Aaron Irion
August 2026
Today, this “ongoing process” must be put into question. The pressing question is not whether Enlightenment accurately characterized Kant’s time and the years immediately succeeding it, but whether its legacy is still felt in our own. Sapere aude! Is this motto ours too? By way of answering, let us once again examine Kant’s text, and compliment it with some others in order to answer the question just posed. Via a mostly textual analysis, I will argue that ours is an age of de-enlightenment. This is both a schematic analysis and a schematic conclusion, and so I leave it to readers to agree or disagree, to fill in the gaps, and to probe the questions raised here further.
AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Let us first work through a few crucial moments in Kant’s text. Kant asserts very early on that if the age preceding Enlightenment is in fact characterized by tutelage, it is because there is a certain ease or comfort in this condition. “If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.” We have here a prescient combination by Kant. On the one hand, submitting ourselves to tutelage appears to be in our best interests. Why should I decide my diet? I am not trained as a doctor—someone else knows better! On the other hand, our submission is convenient. Who wants to do menial, irksome work? In Kant’s telling, then, tutelage results not from a state of natural dependency akin to infancy. Nor is it strictly, or only, imposed on us violently through political or legal authority. Rather, it has a genuine appeal and can be the result of human will (or the willing refusal to exercise that will). It is therefore less a condition of abject domination and already a small prefiguration of what Foucault began to call, towards the end of his life, governmentality (Foucault 2009). This latter concept describes how the traditional mechanisms by which states controlled their populations, such as blunt uses of force, discipline, and law, intersect with subtler means of managing populations, ones that rely on “multiform tactics” to shape needs, desires, and expectations and make room for “technologies of self,” i.e., for the ways in which individuals self-regulate and negotiate their standing in society within certain boundaries. These technologies of self would come into their own through enlightenment, but they are in a sense already there in utero in tutelage itself, according to Kant.
According to Foucault, tutelage arose, for Kant, “because men are unable or do not wish to conduct themselves, and others have obligingly come forward to conduct them”—though notice here that “unable” is ambiguous and may suggest that there is some degree of unchosen limitation or imposition and therefore that remaining in tutelage is not only the result of mere laziness or cowardice, à la Kant’s suggestion (Foucault 2011, 13-14). What Kant is really getting at with this notion of tutelage, then, is not only an external relation but a self-relation: the purposive outsourcing of our authority to reason and make decisions for ourselves. Tutelage therefore marks, in Foucault’s words, a “deficit in the relationship of autonomy to oneself.” He goes on: “Consequently, [for Kant] what Aufklärung has to do, and is in the process of doing, is precisely to redistribute the relationships between government of self and government of others.” In other words, to become enlightened is to begin to use one’s own reason and to begin to govern oneself in the affairs of one’s own life.
However, this is no easy feat. Because of this combination of imposition and appeal in the condition of tutelage, it is difficult for any one person to break out of it. Kant again: “For any single individual to work himself out of the life under tutelage which has become almost his nature is very difficult.” When one moves beyond the individual, however, things look different. “That the public should enlighten itself is more possible; indeed, if only freedom is granted enlightenment is almost sure to follow.” Kant goes on, “For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the most harmless among all the things to which this term can properly be applied. It is the freedom to make public use of one’s reason at every point.” We will get back to this notion of “public” in short order.
But first, on this question of individual versus collective enlightenment, it is worth reaching for Foucault’s analysis again. “Enlightenment [for Kant] is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.” This means, Foucault goes on to say, that Enlightenment is not merely an individual obligation—it is a political problem. “The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight…” (Foucault 1984, 37). We will return to this theme, too.
Kant of course knows that even if individual and public enlightenment is possible and desirable, it is nonetheless difficult to achieve—and not only because tutelage has its comforts. Beyond that, there are real material forces in the world that, then as now, are invested in reproducing this unenlightened state in the broad public. As Kant says, “But I hear on all sides, ‘Do not argue!’ The Officer says: ‘Do not argue but drill!’ The tax collector: ‘Do not argue but pay!’ The cleric: ‘Do not argue but believe!’” What these injunctions amount to are orders and threats, and ones with immense stakes (the officer and the tax collector’s orders being backed up by the threat of state violence; the cleric’s order being backed up by the threat of losing one’s access to salvation). The content of these orders is the same: do not use your reason—obey!
