The Philosophy of German Idealism (1) Introduction
v. 1.1
B(2). Reading the texts: What is Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant (1784)
Two hundred years after the publication of What is Enlightenment? the Foucault Reader was published in New York. It contained an article by Foucault on the question What is Enlightenment? Foucault proposed that to us, the question "What is modern philosophy?" would be of the same rank as the question that Kant tried to answer. And he came up with an interesting first answer: modern philosophy is philosophy that tries to answer the question What is Enlightenment? German Idealism, I would add, is the first attempt to create a "modern" philosophy in that sense.
I would also add that if you wanted to find a text that defined our contemporary philosophy as going beyond the Kantian question of the Enlightenment that would of course be Lyotard's text The Postmodern Condition published in French in 1979. In that text he does not try to answer the question what the Enlightenment is, but exactly what modernity is. One might be tempted to say along the lines of Foucault's remark, that postmodern philosophy after Lyotard tries to answer the question "What is modernity?"
(Of course one has to take into account also the way others like Habermas tried to answer that question after Lyotard. Can we say that the relationship between Voltaire and Kant has an analogy in the relationship between Habermas and Lyotard?) It is a perfectly Hegelian strategy to say, that when a text can be written to which an entire era is an object under scrutiny, we have reached a point of no return from which a new period becomes visible.
If Foucault is right here, and I do not doubt it, then we have in Kant's little text more than just a particular text from a lost era. Kant's answer to the question of Enlightenment has to be understood as the question that gave rise to modern philosophy! His way of understanding the question became somehow definitive for the modern philosophy that build upon it. And as we will see, these boundaries might have been stretched by German Idealism, but we are still dealing with same questions of autonomy, freedom and the limits of rationality.
Several basic questions about Kant's text need to be answered quickly. I have pointed out already that Kant answers the question in a negative manner. Enlightenment is first and foremost a process of deliverance (Voltaire) or liberation (Kant) from the status of "immaturity" or tutelage. The German word Unmündigkeit refers both to a state of mind and a legal status. It might have been translated as "being a minor" and "being immature" at the same time. It implies that we ought to have taken responsibility for our own thinking, but we were both unwilling and unable to do so. That it is a lack of will is expressed by a single adjective. This immaturity is "selbst-verschuldet", i.e. it is our own fault, it is an error of the will, and not so much of understanding. Even when people know they are kept in servitude, they choose in a sense freely to accept that as their condition. Like Medroso.
This dual aspect of the expression returns when Kant characterizes the Enlightenment both as an ongoing process and as an obligation. One should learn to use one's own reason and actually "we" are doing that in this era. The Enlightenment has a "motto", i.e. an instruction and a "Wahlspruch" or heraldic device by which it can be recognized. Aude sapere!, dare to know. As an act of an individual it requires courage, but it is also a collective process in which one can participate.
Another ambiguity in the text of Kant is his use of the term humanity. As we already saw in the Dialogue on Freedom, the Enlightenment appealed to the universal nature of mankind. Is the Enlightenment therefore the collective process of liberation by mankind? The rational autonomy seems to imply the universality of reason as well as the universality of the longing for freedom. Medroso however felt "fine" in the shackles of tradition! The tension that Voltaire's little dialogue made apparent in the Enlightenment project are only increased in Kant's article.
We also referred to the tension between the private and public use of reason, so we have no need to go into that again. Private use of reason, to refresh your memory, was reason within the confines of a particular position win society. There cannot be a free use of reason for civil servants, parish priests and soldiers. Citizens are not free: one has to pay taxes, obey local institutions etc.
Did Kant attack organized religion? It seems that Kant's essay is not so much opposing the Enlightenment to faith, but to fundamentalism and dogmaticism. The Enlightenment was not per se opposed to religion as such - Voltaire seemed to have been a Deist and held that position to be self-evident for anyone but a scoundrel. An uncompromising attitude against religion can only wind up as supportive of fundamentalisms of all sort. One may dream of a fully developed rationality where faith has evaporated, like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris would, but the destruction of all that we may hope for (Kant's reformulation of the function of religion) will only lead to another leap of faith. Notably the kind of leap that makes one hope for 70 virgins in the afterlife. Only blind faith is rejected, only faith that is determined by an outside force has to be dealt with severely. Religion - like Hegelian scholar Ad Verbruggen in Holland would argue - is still the "cement" of social life. In the growing tensions between Holland's post-protestant majority and the Islamic minority he calls for a new Enlightenment, a rational transformation of Muslim faith. Can Islam however become "modern" like Christianity has? Would it want to be? Especially when it is abundantly clear that the "modernization" and rationalization of religion leads to a post-religious era of agnosticism or "something-ism"? (In Dutch: "ietsisme" the belief that there is "something" more than the visible world, having some kind of benign influence on personal life, somehow. It's the positive inverse of agnosticism.)
Hegel saw clearly that the Enlightenment had an ambiguous attitude towards religion. On the one hand there was the sharp opposition between Faith and Pure Insight in what we might call the atheist-hypercritical stage of the Enlightenment. (Der Glaube und die reine Einsicht) And then the Enlightenment is portrayed as a battle against "superstition." So on the hand the Enlightenment opposes all religion as mere "faith" and on the other it restricts itself to the fight against superstition and allows for a (moral) legitimacy of religious beliefs.
