What Is Enlightenment?

In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant described humanity’s coming-of-age. Enlightenment makes man’s deliverance from the tutelage of external authorities and the achievement of mature autonomy.

Earlier, Descartes had constructed an entire philosophy on the foundation of “clear and distinct ideas.” The Enlightenment billed itself as the end of blindness and the beginning of effortless, undistorted vision.

In these and other ways, the Enlightenment implicitly claimed to have reached the eschaton. Its epistemology was, Knight says, a “beatific vision of the object.” And its claim to maturity was a claim to have arrived at full human development, to have achieved the status of the Last Man.

What is Enlightenment? It’s a false eschatology, the heavenly city of the philosophers.