‘What is the Enlightenment? Questions for the 18th Century’

“What is the Enlightenment?” This is the title of an essay by Immanuel Kant whose 300th birthday is celebrated this year. A major exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin asks this question anew. “What is Enlightenment? Questions for the 18th Century,” curated by Liliane Weissberg, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts & Sciences, offers a large collection of objects to reflect on the nature of the Enlightenment and its continued significance. The exhibition is open through April 6.

The Enlightenment is viewed today as an age of reason, science, human rights, and liberty. It was also an age when all of those promises and ideals could not be met. While demands for political freedom were issued and new social models proposed, the texts in which these were put forth were often contradictory and rarely translated into practice, Weissberg says.

“The demands of the Enlightenment—equality, human rights, emancipation, democracy—were not being fulfilled then but are also still in discussion now,” she says.

Rather than presenting the concept of the Enlightenment as a crystallized moment in time, the exhibition looks at “the long 18th century,” running roughly from 1660 to 1810, as a dialogue between differing ideas, perspectives, and interests. The exhibit itself is structured like a kaleidoscope, offering new constellations of ideas and objects. Shift it, turn it ever so slightly, and the viewer will see new patterns, new colors—and perhaps see the world in a new way.

The exhibition contains more than 400 objects across two floors, including etchings, sculpture, oil paintings, historic microscopes and globes, documents, books, and clothing. The objects are rare, and many are being shown for the first time, Weissberg says.

There is pottery made by the industrialist Josiah Wedgewood, who produced a ceramic medallion in support of abolition depicting an enslaved man kneeling and pleading beneath the words, “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” but whose company was also famous for its sugar bowls, for example, receptacles for a product harvested by enslaved people, Weissberg says.

The exhibition includes a loose dress designed for young children, who were encouraged to be free, curious, and unrestricted according to new pedagogical models; pedagogy was a fundamental discipline at the time, Weissberg says. But it also shows another type of dress, to which are attached straps called Gängelbänder intended to restrict the child’s movement. It helped control the body and such physical control was needed for the education of future soldiers. Kant used the Gängelband as a metaphor in his work as the opposite of personal freedom.

One of the lead objects is a wooden model of the human eye, created in 1700. The eye is the organ of the Enlightenment, Weissberg says. “We started with an idea of where ‘enlightenment’ comes from,” she says, noting that the etymology of the word means “into the light,” an English translation of the French “Lumières” and the German “Aufklärung,” which comes from meteorology: the sun rises and the clouds move aside.

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The Enlightenment focused on the question of light as the means for observation and proven evidence, Weissberg says. It was a period obsessed with organization and categorization, seen through various collections, the invention of the museum, or Carolus Linneaus’ system of binomial nomenclature, which is still used in modern taxonomy to name and classify organic species.

“The eye is what carries you through as something that is supposed to be reliable but isn’t always,” Weissberg says, noting that the eye can mislead, confuse, or be tricked. “It is particularly poignant for something like a museum exhibit, where you go in and see.”

The exhibition is accompanied by English and German catalogs, with contributions from scholars across countries, including philosopher Jürgen Habermas, as well as Roger Chartier, Annenberg Visiting Professor in History and Professor at the College de France, and Anne Norton, the Stacey and Henry Jackson President’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science, as well as 21 video interviews with prominent philosophers, scholars, and artists, who talk about the significance of the Enlightenment for their fields, including Drew Weissman, the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research in the Perelman School of Medicine.