Two answers: Kant and Mendelssohn

In September 1784 — three months before Kant’s essay — the Berlinische Monatsschrift published a reply to Zöllner’s question by Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the most celebrated Jewish philosopher in Europe. Its title: Über die Frage: was heißt aufklären? — “On the Question: What Does ‘To Enlighten’ Mean?” Kant almost certainly had not seen it when he wrote his own; he even remarks in a footnote that he had heard Mendelssohn had written on the topic but had not yet read the piece.

Mendelssohn’s answer is more analytic than Kant’s. He treats enlightenment as one part of a larger process he calls Bildung — the formation or cultivation of a human being. Bildung, he says, divides into two components: culture (Kultur) and enlightenment (Aufklärung).

The distinction is between the practical and the theoretical. Culture is practical: it concerns skills, refinement, craftsmanship, social graces, the arts of living well together — knowing how to act and make. Enlightenment is theoretical: it concerns rational knowledge and the capacity to reflect on the things of human life according to their importance and influence. Roughly: culture is the polish of doing; enlightenment is the light of knowing.

Here is where Mendelssohn diverges sharply from Kant. He is worried about a collision — enlightenment can come into conflict with what he calls the vocation (Bestimmung) of a human being and of a citizen. Some truths, spread carelessly, may corrode the morals and civic bonds that hold people together. So Mendelssohn counsels prudence: where the enlightenment of the human being clashes with the enlightenment of the citizen, one must sometimes hold back, and “the philanthropist” may have to keep certain useful prejudices intact rather than tear them down.

Set the two answers side by side. Kant makes enlightenment a matter of the will — courage, the daring emergence from self-incurred immaturity, sapere aude. It is bold, individual, and confident that freedom to reason publicly will carry the day. Mendelssohn makes it a matter of rational cultivation, one balanced component of Bildung, tempered by prudence about when truth helps and when it harms. Kant’s is a summons; Mendelssohn’s is a careful map.

Mendelssohn matters for another reason. He is the emblem of the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment (from Hebrew sekhel, reason or intellect; its followers were the maskilim). The Haskalah was the project of bringing Jewish life into living dialogue with reason, secular learning, philosophy, and the surrounding European culture — without simply dissolving Jewish identity into it.

This is why “What is enlightenment?” is, in this seminar’s home context, also a Jewish question. The Haskalah shows enlightenment as a genuinely European movement wearing different local dress: the German Aufklärung, the French lumières, the Scottish and English Enlightenments — and the Haskalah among the Jews of central Europe. One impulse — subject inherited authority to the test of reason — inflected by nation, language, and religion.