Now let's turn to the political side of the issue.
Enlightenment reigns whenever the free use of reason and the public use of reason can be identified as one. It would be a definition actually of the Enlightened Age. Already Mendelssohn in his first answer to the question "What is Enlightenment?" made this distinction between our identity as a "human being" and as a "citizen". Citizens are subjected to the dictates of political power. There is no paradox here. A rational despotism can be harmonized with the freedom of the public use of reason. That is how the Enlightenment already in Kant's era becomes a political issue. How can Frederick the Great accept the free use of reason? Only because the general commandment can be expressed as: Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey! Maybe that is the reason the text was compulsory reading for many German students for a ling time. The state-sponsored contribution to their education stressed the idea of free speech and at the same time reinforced the principle of an almost blind obedience to authority!
Disturbing also is the implicit notion that only Frederick has achieved the ideal of the Enlightenment. What is the status of Frederick's own use of reason? Isn't it true that to him, the ruler of all, the individual use of reason and the public use of reason are identical? Isn't he then the only one within society that has achieved the "Enlightened Age"? That would make the text a "piece of popular philosophy addressed to Frederick" (Susan Neimann) as a means of encouraging him to adopt a certain attitude which would in fact only enhance freedom of scholarly debate, without going an inch beyond that.
So on the surface it seems that Kant is not advocating any revolt against political power. However, isn't that merely the surface? Can one device another reading strategy that tries to discover something else in the depth of the text? Especially when the text is addressed to the Big Brother of Prussian society? So what if the big Commandment is: argue whatever you like, but obey! Can it be read as really saying: we will not argue directly against obedience, but arguing is in itself the opposite of obedience. If political power is praised as rational, then it is praised for being no longer a blind and unconditional power, it is susceptive to argument.
There are several arguments for this.
If a pastor finds a particular teaching of the Church "contrary to the very nature of religion" he would have to resign Kant says. That would imply that a soldier or tax official should resign whenever he is faced with a commandment that is contrary to the nature of good government or military policy. But resigning means "not obeying." And the motive for such a resignation would be the individual use of reason.
Even a society of pastors, Kant argues, could not be bound to an authoritative tradition that will "preclude forever all further enlightenment of the human race." There is a litmus test for good laws: "can a people impose such a law upon itself?" The autonomy of the people in government does not need to be real, in order to function as a yard stick with which to measure the validity of laws. The principle of autonomy is used even without it being effective in reality through democratic procedures. (And one might add, the criterion is valid even against the formal democratic procedures themselves. It provides some sort of substantial criterion for democracy. It would rule out that one can say: well, the people just did, through the process of representative democracy!)
Finally, Kant speaks about the necessity of public debate in a struggle against "the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function." A governmental institution that does not function as it should, should be redirected towards its goals through public scrutiny. There is obviously some power in the public use of reason. Kant did not intend to let the arguing remain outside the sphere of obedience. What Susan Neimann has called one of the many contradictions in Kant's text might therefore be reconstructed as a firm suggestion that the use of political and religious power be restricted to what can be rationally validated. In fact, the debate among scholars - some kind of elite conversation - becomes the ultimate touchstone of the rationality - and that means the validity - of government.
So Kant certainly did not aim at a political transformation, yet his underlying assumption seems to be that the freedom involved in the rational and public debate extends also into the individual use of reason and is a criterion for the exercise of political power.
[Let me rephrase that. Kant is saying that those who use reason must in some way avoid revolution, i.e. the direct confrontation with state power. One should resist the irrationality of state power by withdrawing from it and creating this new space of public reason and scholarly debate outside its control. Was Kant in fact facing the same two political attitudes that we can find in our present era? The "cynical indifference of consumerism" might be represented by the figure of Medroso in Voltaire's dialogue. He can still feel good even within a dictatorship. And then there is the "violent fundamentalism" that aims to destroy the liberal universe. The gap between the postmodernist resignation and withdrawal from emancipatory projects and Kant's apparent acceptance of enlightened despotism does not seem to be so great. If I'm right with my reading of Kant, Kant's insistence on the possibility of public reason, intended to be a revolutionary undercurrent in society rather than a revolutionary frontal attack, is then also not so much different from Žižek's third option: because the Big Other is still functioning in the guise of second nature, we need to begin to make informed choices. In other words, we need not rush into doing good things, we need theory. Only theory can help us reclaim our subjectivity beyond market-mechanism and ideology. Only theory can help us understand the need for a rigorous (terrorist) egalitarianism. Doesn't that at least sound Kantian? Yes, said Kant, we need theory and freedom of speech and we can do without mindless fundamentalist violence, but we need a Critique of Reason to find this freedom.
R.A. Veen © 2010
Jürgen Habermas, Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985.
PhoS (Miller), pp. 321-328 and 329 - 349 resp.
The "Berliner Monatschrift" wherein it was published is more akin to a newspaper like the Sun in great-Britain (or in Holland: de Telegraaf) than a scholarly magazine.
Simon Critchley in Infinitely Demanding, quoted in Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 339. The distinction between these two attitudes is Critchley's.
The Philosophy of German Idealism - B. the texts - Robbert Veen
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