What Is Enlightened Thinking?
“Enlightenment,” according to the famous statement by Kant, “is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Enlightened thinking has always understood itself accordingly as thinking that, in the process of emancipation from guidance [Bevormundung] by theology and church, has achieved consciousness of itself and its freedom, hence consciousness of its own maturity [Mündigkeit]. Out of this historical process, which finds its first high point in Europe with the Renaissance and then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries finds the course on which we are still moving today, there emerged that new form of culture, society, and the state that we are accustomed to designate the “secular world.” The secular world is not the natural world that is given to us; it is not the world in whose space the stars move, in which rivers flow, plants grow, in which birth and death occur; it is also not the world of relativity theory and quantum physics. The secular world, rather, is the one that emerged out of the process of secularization, the historical world of nineteenth- and twentieth-century civilization; it is the artificial world of the man of the technological age, produced by science, technology, economics, rational politics, administration, and social planning. As the product of the human will to power, it is in an eminent sense real; but at the same time we know that it arose out of the uncanny marriage of rationality and Utopian fantasy, that it is artificial, hence that its reality derives its aggressiveness and its dynamism from the negation of actuality as it is given. Because it is governed by rational thinking, the secular world is a world whose subject is, and wants to be, human reason. It is subjected to rule by human beings; the secular world is thus defined as a world for which man himself bears responsibility. Humanity in the twentieth century became enlightened concerning this responsibility less through its own insight than through historical experiences, in a manner that compels us to repeat Kant's question “What is enlightenment?” on a new level; we must test the Enlightenment itself and the whole sum of its results in the light of those critical principles that we owe to the first phase of the European Enlightenment. The question of the responsibility of thinking in the secular world for the secular world is not posed to this thinking from without, as an inappropriate demand; rather, in posing it we are following the original intention of this thinking itself. Thinking that achieves its self-consciousness in the emergence from a self-incurred immaturity understands itself as mature thinking. A person becomes mature when he assumes the right and the duty to bear responsibility in the future for himself and his action without oversight, that is, on his own authority. Enlightened thinking is thinking whose maturity shows itself in the fact that it is responsible for itself and its consequences. Thus enlightened thinking reaches its goal in comprehending its responsibility for thinking.
The lecture offered here for discussion was delivered on 4 February 1967 at the Dozententag of the Theological Faculty of the University of Heidelberg. It contains a few citations from my works “Aufklärung und Offenbarung” (Enlightenment and Revelation) (in Der Gott der Philosophen und die Wissenschaft der Neuzeit [Stuttgart, 1966) and “Das Wesen des Ideals” (The Mature of the Ideal) (in Festschrift für Professor Hans Bohnenkamp [Weinheim, 1963]) but shifts the ideas developed there into another context. It lies outside my competence to develop the theological consequences that follow from the considerations presented here. I therefore publish this work as a question for theology that should be understood as an invitation to a conversation. [Originally published in Zeitschrift für evangelische Ethik 11 (1967): 218–230.]
We are therefore allowing the method by which we wish to investigate the historical phenomenon of enlightenment to be sketched out by the intentions of the Enlightenment itself. We are thereby making a preliminary decision about the form in which the conversation between theology and secular science should be conducted. Theology cannot do justice to the phenomenon of enlightenment if it retreats to the very positions from which the Enlightenment has emancipated itself. Theology owes to the Age of Enlightenment the insight that the knowledge entrusted to it is denied when it understands itself as a timeless and ahistorical science and that it is thinking untheologically as long as it keeps chasing after history. Therefore, theology must without reservation join in the process of that enlightenment, which in the age of scientific civilization pervades and dominates the whole course of history. The more theology realizes the newly comprehended historicity of its thinking, hence the more thoroughly it comes to enlightenment itself, the more clearly will it become evident that the object of theology cannot be dissolved in the acid of enlightened thinking, that it cannot be secularized. Enlightened thinking has until now found the criterion of its own maturity in the fact that it recognizes no authority outside of itself from which it would let itself be determined or would let its standards be prescribed. It gives itself its own norms. Here reason is its own court of appeal; its responsibility is interpreted as self-responsibility. If we attempt to ask the question “What is enlightened thinking?” in an enlightened form, we must make ourselves participants in the responsibility of this thinking. For this reason theology too may not attempt to determine the essence of enlightenment from without; rather, it must try to clarify, on the basis of enlightened thinking itself, the meaning of the responsibility claimed by that thinking, which has devolved irrevocably upon it. Theology must thus attempt an enlightenment of the Enlightenment. In this sense we are investigating the implications, the possibilities, and the limits of a thinking that claims its own maturity.
