Page - 8 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Introduction8 Our notion of the Enlightenment as a formative cultural and intellectual movement of European modernity is still very largely, and rightly, determined by Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) famous 1784 essay “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” As is well known, Kant defined Enlightenment as “daring to know” (sapere aude)—in broader terms, having the courage to rely solely on one’s reason in making responsible moral decisions, to the exclusion of guidance by any real or supposed external authority—and as the pursuant “emancipation of humanity from its self-incurred immaturity.”11 As such, the Enlightenment is supposedly predicated on a character and set of values that are universally human and “cosmopolitan,” as well as essentially secular and anti-authoritarian12 (even though some interpretations have stressed its ten- dency to assume a specific kind of intransigent dogmatism, capable of lapsing into an authoritarianism worse than had ever been known before13). Accord- ing to textbook knowledge, while cosmopolitan, the set of cultural and intel- lectual attitudes styled as “enlightened” seems to have been specifically bred (after some English and Dutch antecedents) within the confined milieu of French, particularly Parisian, literary and philosophical ambiences, from which they were disseminated elsewhere: as far as “diversity” in the European Enlightenment14 emerged as a research question, it was explored in terms of the proximity achieved, or the distance still retained, vis-à-vis the Parisian model in a process of reception, the outcome of which was more or less pre- dictable according to the level of overall social and cultural “development” in the recipient environment.15 Thanks to the more intense involvement of historians and in general con- textually more sensitive scholars in academic work on the Enlightenment over the past two generations, this monolithic and “obvious” notion has undergone a series of important modifications. Overall, these changes amount to the extension of the very idea of the Enlightenment from a social and moral 11 Immanuel Kant, “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? [1784],” in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58–64. 12 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1967–69). 13 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1944/47]). 14 Roland Mortier, “Diversité des Lumières,” in Unité et diversité de l’empire des Habsbourg à la fin du xviiie siècle, ed. Roland Mortier and Hervé Hasquin (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1988), 15–24. 15 László Kontler, “The Enlightenment in Central Europe?,” in Discourses of Collective Iden- tity in Central and Southeast Europe (1745–1945), vol. 1, Late Enlightenment, ed. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 33–44.