For Kant, the alternative to this state of affairs is not only desirable but a historical necessity. For even if one is content with refusing or deferring their own enlightenment, to prevent it in others is an ethical and historical injustice. As he says, “For himself (and only for a short time) a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for posterity is to injure and trample on the rights of mankind.” Moreover, once the process of enlightenment has begun to progress, it is an injustice to try and impede or circumscribe that progress; it is an injustice for a social order to say, in effect, “this far and no further.” This is what Kant means when he says, “An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge, purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment.” While a bit muted here, it is clear that for Kant the enlightenment process is subsumed under a more general process, that of capital-h History, conceptualized teleologically and felt over the course of a long afterlife that extends through German Idealism and into certain interpretations of Marxism (before being problematized by post-structuralism and other traditions besides) (Foucault 2011, 11).[i] Foucault was attuned to this element of Kant’s thought too, and I leave it to interested readers to find his thoughts on the matter in the endnote attached to this sentence.[ii]
Before closing this section, we need to address a few more themes and passages. The first concerns how (that is, the means by which) Kant sees his age becoming enlightened. Here, as promised, we get back to this notion of “public.” As a practical matter, what Kant is largely concerned with in “What is Enlightenment” is freedom of speech and, implicitly, freedom of the press. The idea is a well-known one: where all are free to express their beliefs in public, in the “marketplace of ideas,” enlightenment follows. But Kant has a very specific conception of “private” and “public” reasoning (the details need not detour us here, though they are important). The general thrust of what the private-public distinction amounts to is this: we all have an obligation to carry out our duties where necessary (this often means in the professional sphere), but we must also be able to criticize the logics that authorize those duties. The injunction above was effectively “Do not argue—obey.” Kant’s injunction is, in a way, “Obey—then argue.” And in fact, he returns to the same examples he provided in the paragraphs above. He says that the soldier cannot refuse his superior’s command, the citizen cannot refuse the tax collector, nor can the clergyman refuse to preach church doctrine. But outside the confines of these institutions all must be able, “as scholars,” to reason in public, to question the soundness of military strategy, the form and rates of taxes, and the validity of religious doctrine. It may seem quaint or trite now, but this remains a principle we should uphold, even if the marketplace of ideas is a rosy-eyed and rather insufficient concept. And of course, the pre-conditions for reasoning in public are much more robust than Kant alludes to: mass literacy, mass distribution, robust mediating institutions, leisure time, and so on. Kant does not touch these, in part because the essay was written as a critique of republicanism and as a defense of “enlightened” monarchism, as the final pages of the text make explicit,[iii] but we should have no problem admitting as much.
What the insistence on public reasoning, and its juxtaposition with private reasoning, does is two-fold. First, it establishes a universal subject in place of an individual one. In the “private” sphere (again, “professional sphere” is a more or less okay shorthand here), one acts merely as an individual insofar as one is, as Kant says, “part of a machine” and has a specific function. In the “public” sphere, however, this changes. As Foucault says, “We constitute ourselves as a universal subject when as rational beings we address all other rational beings.” The second thing this insistence allows for is a more complete definition of tutelage and Enlightenment. Tutelage now becomes a state wherein one obeys—that is, fails to reason—in both the private and public spheres. The exit from tutelage, then, means that “reasoning and obedience are disconnected. Obedience is emphasized in private use and the total and absolute freedom of reasoning is emphasized in public use” (Foucault 2011, 36). Enlightenment is now understood as freedom of and for public reasoning.
One more thing here. For Foucault, Kant’s text is a point of departure for what the former calls the “attitude of modernity.” Kant’s text is not, of course, the marker that designates the onset of modernity. But Foucault convincingly suggests that this text is symptomatic of a changed, and changing, relationship to modernity, one that moves from the longitudinal (defining modernity only with regard to its relative strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis Antiquity) to the “sagittal” (defining modernity with regard to itself, to its situatedness in the present) (Foucault 2011, 13-14). In any event, this attitude of modernity has several dimensions, but I want to home in on one. Foucault says, “For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.” (Foucault 1984, 38, 41). This rhymes with what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, claim is an essence of enlightenment: “the choice between alternatives,” including socio-political alternatives (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 25).