After these preliminary remarks it is necessary for us to secure more precisely the ground on which we—thoughtlessly, perhaps—have placed ourselves. Still determinative for the self-understanding of scientific thinking in the twentieth century, in Germany at least, is the sharp division between the two types of life, the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, which Max Weber in his lectures on “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” tried to keep alive in the world of modern industrial society. Science should be borne by an “ethic of conviction,” which in the pure unconditionedness of its ascetic attitude refrains from asking after its own meaning and the consequences of its action. It is without responsibility and should be. The opposite type, the “ethic of responsibility,” is reckoned exclusively to politics. Through his own thinking and influence Max Weber denied the division of science and politics that he postulated. It also contradicts his sociological argument that modern science based on the division of labor is determined by the structural laws of industrial production and is therefore constituted as an apparatus of power. The ideology of the two lectures by Max Weber nevertheless largely prevailed, at least in Germany, because it corresponds to the situation of interests—actual or alleged—of science. The connection of enlightenment and responsibility has an alienating effect and awakens the suspicion that the concept of responsibility has only been introduced in order to aid theology surreptitiously in a new grounding of its claims and to reestablish the immaturity that has scarcely been overcome. It will therefore be necessary to show that the assumption of real responsibility for this world, that human domination of the world and revolution, have from the beginning been regarded by the enlightened consciousness as the way to the realization of reason.
The concept of enlightenment was understood already by Kant as a concept in the philosophy of history. It intends to bring to expression the fact that according to the self-understanding of the eighteenth century a great turning point in the history of humanity had taken place at that time. That “revolution in the manner of thinking” which, according to Kant, begins in the natural sciences with Bacon and is consummated in metaphysics by the Critique of Pure Reason spreads in the process of enlightenment to the area of politics and here too, according to the expectation of the eighteenth century, will bring to an end the period of groping about and wandering astray. To the extent that reason becomes conscious of itself and achieves influence in shaping human relationships—to the extent, therefore, that humanity is able to become the subject of its own history—human history as a whole gains, according to Kant, what only individual sciences had attained in the past: a sense of direction and that secure forward course that has been described as “progress.” By contrast, the history of humanity in the condition of its immaturity appears merely as prehistory without direction or goal. Thus it corresponds thoroughly to Kant's own interpretation of his epoch that the French Revolution began with a new reckoning of time. The emergence from self-incurred immaturity is the beginning of true history, determined by the autonomy of reason. Thus in his essay Kant answers the question “What is enlightenment?” not in terms of metaphysics but of politics and philosophy of history; he determines the historical locus of his own philosophy by conceiving his whole age as the Age of Enlightenment. Not the single individual but the whole epoch should free itself through enlightenment from the chains that held all previous history in bondage. The tool of enlightenment is criticism. Therefore Kant writes in a note to the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (A xii): “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and lawgiving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.”1 That means that reason can carry out the enlightenment of itself and its task only by entering into the political struggle with the powers that rule the world and oppose the process of enlightenment. In the struggle for the freedom of public criticism, reason must also realize itself politically. Kant says in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Pure Reason (B 766f.): “Reason depends on this freedom for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto.”2 “On this freedom”—political freedom, as liberalism understood it—“reason depends for its very existence,” for the concept of existence signified in Kant actual being in time. Every human being possesses reason as an ability. But the actual exercise of this ability (i.e., rational thought and rational action) is bound to the political freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters. Thinking is thus enlightened only if it has achieved enlightenment concerning the fact that man can realize his own reasonableness only by simultaneously endeavoring to produce the political prerequisites that determine whether his rational ability will achieve existence.
