The Enlightenment in France

The ‘End’ of Kant‐in‐Himself: Nietzschean difference

“…Kant's ethical ideas are a logical outcome of his belief in the fundamental freedom of the individual—‘a morally autonomous unit whose obligations were self‐imposed and owed nothing to the external authority of a religious creed or to the deterministic pressure of a material environment’ (Hampson, 1968, p. 198). This freedom did not imply the lawlessness of anarchy or Feinberg's ‘anomie’ (Lankshear, 1982, p. 99), but rather the freedom of self‐government, and the freedom to obey consciously the laws of the universe as revealed by reason.…”

What Enlightenment Project?

“…5 Indeed, a good deal of this line of critique was already in place by the time of Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences, which -as Norman Hampson has observed -"preceded most of the major works of the Enlightenment itself." 6 Critics of the Enlightenment typically begin either by noting a suitably appalling current practice, which is then linked to what is alleged to be a questionable principle (e.g., condoms in the classroom are a consequence of an overemphasis on rights) or by examining a questionable principle, which the critic then illustrates with a particularly grating example (read in this way, those condoms in the classroom that have so exercised Wilson are simply a rhetorical strategy for illustrating a broader concern: the pervasiveness of "rights-talk" in modern liberalism). Once the link between dubious principle and appalling example has been made, the critic typically proceeds to argue that this principle is the legacy of something called "the Enlightenment project": a set of intentions, originating in the eighteenth century, that still work mischief two centuries later (thus liberal "rights-talk" is only the most recent manifestation of the Enlightenment's "individualism," "atomism," and its habit of reducing all human relationships to contracts between isolated individuals).…”