In Kant’s oeuvre, this transformation, this “imagining otherwise,” is made manifest in the relation between Enlightenment and Revolution, the latter of which being a transhistorical category “whose content is unimportant” (Foucault 2011, 19). It is interesting that Kant’s affinity for enlightened monarchism gives way to this, albeit tepid, embrace of revolution, but we shall leave that aside. What we can say is that Enlightenment can be gleaned not so much in the contingent success or failure of any given revolution, but in the ambiance of revolution. As Foucault astutely remarks, “What then is important in the Revolution is not the Revolution itself…What is significant is the enthusiasm for the Revolution.” Revolution is “a value, an operational value in history and the progress of the human species” (Foucault 2011, 18, 20). This widespread, near universal enthusiasm is the sign of a historical imperative: an imperative that demands that all men give themselves the political constitution they desire, and that the justice of that constitution avoids all offensive war. Enlightenment and Revolution are thus not simply two questions which demanded answers in Kant’s time—they are conceptually paired. This capacity for imagination and for transformation, authorized by the Enlightenment and modernity, needs also to be interrogated in relation to our contemporary moment. Let us, then, turn forthrightly to the present.
AGE OF DE-ENLIGHTENMENT
We now have a sense of what the age of enlightenment entails and can proceed to questioning whether these characteristics remain with us today. To review, some of key themes that we must interrogate are: our relationship to tutelage, our capacity for private and public reasoning, universality and collectivity, and imagination and transformation. I want to think about these themes philosophically and politically, but it is unavoidable to address them without reference to technology as well, given the profound changes we are seeing in our political economy and the technological landscape.
As an entry point, it is worth lingering on this notion of “the public” and offering a brief, schematic history. In Kant’s time, the public, that collective space where, à la Foucault, rational beings address rational beings, was composed mostly of institutional bodies bearing the name “Academy for…” or “Society of….” All these produced journals, hosted salons, and undertook other such activities, meeting one another in a nascent but vibrant public sphere. The space for public reasoning was, then, still highly exclusivist and circumscribed but nonetheless intellectually serious and enlightening. This space began to widen with reforms of the universities and the further proliferation of newspapers, journals, and public discussion fora. Later, media technology widened the collective space for reasoning further, granting the masses access that not only allowed them to encounter public reason on display, but to participate in it. As alluded to above, the conditions necessary for reasoning in public are not autopoietic (self-generating). They require inputs that cannot be taken for granted but must be produced, through politics and socialization. The rational dialogue of reasoning in public requires that people can read, that they can write, that they can encounter the writing of others, that they are embedded in an institutional landscape that is civically and politically grounded and can direct their reason towards definite ends.
Clearly, if we look at the potted history just described, the foundations for all these iterations of what we have been calling “the public” are today neutered or under attack, as are its inputs. The civic foundations that variously sustained the last three centuries of Enlightenment reason are fading, whether they be those academies and societies already mentioned, religious congregations, unions, or mass political parties and their attendant organizations like youth clubs, workers schools, and media organs. That the Tocquevillian ideal of associational life has long been under pressure in the West is uncontroversial, as is the pronouncement of death for mass politics. The universities, as anyone who follows higher ed knows, are not yet (at least not all of them) dead but are day by day being dismantled. Every day we hear news that such and such university, whether public or private, is either shuttering or else greatly reducing its programs of study or admissions. This trend is especially noticeable in the United States, where I am writing from, but is certainly seen elsewhere. In Britain, for instance, as Stefan Collini has recently and wonderfully analyzed (Collini 2026). My own employer, George Washington University, recently closed its Mount Vernon campus, which had a history dating back to 1868 and a storied record of educating women. Closed is here a euphemistic term. It in fact sold the campus—to Amazon, which plans to build a data center on the grounds (Edwards and Jakubowski 2026). The symbolism is a bit heavy-handed, but this is where we find ourselves. Likewise, the media landscape has been completely upended by the internet, which has facilitated a great fracturing and a turn towards echo chambers. The latter provide a certain comfort—the comfort of not being confronted by opposing viewpoints—that is clearly compatible with the conditions of tutelage, as we have outlined them above.
And what of those inputs I mentioned, which are in dynamic relation to the public (that is, they both shape and are shaped by the latter)? We know that “functional illiteracy” is on the rise globally, even in the most affluent European societies (Merry and van Melik 2026). We know that leisure time is receding in the West, even as labor productivity rises (OECD 2021, 303-312). We know that those institutions that facilitated political education, like unions and mass parties, have since been seriously damaged, too. In fact, these trends cannot be isolated from one another. As a 2021 OECD report notes, “The decreasing trend in leisure could therefore be seen as linked to the decrease in worker’s bargaining power and decline in trade union density observed in recent decades.” (OECD 2021, 311).
