Consequences of Enlightenment.(Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-00

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University

Anthony Cascardi. Consequences of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 265, with index. $54.95 cloth/$19.95 paper.

It is difficult to convey how impressive Cascardi's book is because it is so consistently, even relentlessly learned, lucid, and intelligent. Here I can summarize the argument, which is impressive enough, but the great strengths of the book are its scope, its amazingly precise analyses of various thinkers, and its keen critical sense of the problems that emerge for these thinkers as they attempt to adapt fundamentally Kantian themes for modern situations.

Cascardi presents the book as having three basic projects. On the most general level he hopes "to account for the predominantly `aesthetic' forms in which a critical self-consciousness carried forward from the Enlightenment has survived the critique of enlightened reason that seemed to have reached an impasse in Horkheimer and Adorno" (2). If we take the fundamental feature of the Enlightenment to be a pursuit of individual freedoms based on the critical use of reason, then we have to realize that this movement risks losing to the impersonality of reason the very possibilities of subjective freedom generating that investment in the first place. Therefore the aesthetic becomes the one domain where a model of judgment may be possible that does not lose freedom to the disciplinary force of reason but that instead builds a public world out of reflection on the contingencies of pleasure and of pain that define us as subjects.

Second, once one focuses on this need simultaneously to specify the powers of reason and to explore modes of judgment that preserve roles for contingent subjectivities, it becomes impossible to take at face value the many contemporaries who have treated poststructural theory as posited over against an Enlightenment that it somehow sublates or transcends. Instead "The contemporary critique of the Enlightenment originates from within the Enlightenment itself and must be understood as a consequence or continuation of the Enlightenment, and not as a rejection of its critical program" (49). Rather we continue to extend Kant's efforts to find ways of living within that program without making the sacrifices it demands. Ours is a culture that continues the...

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