Curvaceous Enlightenment

Close to the so-called Vienna Gate, Bécsi Kapu, on the Várhegy, Castle Hill, is a statue which metaphorically commemorates Ferenc Kazinczy, a man of the Enlightenment. The female figure holds a lantern, symbol of the light of Reason; her form is slender, the curves of her body are light and soft. The Enlightenment in feminine guise softens the edge of rationality, seems to remove a little of its intellectual dryness, that progressive’s self-assertion, and to confer on it a supple and even amorous understanding—something that perhaps might save it from that dialectic of progress and violence which, according to the famous analysis by Adorno and Horkheimer, is forcing our civilization into a fatal spiral.