Because enlightenment can be understood only as historical process and can be carried out only in historical process, it is not possible to confine it to a specific area of private existence, such as, for instance, the relationship of single individuals to religion. To the extent that enlightenment is carried out at all, it is always carried out in all areas at once. In religion it appears as the revolt of conscience and reason against clericalism and orthodoxy, as the struggle for tolerance against superstition and inquisition. In politics it appears as the struggle for freedom of thought, equal rights, and the commonweal against privileged capriciousness and despotism. In natural science it means empiricism and mechanism, technology and scientific expansion. In science generally it means the transference of natural scientific forms of thought and methods to the entire investigation of the knowable world. In philosophy it appears as liberation from the guardianship [Vormundschaft] of theology, as struggle against dogmatism and metaphysics, as analysis of consciousness and philosophical anthropology. Out of the ferment of this powerful movement of emancipation, the great ideas have proceeded on which rests the order of the secular world: human rights, separation of powers, toleration, domination of nature and the political world through science and technology—but above all, the great thought of the solidarity of all humanity beyond the borders of cultures and religions. No one can deny that wherever these ideas succeed in being realized human beings achieve a level of maturity that they can give up again only at the price of a relapse into barbarism and inhumanity. That we in Germany, in consciousness of the alleged superiority of German culture, believed ourselves capable of dismissing the naïveté and shallowness of the ideas of the Enlightenment—this fact we have had to pay for with catastrophes that should preserve us for all time from holding enlightened thinking in contempt.
The Enlightenment did not stop with Kant. Precisely in realizing itself it has gone beyond itself. We cannot follow this process here, but we are in need of a few marks of orientation before we are able to formulate the question as it is posed for us in the second half of the twentieth century.
If enlightened thinking posits standards for itself out of itself, if it is supposed to be its own tribunal, then the process of enlightenment itself invites the question who the subject of this thinking, the lawgiver of this tribunal, is supposed to be. The empirical individual cannot lay claim to this legislative role, for he is aware, precisely if he is enlightened, that by his drives and interests he is entangled in the world in manifold ways and subject to dependencies from which he cannot free himself for true autonomy. The liberal faith in the power of criticism and the free agreement of citizens called for by Kant is contradicted by political experience, even in the quiet republic of the sciences. It provides an incomplete answer at best, because it does not say what the free agreement rests on. Therefore the Enlightenment stands in need of a second step, a second-order enlightenment, as it were, able to enlighten us about how the subject of the free agreement of citizens—hence the transcendental reason—is constituted, and whence reason derives the ability to be the source of its own truth. The question of the subject of pure reason is inseparably bound up with the question of the possible source of the truth of reason; for reason is only autonomous—it is only mature in the Enlightenment sense—when it not only contains the ability to know but at the same time also contains in itself the light in which the known becomes visible. One and the same reason must be capable of being thought of not only as the power of knowledge but also at the same time as the source of truth; for if the truth had its source in another light, thinking would necessarily be heteronomous; in that case it could never achieve the form of maturity to which it lays claim. The question “What is enlightened thinking?” is therefore not to be separated from the following questions: By what light does thinking enlighten itself? What is the source of the lumen naturale? How is the essence of truth itself to be conceived if we are unable to separate reason and freedom, if, in other words, reason determines itself from the knowledge of truth? In this way “second-order enlightenment” leads with strict logical consistency to the question posed by Kant about the self-knowledge of pure reason. Space does not suffice to present the way in which this question, in the double form of the question of the subject of knowledge and of the light of knowledge, determines the course of thought from Kant to Hegel. It leads to the knowledge of God as the ultimate subject of subjectivity and finds its high point in the statement by Hegel: “philosophy has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theology and, as the servant of truth, a continual divine service.”3 This statement does not signify a retreat into the old immaturity; rather, it signifies the high point of the second great act of the Enlightenment: of philosophy from Kant to Hegel, in which reason, achieving enlightenment about its own essence, takes possession of the entire content of theology in order at last truly to become lord over theology, and as “rational theology” realizes absolute enlightenment as continual divine service.