Those mediating institutions that are now in decline did more than merely educate their members and, implicitly and explicitly, “form” citizens who could actively engage in the public sphere. They were also engines for temporal imagination, mediating between the struggles of the present and a future social order that was to be expected and whose coming to fruition depended on these institutions themselves. That genuine public reasoning could be possible under today’s conditions seems fantastical, and in reality, its possibility is dimming by the day. Moreover, we remain in a crisis of political imagination, an interregnum characterized by the discreditation of previous modes of imagining the world otherwise and our collective inability to imagine new modes for doing the same. Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, while often misread, remains the indispensable text here (Fukuyama 1992). Even if the End of History has receded from memory and imagination has become—superficially, I would argue—possible again, the potential for transformation remains materially out of our grasp. Foucault’s “attitude of modernity,” tied so closely to the Enlightenment project, is more and more foreign to us.
If it seems odd to write about the lack of political imagination and transformation in the post-2016 era, I must insist that there is nothing contradictory here. It may seem that politics are back, that the social realm has been reopened after a long hibernation called the End of History. But as Anton Jäger has recently shown in his Hyperpolitics, this suggestion is only true when the notion of politics is highly circumscribed (Jäger 2026). When it comes to questions of who gets what when, when it comes to affecting outcomes through our political activity, we are very far away from such a return. As such, we are very far away from freedom and much closer to Kant’s notion of tutelage: when it comes to the key decisions affecting the mass of people in the West, it is not the “public use of one’s reason” that is the decisive factor. More often, things happen and the masses are given more or less polite or elaborate instruction akin to “Do not argue…” In the academic literature, this is accounted for in the concept of “representation gap” (Berman and Kundnani 2021, 32-35). But through all of our lived experience, we simply know this to be true. In fact, one of the reasons Western politics have gotten so upended and chaotic in recent years is because people are responding to this condition with cynicism: this is why the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore called Donald Trump a “human Molotov cocktail” (Wang 2016). The idea is simply to burn down the system that is so unresponsive to your direction, so out of touch with your conscious reason, not to mention your emotions and desires.
If we return for a moment to Foucault’s analysis, where he says that for Kant, “Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally,” we can say that today the space for the former is increasingly foreclosed. Genuine collective participation has receded from our political horizon as the forces of atomization have shifted into overdrive. If there is a silver lining to the destitution of our present, it lies in the fact that space for the latter action, tied to personal courage and accomplishment, has widened. To read a difficult book in an era of rising functional illiteracy, to “brick” one’s phone so that it becomes temporarily unusable (Kircher 2026), to become a dues-paying member of a voluntary association, to embrace the “creative side of withdrawal,” as Bifo Berardi once put it, and withdraw one’s energies little by little from the capitalist market (Berardi 2011, 139), these are all small acts of resistance. But they are acts which, when undertaken alone, can only ever be fought in service of a losing battle…
TUTELAGE TODAY
If for Kant Enlightenment suggested exit, then de-Enlightenment suggests an entrance, a return. A return to a state of tutelage.
When we return to the description provided by Foucault, that “There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another,” we can now say that this superimposition has been disarticulated. “The public” is in disrepair, as was just articulated above. Likewise, universality has not so much been forgotten as consciously attacked. Growing atomization, the loss of forms of universal subjectivity, has been an object of study for decades. Though it has been quoted innumerable times, Margaret Thatcher’s infamous quip, that “there is no such thing as society,” really is instructive here. The drive to privatize and de-socialize obviously and inevitably weakened the possibility for a Kantian public. Neoliberal capitalism and its imperatives for accumulation have produced and reproduced “the individual” as the predominant social unit. But, drawing on Kant, we know from what has been said above that the individual is precisely that unit that cannot become enlightened. And finally, this notion of “the free” use of reason. In societies which are increasingly sclerotic, undemocratic, and even illiberal, the space for such freedom is largely foreclosed. The return of heavy censorship regimes across the West, coming in forms new and old, marks the turn away from the Kantian desire to reason in public, a desire that became embedded in liberal orders over the past centuries even if it was only ever partially and insufficiently lived up to. We have all lived through the past decade or more and therefore understand that whether it be government repression of speech or cultural shaming thereof, the space for acting like Kant’s reasonable “scholar” is shrinking.
What all this amounts to is this: Enlightenment as freedom of and for public reasoning is fading away while the specter of tutelage is no longer simply on the horizon—it is here now. Tutelage is, first and foremost, a condition of un-freedom: facilitated by un-freedom and in the service of furthering ever more un-freedom. While this tutelage is manifest in myriad places and domains, I want to focus briefly, before closing, on the new technological landscape as an example of this tutelage in action.
