Maturity and Freedom of Thought

Kant on Enlightenment

Nehmt an, was euch nach sorgfältiger und aufrichtiger Prüfung am glaubwürdigsten scheint, es mögen nun Fakta, es mögen Vernunftgründe sein; nur streitet der Vernunft nicht das, was sie zum höchsten Gut auf Erden macht, nämlich das Vorrecht ab, der letzte Probierstein der Wahrheit zu sein! — Immanuel Kant, Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?, 8:146

This is a rough and ready translation of an essay that I posted earlier in Dutch, as the first part of a four-part series on some of Kant’s minor essays from the 1780s and 90s, which were recently translated into Dutch for the first time and collected in the volume Wat is verlichting? En andere geschiedfilosofische geschriften, ed. Th. Mertens & W. Van der Kuijlen (Amsterdam: Boom 2021). The next part (in Dutch only I’m afraid) will concern moral and external autonomy and Kant’s notion of ‘moralische Waghälsigkeit’ in the context of the general vaccination mandate that Austria and Germany have announced. Parts III and IV will concern Kant’s views on history and teleology and race and physical anthropology, respectively (Dutch-only again).

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Kant’s minor essays are often seen as less important than the major works of the critical period, in particular the three Critiques, the Groundwork and the Religion. This is unfair though. The series of essays that Kant published, in the 1780s and 90s, in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, a well-known monthly in Berlin Enlightenment circles, and once in the Teutsche Merkur, represent in nuce, and often in a stilistically superior writing style, the core ideas of Kant’s thought. At the same time, in those essays various themes are broached which are not or only tangentially dealt with in the major writings. One theme that runs through Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (henceforth Aufklärung), probably Kant’s most well-known and influential work, a theme that is central to his thought in general, is the notion of Selbstbestimmung or Selbstgesetzgebung. This hangs together intimately with Kant’s views on the centrality of the thinking subject and reason in general, that is, thinking itself. Subjectivity and the rational capacity that each human being possesses, as the measure with which we judge or evaluate anything, is also thematised in Aufklärung in the context of a question that was posed in an earlier instalment of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, namely the question: What actually is enlightenment?   

Kant’s answer to that question diverges from the then as now usual definition or view of Enlightenment—a view that Moses Mendelssohn, too, espoused in his own answer to the question, published shortly before Kant’s in the same journal. According to Kant, enlightenment is not about theoretical knowledge or its dissemination or transference, or the increase in rational knowledge as such, which should be seen as a counterbalance to other non-rational views or ideas of life, religious or otherwise. Nor is it just about scientific progress. On the contrary, enlightenment primarily concerns a way of thinking. For Kant, enlightenment is also always critique, a capacity for critical thinking. Enlightenment is therefore not just theory, or having knowledge (plural: Erkenntnisse), but also a certain perspective on or approach to knowledge, how it can be acquired and applied methodically. The practical dimension is in fact primary. This is evidenced by various passages in Aufklärung.

Let us first look at how Kant defines ‘enlightenment’. ‘Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority,’ Kant writes. ‘Minority is [the] inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another’ (8:35). The term ‘minority’ or ‘immaturity’ is first used by Kant in his early anthropology lectures. In the Friedländer text from the 1775–76 semester, it says for example: ‘The understanding can either be used under the guidance of another, or also without the guidance of another’ (25:541). In the same year that Kant published Aufklärung, he again lectures in anthropology; in the Mrongovius notes of the anthropology lectures from the 1784–85 semester, one finds this same-sounding passage: ‘Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without guidance from another’ (25:1298).

There are a number of core aspects of Kant’s method of analysing that are, here at the outset of the Aufklärung essay, immediately apparent. There is talk of an activity (Ausgang) from a state for which one is to blame oneself; that is to say, that state is not a state of nature in which one simply and blamelessly finds oneself, without our being able to do anything about it. Kant speaks of an ‘inability’ for which one is responsible oneself (selbstverschuldet). After all, every human being possesses by nature a rational capacity, an intellect, which he is able to make use of, and which he also has the moral obligation to make use of.          