The third act of the Enlightenment begins at the moment in which reason, knowing itself, achieves enlightenment concerning the fact that the historically existing subject of reason cannot postulate its own identity with the absolute subject of transcendental reason. At this point the history of the decline of reason begins. Only in this great world-historical drama—that is, in the history of thought of the last one hundred fifty years—has it become progressively clear which ideas held together the previous heroic phase of the European Enlightenment. If we want to understand the crisis into which reason was driven by the process of enlightenment, we must once again become clear about the simple postulates on which rested the faith in the power of reason at the high point of the European Enlightenment: we can trust that we reach enlightenment through the pure power of thinking, when our thinking produces out of itself the light in which we are enabled to know the facts of the matter to be clarified as they are related according to the laws of nature. The criterion for the truth of our thinking is the free agreement of all thinking human beings. We take a cognition to be true when every other person who is capable of thinking, so far as he is of good will, hence free, must reach the same cognition. Where such is the case, we say a cognition is secured. The subject of the cognition is thus no longer the single thinking individual, but rather the essence of all thinking human beings, who according to the same rules recognize the same thing, or the “transcendental subject”—that identity of the thinking consciousness in all human beings who are capable of thinking, on which rests the agreement by which they measure the truth of our cognition. What the individual thinks counts as true when it agrees with what all are able to think. The criterion of truth is the identity of the empirical with the transcendental consciousness. But enlightenment is not thereby secured, for the agreement might well be an agreement in blindness. The agreement can serve as a criterion of truth only if the ground of the agreement, the transcendental subjectivity, is simultaneously the condition of the possibility of the truth of the cognition, if it contains within itself the lumen naturale—that is, that light in which thought recognizes itself and the world. European thought since Plato gives the name “God” to the source of the light of cognition. The truth of the Enlightenment is therefore secured only if God can be thought of as the ground of the subjectivity of thought, as the absolute subject. The agreement of the rational thought of empirical individuals rests, then, on the agreement, mediated by transcendental subjectivity, of the reason of the empirical subject with the absolute subject—that is, with God—whose light appears in the rational thought of the individual who achieves enlightenment. Empirical thought is enlightened whenever universal and timeless rationality is represented within its temporal limitation. Through the process of enlightenment, temporal thought, that is, existence insofar as it becomes rational, gains the possibility, to cite Hegel, “of being manifested in the restrictedness of its own content as at the same time universality and as the soul which is alone with itself.”4 Absolute Spirit alienates itself in the limitation of the historical figures of reason, impresses on them the stamp of its own infinity, and thus returns to itself in them. God is the source of light and the cohesion of all rational thought in general. Therefore He is the absolute subject of reason.
In order to comprehend how the path that led the Enlightenment to this high point led by its own logic to the crisis of absolute thought, and thus simultaneously to the crisis of the Enlightenment, we must consider how this crisis already breaks out in Hegel's thought itself. Were we to take our orientation from other philosophers, such as Feuerbach or Marx, the suspicion might arise that the crisis is only a product of the decline of that royal road of the Enlightenment that Hegel exhibited and traversed. But if Hegel's thought itself falls into this crisis, the way to the crisis of reason and ultimately to the dissolution of reason is already prefigured by the consummation of the autonomy of reason in its ascent to absolute reason. The following reflections build on the work in which the philosophy of German idealism reflectively comprehends its own end: Hegel's Aesthetics. In the epoch from Kant's Critique of Judgment to Nietzsche, aesthetics became, for reasons that cannot be developed here, the fundamental metaphysical discipline; accordingly, we can explain the fact—surprising at first glance—that in Kant, in Schelling, in Hegel, and in Nietzsche aesthetics offers the deepest insight into the basic structure of their thought.
If we want to understand the circumstances that led to the failure of absolute thought, we need to recall that the secular world is not the world in itself but rather a product of enlightened thought. Rational thought subjects the world to the rational systems of the state, which it has itself produced, and to the technological economy. It objectivizes itself in these systems; it becomes objective spirit. The secular world is the product of this process. It is objectified—and in the objectification, as it were, congealed—reason; it is reason petrified and robbed of its freedom. The organizational matrix on which this world rests, its substructure, cannot be shaken precisely because it is reason become structure; for that which is organized by reason interlocks, dovetails, establishes functional intérdependencies, and consequently cannot be forced apart without resulting in a universal catastrophe. By objectifying itself, reason also objectifies the identity on which the possibility of its truth rests. Therefore the products of reason objectifying itself in the social process always have the character of a system—more precisely, of a system of domination. But reason, as already mentioned, is frozen and petrified in these systems. By the act of objectification it has alienated itself from freedom; it is not autonomous vis-à-vis its own productions but rather heteronomous, and it is thus able to receive its freedom vis-à-vis its own constructions only in the form of negativity as free-floating individuality. Thus the bearers of enlightenment become intellectuals.