Both of the tendencies of tutelage elaborated above are integrated into the logic and appeal of artificial intelligence. Having been trained on infinite quantities of textual data (as well as images, video, and audio), artificial intelligence possesses a level of “expertise” that no human could achieve (let alone the average user of such technologies). Why not ask Claude why you feel so lonely, ask ChatGPT whether you were wrong to break up with your girlfriend, or ask Grok what that rash on your armpit is? In this, we hear clear echoes of Kant’s observation that “If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think…” The temptation to outsource our own capacity for reason is once again rearing its ugly head, but who we are outsourcing it to has changed remarkably: our de-enlightening directors now are largely unknown to us. An algorithm or a training protocol built in secrecy in Silicon Valley is not the same thing as a priest, an officer, or a king.
And then there is all that “irksome work” that Kant tells us about. For different reasons, artificial intelligence, and even much “dumber” computing than that, is handy for delegating any and all irksome activities. Some of this is indeed menial, like writing a grocery list, while some of it can work symbiotically with high-level intellectual activity (even if you have just written a book, who the hell wants to format all those citations?). But the point is that all this delegation has a cost. Irksome as these tasks may be, they are constructively irksome in some small way, building out mental, emotional, or spiritual capacities. By delegating these away, what begins as the extension of human reason becomes its undoing, ushers in its return to tutelage and inhumanity. This is what the dialectic in Dialectic of Enlightenment refers to, “the tireless self-destruction of enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xiv).
There is a humanist point that is important to emphasize vis-à-vis the Enlightenment and modernity, too. As the human geographer Thomas Dekeyser has written, “Despite the often-fierce conflicts between its prominent thinkers, the epistemological project of the Enlightenment tended to center human reason as the primary path into true knowledge” (Dekeyser 2026, 102-103). The emphasis on human is my own, because I think it is worth stressing. If one takes Dekeyser’s point, and even if one is neutral on the question, it is clear that the rise of machine-learning moves us somewhat away from the problematic of the Enlightenment. Relatedly, the practical result of the Enlightenment was, as Jonathan Israel has it, to “raise the level of human wellbeing by improving society’s institutions, education, and basic organization” (Israel 2019, 2). Today, outside the milieu of liberal policy wonks and Silicon Valley booster clubs disguised as think tanks, it is less and less common to find people who think that our institutions are generally sound or trending upwards, that education is improving, or that the basic organizational structures of our societies are fit for purpose. And moreover, the concept of “wellbeing” has been so bastardized in the service of capital that wherever one ostensibly finds it, they are likely in the presence of its opposite.[iv] The epistemological displacement of the human in knowledge production, and the social displacement of actual human wellbeing as a primary good, means that we are, for better or worse, increasingly somewhere beyond the Enlightenment (or back to the conditions that preceded it).
On this question of technology, the lack of imagination and transformation once again become pertinent. In the capitalist mode of production, cybernetics has only produced “a cybernetic time invested in reducing futurity to the stabilization of the present.” Even cybernetic theories which seem to follow dissimilar logics operate with the “shared goal of expanding the present into the future, warding off any radical break…” (Dekeyser 2026, 133, 138). One sees the similarities here with what the late Mark Fisher once called “the eventless horizon of the end of history, in which nothing happens forever” (Fisher 2018, 714). Except now, the End of History is understood not only as an political and ideological condition, but a material, technological one. Let us think back to Foucault’s “attitude of modernity,” where “the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.” Contra this modern, enlightened attitude, our cybernetic present has, in the hands of capital, fostered an attitude which seeks not to imagine the present otherwise than it is, not to transform the capitalist present, but to retain it and project it into the “future.” Over and over again.
With the question of capitalism now definitively raised, we must briefly account for its relationship with the Enlightenment as we have been tracing it here. There is no doubt that capitalism is part of the Enlightenment’s legacy. But if this is true, it is no surprise to me that our era of de-enlightenment has coincided with certain suggestions that capitalism is regressing into or merging with certain pre-capitalist modes of production. The rise of the neo- and techno-feudalism theses are of course emblematic here (Varoufakis 2024; Dean 2025). But there are others. The latest book from Marxist geographer David Harvey, The Story of Capital, mentions “caste” dozens of times, suggesting the intermingling of capital accumulation with other pre-capitalist, feudal-like, modes of production (Harvey 2026). I have yet to be convinced of these theses but, symptomatically, I do not think that it is an accident that the rise of this discourse coincides with the retreat from the Enlightenment and the seeming return of something older.
