Koselleck and Foucault: Crisis, Eschatology and Experimentation

This article responds to the suggestion implicit in Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis that the Enlightenment worldview should be understood as a kind of secularized eschatology. Specifically, I hope to gain more precision about what this apparently vague diagnosis means and what to do about it. To do this, I will place Michel Foucault’s readings of Kant and Baudelaire in ‘What is “Enlightenment”?’ alongside Koselleck’s own account in Critique and Crisis to flesh out some of the conceptual richness that is missing from the latter. I also draw on a number of religious scholars – particularly J.J. Collins – to give a more precise idea what in particular makes Enlightenment eschatological. Thus, I argue that, at the level of its conceptual grammar, Enlightenment rehearses many of the features of what Collins calls the apocalyptic genre. I conclude by suggesting that Foucault’s concept of an experience book provides a model for future philosophies less beholden to the moral-eschatological framework latent in modern critique.