We want now to look at how Hegel himself describes this process. In the individual the autonomy of reason emerges as spiritual freedom; in Hegel it bears the name “independence.” “True independence consists,” as he says, “solely in the unity and interpénétration of individuality and universality. The universal wins concrete reality only through the individual, just as the individual and particular subject finds only in the universal the impregnable basis and genuine content of its actual being.”5 Here there emerges, however—and this is the remarkable aspect of Hegel's doctrine—an inevitable collision of autonomy with the reality of the modern world. Hegel establishes that freedom and independence cannot make their appearance if the conditions and relations of the surrounding world have achieved essential objectivity on their own and independently of that which is subjective and individual. The autonomy of this subjective reason is possible only so long as what is objective does not move and perform on its own, disengaged from the individuality of subjects, “because otherwise the individual retreats, as something purely subordinate, from the world as it exists already independent and cut and dried.”6 But this is precisely what has happened in the life of the modern state, in which particular individuals are “no longer…with their character and heart the sole mode of existence of the ethical powers. On the contrary, as happens in genuine states, the whole details of their mental attitude, their subjective opinions and feelings, have to be ruled by this legislative order and brought into harmony with it.”7 Hegel maintains: “in such a state of affairs the independence we required is not to be found.”8 Nothing less is said thereby than that the objective realization of autonomous reason in state and society severs the authentic nerve of autonomy—namely, the unity of empirical and transcendental reason—that reason, therefore, by realizing itself in the production of the secular world, destroys the condition of its own possibility—namely, the freedom of its rational existence. Reason itself, by objectifying itself in the schematisms of the state, of positive law, and of administration, begets a new and irrevocable heteronomy, and its subordination to its own products limits its freedom far more mercilessly than those old forms of immaturity from which it had freed itself in the process of enlightenment. Autonomy now maintains itself only as delusion or as the mere negativity of the subject that keeps itself free of the universal in its empty particularity, in its invalidated individuality. But that autonomy which plays within itself has lost the truth as well as the freedom of reason; for truth comes to light only where the universal manifests itself in the particular cognition. The consciousness of the intellectuals, thrown back upon separate particularity, can no longer be enlightened, for along with true independence it has simultaneously lost the possibility of truth.
The fatality of the situation into which the enlightened consciousness thereby falls—that reason estranges itself irrevocably from itself in its objective realization—shows up in the field of economics. The following citation comes not from Marx but rather from the aesthetics of Hegel.
In this situation the long and complicated connection between needs and work, interests and their satisfaction, is completely developed in all its ramifications, and every individual, losing his independence, is tied down in an endless series of dependences on others. His own requirements are either not at all, or only to a very small extent, his own work, and, apart from this, every one of his activities proceeds not in an individual living way but more and more purely mechanically according to universal norms. Therefore there now enters into the midst of this industrial civilization, with its mutual exploitation and with people elbowing other people aside, the harshest cruelty of poverty on the one hand; on the other hand, if distress is to be removed [i.e., if the standard of living is to be raised], this can only happen by the wealth of individuals who are freed from working to satisfy their needs and can now devote themselves to higher interests. In that event of course, in this superfluity, the constant reflection of endless dependence is removed, and man is all the more withdrawn from all the accidents of business as he is no longer stuck in the sordidness of gain. But for this reason the individual is not at home even in his immediate environment, because it does not appear as his own work. What he surrounds himself with here has not been brought about by himself; it has been taken from the supply of what was already available, produced by others, and indeed in a most mechanical and therefore formal way, and acquired by him only through a long chain of efforts and needs foreign to himself.9
In this world substantial freedom and substantial truth are no longer possible. The realm of the absolute spirit now appears, according to Hegel's own word, as a realm of shadows. This recognition underlies the famous statement from the preface to the Philosophy of Right: “When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”10
There is not room here to delineate how the further course of the European Enlightenment led in Marx, in Nietzsche, or in Freud out of the dusk already falling in Hegel's philosophy into an ever deeper night. A single citation may suffice to make visible the terrible consistency that is at work here. It comes from Nietzsche's Gay Science and yet reads like a direct continuation of the passage from Hegel's Philosophy of Right.
