Kant’s View on Enlightenment

Recently I have been rereading some of Immanuel Kant’s essays after picking up a used copy of Ted Humphrey’s translation, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Abebooks. I probably first read these separately more than 10 years ago as an undergrad, and, as I think is common at that stage, rather than retaining anything specific the essays formed more of a general philosophical foundation. Given that, I thought it might be interesting to do a series of mini-reviews of the essays and explore what, if anything, they have to teach us now.¹

One essay, written in 1784, that I am sure had some effect on my thinking was “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”. One immediately enjoyable aspect of the essay is Kant’s forthrightness. He answers the question in the title in the first line.

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.

Immaturity, in this context, is the inability to use one’s “understanding” (eg. powers of reason) without guidance. Kant appears initially to solely blame people’s laziness and cowardice for the immaturity by describing it as self-imposed. But, Kant also apportions blame, sarcastically, on “benevolent guardians” that keep people, and Kant draws specific emphasis on women² here, in this state of immaturity by keeping them unable to reason and then constantly showing them the danger of it.

Kant’s explanation of the causes of immaturity here are plausible and recognisable to us. The first line is an individualist explanation and the second more structural. The second line of blame is similar to many current criticisms of “elites” in liberal democracies as paternalistically maintaining a self-serving consensus on economic, social and foreign policy issues. What is amusing is that, two of the three examples of immaturity he cites are the use of “a book to serve as my understanding” and “a physician to determine my diet for me”. These seem like odd cases to pick out. They are cases where someone recognises they don’t understand something and are using a book to help them or deferring to an expert. Hardly immature. But really, Kant’s point is strongest with the second example: “a pastor to serve as my conscience”. This is the classic case that really makes sense as the cause of immaturity. The key point is not about a pastor or religion in particular, rather it is about something else taking the place of or completely guiding one’s conscience.

So what are we supposed to do about this immaturity? In the first instance, Kant is clear in what we should not do. In what might be an affront to modern sensibilities, for Kant the path to enlightenment is not through the overthrow of the “guardians” or a revolution of one’s political structure. He is pessimistic that this will only likely replace one set of prejudices with another without removing the underlying state of immaturity. This is because Kant thinks a revolution can never truly reform the way people think, which is at the heart of immaturity. Enlightenment must be achieved slowly. Unfortunately for Kant history I think has clearly shown up this bit of speculation. The revolutions of the 19th and 20th century, from Russia, to China, to Iran, and the liberal cultural revolution in the west, have shown the full power of the state. Even if revolutions start as bottom-up movements, they typically end with an overturning of political authority and the use of the state to change how people behave and think. Perhaps Kant could not imagine this development of state capacity.

So what is the path to enlightenment? It is to have the “freedom to use reason publicly in all matters”. This is perhaps the most important idea in the essay and the one with the most insight for us more than 200 years later. To understand what Kant means by it we need to understand the distinction he makes between the public use of reason and the private use of reason.

The private use of reason is the use of reason in one’s capacity in an appointed role. As an example, a pastor will use reason privately in delivering a sermon, or an officer of the state might reason the best way to implement some policy. This use of reason can according to Kant be restricted because it involves guiding those in approtined roles to some collective ends. In contrast, the public use of reason is the use of reason in one’s capacity as a citizen who reasons sincerely and addresses all other citizens as equals in their society. Kant repeatedly refers to this capacity as being like a scholar reasoning about some topic purely to seek the truth. This an oddly egalitarian view compared to a lot of contemporary discourse that demands a knee jerk deference to academic credentials in matters that involve moral and political decisions. This view also doesn’t mean a pastor or an offer of the state can’t reason publicly. A pastor would use reason publicly when debating the role of religion in his society, or state officers to question the justice of the policies being implemented. To that end, the freedom to use reason publicly is not just the individual freedom or willingness to do certain mental activities like evaluate the rightness of laws, rather it is to have the social freedom to voice those judgements and debate them openly in front of everyone. It also means a society or even a private association should not be allowed to bind itself to some unalterable law or creed. This is because that would undermine any hope of enlightenment.