Nonetheless, it is my view that we are still definitively living under capitalism. And contemporary capitalism, let us draw on Berardi again, is done with modernity. “The dissociation of capitalism and modernity is complete: capitalist rule is getting rid of modern civilization” (Berardi 2011, 159). And so, despite finding its own roots there, capitalism has long since been done with enlightenment, if by enlightenment we mean in general “the disenchantment of the world,” the constant, unceasing “negation of reification,” i.e., the negation of those things which appear settled or natural but are in fact precisely the opposite (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 2, xvii). Through enlightenment, through negating the reification of previous modes of production, capitalism was born. But long ago, enlightenment succumbed to that which it had birthed. If we rely on Horkheimer and Adorno once more, it becomes exceptionally clear that “Once harnessed to the dominant mode of production, enlightenment, which strives to undermine any order which has become repressive, nullifies itself,” it “makes room for the existing order” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 73-74).
Sapere aude! Dare to know! Kant’s motto is precisely Marx’s, insofar as the latter knew that we must strive for the ruthless criticism of everything existing, we must know everything existing by forcing “the dogmatists to clarify their ideas” (Marx 1843). And it is precisely that motto which is day by day fading, giving way to a blank mass which has no desire to direct itself, to reason, to think, nor to ruthlessly criticize or imagine the world otherwise. With capitalism, there is no longer enlightenment. Without enlightenment, there is no future. Any real commitment to the future thus depends on rediscovering the radical core of the Enlightenment, on “putting the once-valid critical concepts to use, not in order to enshrine them as invariants—which, by virtue of their content, they cannot ever be—but in order to exhaust them in the process of their reflection and, perhaps, drive them further” (Adorno 1969)
THE APPROACHING NIGHT
In closing his now famous article, Kant asks himself a question and then answers it: “If we are asked, ‘Do we now live in an enlightened age?’ the answer is, ‘No,’ but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” We may adapt this to our present: We do not live in a fully de-enlightened age, but we do live in an age of de-enlightenment. In other words, there remains a legacy of the Enlightenment at our disposal, remnants of real victories that, while broken, may remain legible enough to one day be put back together, just as broken vases are carefully reassembled in the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi.
But even if there a kernel of hope here, in the fact that our age is not yet fully de-enlightened, it is a fleeting one, because de-enlightenment does seem to be the trajectory we are on. And so maybe Martin Heidegger was right, maybe only God can save us from this epoch (Heidegger 1976).[v] Even if one believes in such divine intervention, there is very little solace to be found there, either. We may yet wait a long while for our salvation (and incur much more suffering as we do). In my most melancholic moments, then, I think that the best we can hope for is to store away those broken remnants and come back to them one day. For, as Horkheimer said in 1940, at the onset of one of the greatest human catastrophes imaginable, “our work is essentially designed to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle” (Horkheimer 1940). With the illumination of the Enlightenment dimming by the day, “night” may indeed be the proper imagery…
ENDNOTES
[i] On the muted nature of this question in the text, Foucault says, “…the question of the immanent teleology of the process of history is posed only in a relatively discreet, almost lateral way.”
[ii] “It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant’s and the other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to define the internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of humanity is moving. Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as humanity’s passage to its adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the overall movement and its basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process. The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history…It is in the reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie” (Foucault 1984, 38).
[iii] Jonathan Israel suggests that Kant’s compromises with authority were not so much principled as undertaken “for reasons of social and political expediency” (Israel 2019, 21).
[iv] “Wellbeing” has become almost entirely synonymous with capitalist growth, and thus measured by wholly inadequate metrics like gross domestic product (GDP). Though not entirely in line with the points raised here, Dirk Philipsen traces this evolution in his The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do about It.
[v] In his translation of this interview, W. Richardson makes the point (footnote twenty-seven) that Heidegger is not likely to be using “God” here in the way we commonly understand, but in a more esoteric way. I think that the point I am only briefly making here stands regardless of that distinction.
REFERENCES
Theodor Adorno, “Draft (Preface) for a New Edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment (Feb. 1969). Translated by James Crane at Substudies. June 12, 2026. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/adorno-draft-preface-for-a-new-edition
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future. AK Press (2011).
Sheri Berman and Hans Kundnani, “The Cost of Convergence.” Journal of Democracy 32, no. 1 (2021): 22-36, 32-35.
Stefan Collini, “Squadrons of Pigs: Stefan Collini on the university system.” London Review of Books 48, no. 10 (2026). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n10/stefan-collini/squadrons-of-pigs
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