THE ENLIGHTENMENT
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when one may hope thereby, after a longer or shorter period, to
reach the goal itself: a totally elucidated world, capable of being
ordered as a reasonable world. This eschatology of the religion of
enlightenment has been its most powerful motive force, and at the
same time not only a fundamental error but also its doom in prac–
tice: for this belief in the totally reasonable world has become, in
the modern mass movements, a practice of anti-enlightenment, has
become the modern systems of terror.
If,
after this most bitter experience (or rather, in the midst of
it), we nevertheless wish to speak affirmatively of enlightenment,
we can do so only with a view to an enlightenment enlightened
about itself. This means, above all: such an enlightenment must be
enlightened as to its limits. It must comprehend itself as a movement
directed toward true knowledge, a movement which does not postu–
late any sort of results beforehand, especially not definite over-all
results, to say nothing of its own total success, but which first, last,
and always admits the validity of the "unknown," as its own con–
trary. It must win terrain from the unknown, as much terrain as
possible; yet
it
must have no terror of the unknown-enlightenment
demands a brave spirit. But it must not overhastily seek to know
how much "unknown" may remain, and whether it can itself ever
attain fulfillment. Yet more: in following this course, it can recognize
certain boundaries which it clearly sees that it cannot cross. In the
non-human realm (as today in theoretical physics) or in the human
realm, it may repeatedly encounter limits where its impulse becomes
powerless and hence meaningless, where certain congeries of facts
escape its methods. Man knows certain "secrets," partly through
tradition and experience, partly through revelation; there is also a
third way of discovering them (or of confirming them) -through
an enlightened enlightenment, and it is one of the most impressive
experiences of the last century that honest work toward enlighten–
ment repeatedly comes upon such phenomena, to the astonishment of
its practitioners. Today in psychoanalysis and the therapy which
goes with it, the possibility of freedom, guilt, and grace is more and
more clearly disclosed: the methodology of the laws of science, ap–
plied to men, reveals that it is incompetent in these matters.
American positivist sociologists discover the freedom of the per–
son, that is: they discover the real limits of their positivism itself,