It is hard to overstate the historical importance of this distinction. It is one of the earliest attempts at a framework for social freedom that would allow political disagreement to coexist with a free and stable society. For better or worse it is part of the foundations of what eventually becomes the liberal conception of the person and society. But, I believe the framing is useful for modern egalitarianism as well. It provides a useful way to see how the social freedom to reason and express one’s sincere thoughts remedy the inequalities between employer and employee, provide people with equal standing in political discourse and allows all to achieve enlightenment equally.

For one example of this use, take social media policies in Australia. It is now a legal precedent that employers in the public and private sector may restrict what employees can say in public outside work hours with the threat of termination. This was central in Israel Folau’s termination from the Australian Rugby Union team, and the ABC’s social media policy for its journalists. But the issue is not restricted to social media. Cases like Andrew Thorburn’s show that membership of other private associations are also acceptable grounds for employer restrictions or termination. What is worrying is that some of the reasoning around these issues is upside down. There is an implicit thought that it is right to restrict how people reason in public but their reasoning in private must be left alone. This is why analyses of these cases get distracted with ideas of resolving some tension between rights to religion and speech, employer restrictions being permissible so long as they fit an employee’s ‘crime’ or there is some incompatibility between the values of private associations that individual belongs to. Kant’s distinction shows us the real issue is about whether it is permissible for a person’s sincere reasoning before their fellow citizens to be restricted by their employer. If enlightenment is an end that we think all should have the opportunity to achieve then it requires allowing much more freedom for the public use of one’s reason (whatever its use may be).

But of course, as Kant points out, this does not mean that the private use of reason may not be permissibly restricted whether in a workplace or within a private association. After all, an employment contract is simply a contract that one will follow instructions to do and say certain things within the workplace. In addition, taking Kant’s idea of enlightenment seriously doesn’t require absolute free speech. For Kant the public use of reason should be free because it is valuable. It allows for enlightenment as a process of people emerging out of immaturity and using reason to govern themselves in keeping with their dignity as human beings. To that end, restrictions on free speech are justified insofar as they help achieve that enlightenment. This means that a regime of freedom to use public reason can and should involve restrictions on communication that does not hinder others to reason, to be heard or considered. Speech that incites violence, vilifies or demeans a person would to varying degrees do that and would be justifiably restricted to varying degrees.

One weakness of Kant’s view is his individualism. Kant seems to think that only individuals can reason publicly. But this is simply not the case, people can reason publicly on behalf of their associations like political parties, or trade unions. An example of this problem is Kant’s insistence that priests reasoning before their congregation is “merely a private use” of reason. This is an odd thing to commit to as it seems whether it is a use of private reason depends on what the priest says and the circumstances in which they say it. This is because even within their role as a priest their commission from a church or religion organisation can be to speak publicly to non-christian or on the import of religion to the operation of the state. The extent to which the priest is free of private and public sanction would depend on what they are saying and who they are addressing. The church is free to restrict the priest’s reasoning on their behalf, but the priest may carry on outside of this role.

One interesting part of the essay is Kant’s praise for Fredrick II of Prussia’s monarchy as genuinely promoting the public use of reason and not merely tolerating it. This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it clearly shows Kant’s proximity bias. It seems to never occur to Kant that other more constitutional forms of government would be more conducive to protecting the social freedoms that allow for enlightenment. History has pretty clearly proven this correct. The second reason is that Kant’s praise does highlight the crucial difference between the form of government and the substantive policies that government pursues. This makes it clear that substantive policies cannot be justified lazily as ‘democratic’ or impugned by the same measure. Policies must be justified on how well they achieve a just state of affairs.

Despite his forthrightness on the nature of enlightenment, Kant is surprisingly honest that his own time is not enlightened but merely enlightening. What about us? Do we live in an enlightened age? I think we have reason to be as humble as Kant. Liberalism is undoubtedly the prevailing ideology of our time. In turn it has given rise to its own dogmas of identity politics, superficial virtue over material analysis, and the valuing of autonomy above all else. This, like many ideologies that prevailed before it, has formed its own level of immaturity. One solace is that Kant at least provides one sort of hopeful answer on why we should care about enlightenment at all. Enlightenment matters because human beings are more than mere machines. They are beings with a certain dignity that requires treating them in a way that allows them to think freely.