The greatest recent event—that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes—the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, “older.” But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impended—who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?11
The God whom Nietzsche here says is dead, is, as I tried to show in another place,12 that God whom Pascal called the God of the philosophers, the God of absolute metaphysics, the sun of the Platonic parable of the cave, which in modern philosophy had transformed itself into that absolute subject which reason must presuppose as ground of its subjectivity when in the sense of autonomy it tries to conceive its own ground as the source of the light in which it recognizes the truth of that which is. As soon as the emancipated—or, in Nietzsche's concept, the free—spirit recognizes that its freedom has dissociated itself irrevocably from the universality of objective spirit, the light of enlightenment is also extinguished. The way of enlightenment appears henceforth as a way of progressive darkening. It leads ever deeper into the shadow of an “eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth.” The fearlessness of the enlightened spirit proves itself in the resolution not to evade the “shadows that must soon envelope Europe”: “At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright [A] 11 the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never been such an ‘open sea.’”13 But the openness of the horizon that is not bright is the openness for the fearless journey into night. The great noonday, toward which the journey aims, proves to be a noonday without sun. The Enlightenment has erred into a course that leads not into the clear but into the darkness.
The process of experience through which thought passed in the epoch of the eclipse of European philosophy has taught us that we can no longer equate the subject of thought with that light in which truth appears to us. The faculty of reason is no longer its own light. Both sides of the classical concept of the subject, which in Hegel were still dialectically mediated—being at once autonomous ego and ground of truth—have broken irrevocably asunder. We are able to ground neither the freedom of man nor the truth of his cognition on the subjectivity of his consciousness. The system of equations on which rested the classical concept of the subject, the classical concept of reason, and the classical concept of freedom was irrevocably burst open by the process of enlightenment itself. The enlightened consciousness saw itself forced to understand itself as historical consciousness; and when thought asks after the conditions of its possibility, it encounters, instead of the absolute, its own history in its relativity and finitude. Thus history becomes, instead of timeless identity, the actual content of philosophy. But history does not beget its own light. The insight into the truth of thought is lost in recalling the historicity of thought. In view of the inadequacy of a consciousness that has succumbed to relativity, thought becomes resigned before the ancient questions of the unity of being, the meaning of truth, and the conditions for the possibility of freedom—that is, the questions of the unum, verum, or bonum of classical metaphysics. One behaves like the fox toward the sour grapes: one declares oneself to be uninterested; and thus is realized in modern consciousness that phase in the history of the secular world that Nietzsche described as the phase of incomplete nihilism. In this phase it has become senseless to talk any longer with Hegel and Marx of alienation; for modern consciousness has discovered that that all-pervasive noncommitment of thought and action, which we attribute to the abdication of the question of truth and the foundation of our freedom, is the last comfort of modern man's intellectuality, absorbed in the enjoyment of its particularity. The Enlightenment has lost its sting; it is released from the duty of maturity and is no longer the foundation for man's responsibility for the system of objective spirit and the history of the secular world. It no longer liberates for political action but rather, like its adversary, religion, has become a private affair. One practices enlightenment no longer in parliament but rather on the psychotherapist's couch, in order that the adjustment of the individual to the mechanisms of society may take place with less friction.
But reason does not renounce with impunity the question of its own essence and of the conditions of its possibility. The abdication of reason's self-knowledge—thus the abdication of philosophy—has brought about a disintegration of reason in the last century, which defines the history of Europe in the period of its self-destruction. Because modern consciousness no longer feels itself bound to ask after the relation of freedom and truth, scientific thought submits to the schematism of those objectifications that at the same time produce and continuously reproduce the secular world. The functional principle to which thought submits is the principle of the mechanized division of labor, to which we owe the expansion of modern science and technology. But division of labor always means heteronomy. The basic principle of the Enlightenment, autonomy, has been so fundamentally abandoned in the system of the modern specialized sciences that thought does not even notice the loss of its enlightened freedom. Division of labor means disintegration. The rationality of the technological world is a disintegrated rationality. But since the reasonableness of reason was grounded in the relation of every individual cognition to the unity of the transcendental consciousness, the disintegrated rationality of the twentieth century has in the true sense of the word lost its reason; it is a reasonless rationality. More precisely: it is a rationality that is indifferent to reason or unreason. That shows itself most plainly at those points where the specific form of the rationality of modern science was carried to the extreme: in nuclear weapons systems and space technology. The instruments fashioned here serve insanity as well as reason. The rationality of their systems behaves in a manner indifferent to the possible consequences of their application. The indifference of modern rationality to reason and unreason is, however, the total negation of the basic principles of the Enlightenment. In the functionally secure systems of mathematicized science, that maturity of human reason for which the Enlightenment wanted to free itself is already excluded at the start. Kant's expression “self-incurred immaturity” applies here with a precision of which the eighteenth century could as yet anticipate nothing.
