Between shadow and lights: the culture of curiosity and its ambivalences in the 18th century

Abstract

In the 20th century the Enlightenment was the target of radical criticism. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in 1944, the german philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in particular, wanted to show that, in the very process of its development, the Enlightenment resulted dramatically in its opposite. Instead of working for a more humane society, the Enlightenment’s rationality would have degenerated into a form of positivism and technicality, leading to a new form of barbarism and oppression, against which the Enlightenment, however, rose. This reading of the Enlightenment made sense in the context of a question about the advent of totalitarianism and nazism. But at a time when certain fundamental principles of the Enlightenment are, on all sides, violently or cynically questioned, investigating this judgment would seem particularly inappropriate. However, it is not a matter of limiting itself to presenting a radiant Enlightenment that contributes to the invention of freedoms with unanimous enthusiasm, in a simplistic view of the progress of the human spirit. The Enlightenment phenomenon is rich in tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that should not be ignored. We would like to focus here on one of the most emblematic manifestations of this ambivalence: the emergence of a new culture of curiosity whose advent is inseparable from the Enlightenment.