What is Enlightenment?

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightnment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." -- Henry Louis Mencken

For Foucault¸ Enlightenment is defined by a “modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority and the uses of reason” (35), a phenomenon, an ongoing process. Modernity is then an attitude—or a way of relating to contemporary reality, tied to an inidispensable asceticism He seeks to emphasize the extent to which a “type of philosophical interrogation—one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject—is rooted in the Enlightenment” (42). But it is the thread of permanent reactivation of that activation that connects us with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment can either be accepted or criticized in a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible, oriented toward the “contemporary limits of the necessary” (43). We need to free ourselves from the “blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment” (45). We must take a limit attitude, one in which there is not only theory, doctrine, or a permanent body of knowledge but an ethos where such limits can move beyond them, into a direct inquiry.