What Is Enlightenment? (Foucault)
What is Enlightenment? (frz. : Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?) is the title of two texts by the philosopher Michel Foucault. Both have the same tenor in terms of content and go back to a lecture at the Collège de France of January 5, 1983. In the commentary on Immanuel Kant's essay Answering the question: What is Enlightenment? he deals with the Enlightenment. What is enlightenment? is also an important contribution in Foucault's debate with Jürgen Habermas. The longer of the two texts first appeared 1984 as What is Enlightenment in English, the shorter and sharper in content in the same year as Qu'est-ce que les Lumières? in ' 'Magazine littéraire. Publication History 
The long version was first published as What is Enlightenment in English in The Foucault Reader. It was first published in French in 1993 in Magazine littéraire under the title Kant et la modernité and in 1994 in the fourth volume of Michel Foucault: Dits et Ecrits 1954–1988, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. The short text variant appeared in 1984 in French in the Magazine littéraire and in a German translation as What is Revolution? What is Enlightenment? in the tageszeitung of July 2, 1984. This in turn appeared in english for the first time in 1988 in the anthology Politics, Philosophy, Culture under the title The Art of Telling the Truth. Content 
In his text, Foucault describes the enlightenment with Kant and the modernity with Baudelaire, before he describes the ethos of the enlightenment. In the longer version, he writes about enlightenment:

And about the modernity:

And the modern man:

He grants the Enlightenment a more comprehensive existence as a totality of events and processes, considers it fundamental for philosophical reflection, but only the reflective relationship to the present. For him, enlightenment is the question of reason according to its own historicity:

Foucault contrasts two types of critical practice, both of which he found in Kant. On the one hand, there is Kant's well-known question of what knowledge about knowledge is possible and what are the limits of knowledge. From this, however, comes the critique of what is universal, necessary, and obligatory, and what is singular, contingent, and a product of circumstances. For Foucault, criticism is no longer a search for universally valid formal structures, but a historical investigation into the events that constitute ourselves and that enable us to see ourselves as subjects. Foucault thus states that the universal boundary conditions of modernity exist, which induce people to produce themselves. Enlightenment itself is part of what determines who we are, so it's impossible to be for or against it. For things that are outside of the choices, it doesn't matter whether they have legitimacy. While there is no knowledge that is free of or transcends these, it is possible to reinterpret and live in a way that best harmonizes with one's understanding of self. References

Sources 

 Michel Foucault: Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? in: ders. Dits et Ecrits 1954–1988. Band 4: 1980–1988. Published by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Gallimard, Paris 1994

Literature 

 Clifford Siskin, William Warner: This Is Enlightenment University of Chicago Press, 2010 ISBN 0-226-76148-7

External links 

 Fulltext in french
 Fulltext in englisch

Michel Foucault
Philosophy essays
Enlightenment philosophy