Simultaneously, however, the might of science and technology forges ahead into dimensions in which the future of all humanity becomes dependent on their commanding power. The dominium terrae14 once promised to human beings has passed against their will, and as it were behind their backs, to a science that has always refused to accept responsibility for its own consequences. It bears responsibility for the future of the world whether it wants to or not. It is therefore condemned to enter into responsibility for its own action—to become enlightened about itself and its consequences, its internal possibilities, and its limits. At the outset I said: enlightened thought is thought whose maturity proves itself in the fact that it is responsible for itself and its results; therefore, enlightened thought reaches its goal in grasping the responsibility of thought. If a science that holds sway over the world does not transform itself in this sense into an enlightened science, if it perseveres in its present blindness and in selfforgetfulness of the reason that rules within it, then the name “secular world” will designate a world that prepares itself for its own end, because it is incapable of carrying out the enlightenment that is its fundamental law. Because rationality holds sway over the world, the enlightenment of reason about itself has become today the condition for the existence of all humanity. But since Nietzsche, reason is enlightened about the fact that the horizon in which it could achieve enlightenment has faded into the empty openness of an unending night. Reason no longer finds within itself the source of its own light; it is not capable any more of tracing out of itself the horizon of its own possibility. It is no longer possible to conceive autonomy as the condition of the possibility of reason; or expressed otherwise: it is not possible any longer to interpret freedom as autonomy. Freedom and truth are moving into a new context, as yet scarcely disclosed. To clarify it [aufzuklären] is the task of philosophy, insofar as it is the science of the conditions of the possibility of reason. If philosophy wishes to remain the science of science, for which it was once founded, it will fulfill its meaning in the twentieth century when it becomes the science of a comprehended enlightenment, in which reason discovers its responsibility in history as the ground of its possible freedom. Then philosophy will transform itself into a science of the transcendental and the real conditions for the possibility of human responsibility in history. According to its ancestry, however, the concept of responsibility is, as can be shown, a concept of Christian eschatology. It contains a kernel that is not to be secularized. Does the name “eschatology” perhaps designate that horizon of reason to be disclosed anew, in which thought could again discover its maturity? Does revelation set thought free for enlightenment? May it suffice to have posed these questions; the mere fact alone that it is thinkable to pose them in direct fulfillment of the process of enlightenment indicates an epochal turning point, which is taking place today in the relationship of faith and thought.
NOTES
1. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York, 1968), 9n.
2. Ibid., 593.
3. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 101 (Jubiläumsausgabe 12: 145f.). The term Gottesdienst, which Picht repeats in the following sentence, is the usual German term for “worship,” though its literal meaning is “service of God” (cf. English “worship service”). Thus Hegel could be translated as saying that philosophy is “continual worship of God.”—TRANS.
4. Hegel, Aesthetics, Knox 155 (JA 12: 215).
5. Hegel, Aesthetics, Knox 180 (JA 12: 247).
6. Hegel, Aesthetics, Knox 181 (JA 12: 248).
7. Hegel, Aesthetics, Knox 182 (JA 12: 250).
8. Hegel, Aesthetics, Knox 184 (JA 12: 252).
9. Hegel, Aesthetics, Knox 260 (JA 12: 350f.). [The bracketed interpolation is Knox's.]
10. Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1945), 13 (Jubiläumsausgabe 7: 36f.).
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), sec. 343.
12. Georg Picht, Der Gott der Philosophen und die Wissenschaft der Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1966).—TRANS.
13. Nietzche, The Gay Science, sec. 343.
14. The “dominion over the earth” that God gave to the newly created human beings according to Gen. 1:26–28.—TRANS.