Moderation or Audacity? Kant, Spinoza and Leibniz and the Enlightenment

Mogens Laerke (University of Aberdeen)

In his 1784 contribution to a Berlinische Monatsschrift essay contest on the topic “What is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant famously answered the question by arguing that the Enlightenment is, as Michel Foucault has later put it, a certain “attitude” expressed by the  slogan “Have the audacity to know!” This paper attempts to ask Leibniz the question that Kant replied to in 1784. If, according to Kant, the enlightened philosopher is characterized by audacity and courage to think for himself, what is he characterized by according to Leibniz? What stand did Leibniz take in relation to the kind of philosophical audacity later recommended by Kant? And what kind of intellectual attitude characterizes the enlightened mind for Leibniz himself? In this interrogation, Leibniz’s relations to Spinoza, this “most audacious innovator,” plays a crucial role and provides important information about the philosophical heritage that a Leibnizian analysis of the Early Enlightenment will reveal that Kant implicitly took up with his slogan. This analysis also provides an important key to understanding the “moderate” alternative that Leibniz defends against the “audacious” (rather than “radical”!) intellectual attitude shared by Kant and Spinoza.