  To understand the project of the Critique better, let us consider the historical and intellectual context in which it was written.[5]   Kant wrote the Critique toward the end of the Enlightenment, which was then in a state of crisis. Hindsight enables us to see that the 1780’s was a transitional decade in which the cultural balance shifted decisively away from the Enlightenment toward Romanticism, but Kant did not have the benefit of such hindsight.