Revisiting Enlightenment: Lantugi as Rational Discourse

Abstract

This paper revisits the Enlightenment as conceptualized by Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, and key figures in the Frankfurt School. Kant construes the Enlightenment as an emergence from self-incurred immaturity, i.e., dependence on authority. Foucault reframes Kant’s question as an interrogation of the present. I then trace Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis that the Enlightenment risks becoming an instrumentalized myth and present Habermas’s corrective of communicative rationality as a procedural way to recover the emancipatory promise. Reflecting on my fieldwork with an apologetics community in Bohol, I argue that lantugi captures Habermas’s vision for undistorted discourse and thus offers a local, practice-based, non-Eurocentric pathway for re-anchoring the public use of reason, conditional on light institutional supports (rotating moderation, archival practice, civility norms). Lantugi is one of the possibilities for rebuilding deliberative capacities from below.