Abstract

This article considers the atypical understanding of the Enlightenment and its goals by the famous German philosopher-innovator I. Kant. The author, examining Kant’s attitude to the Enlightenment, argues that the German philosopher understands the Enlightenment not as the establishment of reason and sciences in all spheres of society, but as the self-determination of reason by its own limits of cognition and knowledge through the critique of reason. The goals of the Enlightenment, according to Kant, are moderate, not progressive and absolute. The goals of the Enlightenment are also determined by the critique of reason – its ability to answer Kantian well-known questions: what can I know, what should I do, what can I hope for, what is a human being? To answer these questions, the reason must be freethinking. Free-thinking, that is, the free search for the correct answers to the above questions and spontaneous reflections on these questions, is also the goal of the Enlightenment. Without freedom of thought, without freedom to seek truth, the reason will be immature and indecisive. Therefore, the Enlightenment provides both a critique of reason and freethinking of reason. Without them, the Enlightenment is impossible. Criticism of reason sets the limits of freethinking of reason and the limits of its cognition. The article argues that Kant’s critique of reason is aimed at the rehabilitation of faith, which compensates for the inability of reason to cognaze noumenal reality and have knowledge about it. Therefore, in Kant’s Enlightenment there is a place for faith, which is atypical for the stereotypical understanding of the Enlightenment as the «kingdom of reason», that is, as its dominance. Kant's understanding of the Enlightenment challenges ideological and traditional views on it as the «Age of Reason». The Enlightenment is rather a process of the application of reason/understanding by individuals in all spheres of social life, than an age of established reason/understanding in all spheres of social life.