BOOK REVIEW: VASILE MUSCĂ, “ILUMINISM ȘI ISTORISM [ENLIGHTENMENT AND HISTORICISM]”. CLUJ-NAPOCA: GRINTA, 2008, 191 P.

Abstract

“What is the Enlightenment?” is one of the most significant questions ever asked, a question that, in many ways, has shaped the world we live in. Either blaming or celebrating the movement, the answers to this question have attempted to contribute to the understanding of the modern world for more than two centuries now. The question started to infiltrate the European political and philosophical thought in the seventeenth century, although it received full articulation only in the late eighteenth century, when it engendered a spirited discussion about what had already been perceived as a decisive shift in Europe’s sense of itself.

The late eighteenth-century debates on the changes brought about by the enlightened age stem from German soil and are notoriously associated with Berlinische Monatsschrift, the magazine that launched the challenging invitation of answering the question “What is Enlightenment?” in 1784. The question then produced two of the movement’s best known descriptions, by Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant respectively, the latter being influenced by David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” has arguably remained the most prominent and influential, the last decades of the eighteenth century benefited from the contributions of several other thinkers who insisted on aspects that would become the tenets of the Enlightenment, namely the public use of reason, freedom of thought and expression, education, progress, the distinctive engagement with religion and faith, political awareness and revolutionary drives, all of them meant to improve the human condition.