“WHY ‘THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT’ IS NECESSARY AND UNENDING”
“To put it mildly, the phrase “Enlightenment project” is a term of indignant disavowal, as if it referred to a blueprint for the world’s biggest prison. By using it, the speaker casts an anathema, sometimes with a curl of the lip or a roll of the eyes. In this voice, “the Enlightenment project” means (more or less) the organization of thought, beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe and its colonies, around a set of interlocked propositions:
1. the mind is a lone wolf;
2. its rational operations are predatory in that
3. they devalue women, people of color, and the colonized,
4. suppress ways of knowing other than the rational, Newtonian, Cartesian, and scientific,
5. and lead to seeing all of nature — the whole world outside the predatory ego, and in particular those seen as rightly subject to the domination of reason,
6. which is an ideological instrument cultivated by European males to rationalize their exercise of colonial and imperial power.
You might well ask what the Enlightenment had to say for itself? In 1784, its pivotal philosopher, Immanuel Kant, wrote a newspaper article, of all things, called “What Is Enlightenment?” proposing a rather different notion: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-inflicted immaturity. … ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ — that is the motto of enlightenment.” Of all the ideas that clustered around the Enlightenment, infinite perfection through reason was one of the lesser strands. Far more important were critiques of unearned privilege, whether of throne, church, or property. Toward improvement? Surely. Perfection? Not hardly…
when an Enlightenment vocabulary is used to justify hereditary privilege (for example, in the tyranny of test scores), then it becomes necessary to fight against misuses of Enlightenment — in the name of more Enlightenment.”
I heard the phrase “the enlightenment project” a while ago and I’m trying to understand it. And if you’re reading this, you are joining me for this journey. I’d love suggestions of what it read next.
