Kant And The Enlightenment Essay

"Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit" is the beginning of Kant's answer to the question of what defined his, and perhaps still our, period of time known as the Enlightenment.1 In Foucault's famous addresses of this response, he highlights both the failure and the promise that came with this response and this Enlightenment. The Enlightenment can be seen as failure insofar as we have not gone beyond this arrested development, and cannot say sincerity that we have moved beyond this self-imposed immaturity. Additionally, the rationalism and idealism that Kant espouses in his attempt to escape this bondage has largely failed, with no likely incentive to return. Yet, for Foucault, there is still an ethos that characterizes the Enlightenment that we can still say that we are inheritors of: a spirit of critique and a critical

This is based off of a distinction Kant makes between concepts and intuition; intuition constitutes the passive condition in which an object is given as an appearance, while a concept constitutes the active cognition through which a particular object appears within the intuition.3 In the aesthetic, Kant argues that space and time are not merely concepts that we abstract from experience, but constitute given a priori conditions under which we could even conceive of objects arising in the first place. When conceiving of a particular space, this can only be done on the basis of conceiving space in general of which this space is part. Additionally, all objects in motion presuppose time and that we could not therefore abstract time from those objects in motion.4 Kant's goal in the aesthetic is to demonstrate that space and time are given to us as empirically real, yet transcendentally