An unfinished project
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Two hundred years after Kant asked “What is Enlightenment?”, two of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers sat down to answer him again — and disagreed about almost everything except that the question would not go away.
After Adorno and Horkheimer, it might seem there is nothing left to defend. If enlightened reason breeds domination, why not abandon the whole project? The late twentieth century’s most interesting answer is: no. Two thinkers — Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault — return to Kant’s question not to close it but to transform it. Enlightenment, they argue, is not a finished doctrine to accept or reject; it is unfinished business.
Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929): more reason, not less. Habermas, heir to the Frankfurt School, accepts his teachers’ diagnosis — instrumental reason really has run amok — but rejects their near-despair. His decisive move: instrumental reason is not the whole of reason. There is another dimension they under-weighted, and it is the cure, not the disease.
That dimension is communicative reason — the rationality at work whenever people try to reach genuine understanding through argument, giving and demanding reasons, aiming at agreement rather than manipulation. Instrumental reason asks “how do I get what I want?”; communicative reason asks “what can we, together, agree is right — once no one is coerced and the better argument alone decides?” The pathologies of modern life come from letting the first kind colonize domains that belong to the second.
In his 1980 address “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” Habermas argues that the Enlightenment’s emancipatory promise is incomplete, not discredited. The answer to reason’s pathologies is a fuller rationality realized in undistorted public dialogue — the public sphere where citizens reason together as equals. This deliberately echoes Kant’s public use of reason: the free, open address of the scholar to the reading world (What is Enlightenment?). The project is unfinished; our task is to finish it.
How does Habermas answer the charge that Enlightenment reason produces domination?
Michel Foucault (1926–1984): Enlightenment as an ethos. In 1984 — the 200th anniversary of Kant’s essay, and the year of his own death — Foucault wrote his own essay titled, pointedly, “What is Enlightenment?” He is often cast as an enemy of the Enlightenment, but this late text is a careful, even admiring, reappraisal. His key move: refuse the choice “for or against.”
Enlightenment, Foucault argues, is not a body of doctrines — a fixed set of beliefs about reason, progress, and rights that you sign up to or renounce. It is an ethos: an “attitude of modernity,” a way of relating to one’s own present. To be enlightened is not to hold certain opinions but to do a certain kind of work on oneself and one’s age.
What work? A permanent critique of ourselves and our present. Foucault calls it a “critical ontology of ourselves” — patiently examining the historical, contingent limits that have made us who we are, and testing which of them are genuine necessities and which are merely accidents of history we might yet exceed. Kant asked “what can I know?”; Foucault’s twist is a historical question: “in what is given to us as universal and necessary, what is in fact singular, contingent, and changeable?”
So Foucault re-reads Kant’s sapere aude — dare to know — not as an achievement to be secured but as an ongoing practice, a discipline of the self that is never finished. Enlightenment is not a state you reach; it is an attitude you continually enact. And that reframing quietly agrees with Habermas on one thing, for all their famous quarrels: the Enlightenment is a task, not a possession.
On Foucault's 1984 reading, what is Enlightenment?
The seminar’s closing reckoning. Step back across the whole course. Kant’s defenders and Kant’s critics — Hamann, Herder, Burke, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Foucault — disagree ferociously about what reason is and what it can safely be trusted to do. Yet notice: all of them are still arguing on the terrain Kant opened. Even the fiercest critic of Enlightenment reason is exercising the very freedom to think for oneself that Kant demanded.
That is why the question never closes. Kant’s essay ended by insisting we do not yet live in an enlightened age, only an age of enlightenment — an age of the task, not the achievement (What is Enlightenment?). Two centuries of defenders and critics have only deepened that verdict. The question — have we the courage to think, and to govern ourselves, for ourselves? — remains the modern question. It is now yours to answer.