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Articles

The Enticing Light of Progress

Helena Moradi asks if the promise of pure progress is problematic.

In November 1784, the Berlinischer Monatsschrift published an article titled ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ The article’s author was Immanuel Kant. His famous answer was, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-inflicted immaturity (Unmündigkeit).” This long-standing question is a historical staple that continues to preoccupy the present. Two hundred years later, the French post-modern philosopher Michel Foucault still asks it in What is Enlightenment? (1984). In this essay, Foucault claims that modernity finds itself with a constant desire to know where we are right now.

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