the nature of the Enlightenment, and an awareness as well of the fact that historical events are not possible and therefore not thinkable without linguistic acts.

In fact, this peculiarity of the Enlightenment as a category in the history of Western culture becomes especially obvious when we consider the way in which eighteenth-century thinkers like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon, and many others redefined universal history and the very idea of historical knowledge through the introduction of the radically new concept of a secularized "historical time" That concept was based on the distinction—cultural and, even more, anthropological—between past and future, experience and expectation.

No one really subscribes any longer to the nineteenth-century condemnation of Enlightenment historiography as "anti-historical," a view born mostly out of political and ideological motives. Nowadays it would be difficult to refute Reinhart Koselleck's assertion, in the wake of Wilhelm Dilthey's famous rehabilitation of the Enlightenment, that "[o]ur modern concept of history is the outcome of Enlightenment reflection on the growing complexity of 'history in general," i.e., of history finally considered per se, history in the collective singular, an autonomous entity not linked to any object or subordinate to any subject.

In the course of the eighteenth century a long and complicated process that had begun in the middle of the sixteenth century finally came to a head. It saw the emergence in people's consciousness of the idea that they were living in new times, times that were completely...