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SYMBOL AND TEXT. Where the Enlightenment is concerned, there are few philosophical texts which are so often cited as Kant's famous essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?1 This occasional text, which started out as an answer to a question raised incidentally in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, has in the course of the last two hundred years grown to become the symbolic text of the philosophical Enlightenment.2 The reasons for this are obvious. It is a text which, in terms of its textuality already displays a number of features traditionally associated with the phenomenon of the Enlightenment. To start with, there is the element of self-reflection and selfjustification. In Kant's text, the Aufklärung seeks to give an account of itself, and tries to understand and explain itself. In addition, the text's pronouncements are those of an intellectual who speaks out freely, relies on his own understanding, and addresses a broad public via a readily accessible text. As a piece of writing, What is Enlightenment? is thus thoroughly "enlightened." Yet we also find the classic agenda of the Enlightenment in Kant's very argument. Characteristic here is the plea for the emancipation of thinking and the insistence on the importance of thinking for oneself (sapere aude). Equally typical is the link which is made between this question and the political conditions which make it possible: Kant refers expressly to the need for politically guaranteed publicity, in which this independent thinking can be articulated freely and without hindrance. One final recognizable feature is the way in which the Enlightenment becomes embedded in an historical-philosophical dynamic, which is intended to demonstrate that the Enlightenment is inevitable because it is ingrained in the very nature of things, and that it should therefore be immediately promoted and brought about.
Therefore, it is not surprising that in numerous publications both past and present, What is Enlightenment? figures as a model text for the Enlightenment, or what is taken to be the Enlightenment.3 This is no less true in Habermas's reading of What is Enlightenment?* and in that of Foucault.5 They may avoid offering a predictable reading of Kant's essay, but like many others they all too readily refer What is Enlightenment? back to a number of central ideas and insights...