This study argues that it would be a foreshortening of Enlightenment discourse to regard prejudice merely as one of the bugbears the Enlightenment set out to dismantle. Rather, the discourse on prejudice served as a mode of self-enlightenment. Anthropologically oriented arguments advanced in literary and popular philosophical reflection on prejudice unsettled the rational certainty with which prejudices were criticized and replaced by the truth. Inquiries into the function of prejudices and attempts to find ways of engaging with them figured as substitutes for philosophical concepts and typologies.