Enlightenment

Definition

The Enlightenment is the 18th-century intellectual movement, epitomized by Kant's famous definition of Aufklärung as "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity" — the courage to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. It championed reason, autonomy, scientific inquiry, and critique against tradition and authority. For architecture, the Enlightenment is the epochal backdrop of modern architectural rationality: it gave rise to the techno-scientific worldview that would underwrite modernist functionalism, while also grounding the emancipatory ideals (public reason, human dignity, cosmopolitanism) that critical architecture claims as its inheritance. Kant's own "dwelling house" metaphor — building a "secure home for ourselves" rather than "castles in the sky" — models the Enlightenment's sober, critical ambition for architecture.

Key Thinkers

• Immanuel Kant — "What is Enlightenment?"; the motto sapere aude (dare to know).
• Diane Morgan — Kant's Enlightenment as the "dwelling house" metaphor and critical project.
• Jean Baudrillard — the Enlightenment's moral philosophy diagnosed as Marxism's unbroken inheritance: "Marxism has not disencumbered itself of the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment… it holds onto the religion: the moralizing phantasm of a Nature to be conquered. By secularizing it in the economic concept of scarcity, Marxism keeps the idea of Necessity without transforming it" (The Mirror of Production, ch. II, "The Moral Philosophy of the Enlightenment," pp. 56–57). See domination-of-nature.

Related Concepts

• Ethics — Enlightenment ethics of autonomy and dignity.
• Humanism — the Enlightenment's humanism, later critiqued by posthumanism and Foucault.
• Modernity — the historical condition the Enlightenment set in motion.
• Aesthetic Judgment — the Enlightenment faculty of reflective judgment.
• Perspective — the Scientific Revolution's mathematization of vision and space: the seventeenth-century ground on which the positivistic quest stood.
• Domination of Nature — the Enlightenment's "Nature to be conquered" as the book's target: "Nature is the concept of a dominated essence and nothing else" (ch. II, p. 55).
• Historical Materialism Critique — where the Enlightenment inheritance is pressed: Necessity and Scarcity as the secularized form of the moralized Nature, not economic givens (ch. II, pp. 57–58).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Kant for Architects — the Enlightenment and the "dwelling house" metaphor.
• Quadrature (La Coe 2018) — the seventeenth-century pre-history: "The positivistic quest initiated by the Scientific Revolution sought to reduce all phenomena to a few all-encompassing rational truths based in mathematics. Reason replaced metaphor as an explanation for the phenomena of the physical world" — the truth/illusion debate as the era's popular philosophical battleground.
• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the Enlightenment as the unacknowledged moral ground of historical materialism: "Marxism has not disencumbered itself of the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment. It has rejected its naive and sentimental side… but it holds onto the religion: the moralizing phantasm of a Nature to be conquered. By secularizing it in the economic concept of scarcity, Marxism keeps the idea of Necessity without transforming it" (ch. II, "The Moral Philosophy of the Enlightenment," pp. 56–57). The book's counter-claim is anthropological: "Scarcity, which itself arises in the market economy, is not a given dimension of the economy… in his symbolic exchanges primitive man does not guage himself in relation to Nature. He is not aware of Necessity, a Law that takes effect only with the objectification of Nature" (pp. 57–58) — Nature, Necessity and Scarcity appearing as the Enlightenment's secularized theology rather than as description, the "good/bad Nature" split surviving in the economic concept of scarcity. See domination-of-nature, historical-materialism-critique, primitive-societies-as-alterity.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).