This epistemic duty concerns an innate right, the only innate right that a human being has according to Kant, namely his freedom. Human freedom is directly related to the use a human being makes of his or her rational capacity, the capacity for exercising one’s mind. As Kant says, the cause of minority lies not ‘in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolution (Entschließung)’ and ‘courage to use it without direction from another’ (Aufklärung 8:35). Enlightenment is therefore, put succinctly, having the courage ‘to use your own understanding', which Kant reinforces by quoting Horace: ‘sapere aude’, dare to know (Horace writes in his Letters: ‘Dimidium facti, qui coepit, habet : sapere aude, /incipe’).

What is at issue here is authority and autonomy. Every human being possesses the freedom to break free from the authority of another—be that authority a person, institution, or tradition, religion, or culture. Each person can make the decision to think for themselves. Of course, that does not mean that the thinking ‘I’ solely relies or can rely on itself as a source of knowledge! What matters here is where the ultimate formal authority of a particular knowledge claim or claims lies. That is to say, it concerns the possibility of ‘holding-something-to-be-true’, a fürwahrhalten (which is obviously not the same as something being true); and for Kant that epistemic responsibility rests entirely and solely with each individual human being who makes use of his or her own mind.

The connection between freedom and thought is not only mentioned in Aufklärung, but also in an essay that Kant published some two years later, also in the Berlinische Monatsschrift and which played a role in the so-called Spinozastreit, namely, the essay Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren? (hereafter Was heißt). There, Kant makes it quite clear that ‘the freedom to think is opposed first of all to civil compulsion. ... Second, freedom to think is also ... opposed to compulsion over conscience ... [and] third, freedom in thinking signifies the subjection of reason to no laws except those which it gives itself’ (Was heißt 8:144). Those second and last lines are very important and will be discussed in detail when we talk about moral duty and conscience as well as external autonomy in part 1.B [will appear in Dutch]. The first element mentioned here, freedom of thought as opposed to ‘civil compulsion’ or civil coercion, is an important facet that Kant also emphasises in Aufklärung: it concerns the fundamental and incontrovertible public character of thought, ‘namely [the] freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’, as he writes in Aufklärung (8:36). But before we get to that, I want to go back for a moment to the aspect of ‘resolution’ and ‘courage’ that Kant associates with emerging from immaturity, and the question of authority. He writes further:

It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of human-
kind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction …, nevertheless gladly remains minors for life, and that it becomes so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me. That by far the greatest part of humankind ... should hold the step toward majority to be not only troublesome but also highly dangerous will soon be seen to by those guardians who have kindly taken it upon themselves to supervise them; ... Pre-cepts and formulas, those mechanical instruments of a rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of an everlasting minority. (Aufklärung 8:35–6, emphasis added)

What Kant says here can be transferred without much fantasy to the context of our own time, in which an expertocracy is more and more seen as the indisputable measure of truth and anyone who makes independent use of his reason is quickly disparaged as an armchair scientist or—very topical now—a hobby virologist, or put down as a wappie or anti-vaxxer or worse. This situation is, on the one hand, partly determined by the relative decline in trust in the institutions and the worrisome increase in what is sometimes referred to as ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ (a.k.a. ‘post-truth’), a trend that is increasingly becoming apparent in the Covid pandemic that has lasted for almost two years now. On the other hand, science is seen by its ‘fideist’ proponents as neutrally ‘objective’ or completely ideology free as if there was such a thing as the science or as if scientific consensus were not something that is reached only after long processes of internal evaluation and sometimes also beset by controversy and malfeasance (e.g. especially when the pharmaceutical industry is involved). In an extremely complex society such as ours, hyper-specialisation in the various fields of science make that only a multidisciplinary approach can lay any claim to objectivity when dealing with a multifaceted, far-reaching social and political as well as medical and epidemiological problem such as a pandemic. Arrogant and moralising insistence on ‘the facts speak for themselves’, on the so-called clear language of ‘science’—in this case, epidemiology and virology—betrays a blinkered view rather than a sincere wish to solve or mitigate the real problem, in all its social and political ramifications.

The sharp polarisation between science fideists and its critics is fuelled by a distrust on the part of the fideists of any kind of self-thinking, which is by definition denounced as irrational and irresponsible, if not conspiratorial—whether it concerns the self-thinking from fellow scientists whose specialisation is not in virology or epidemiology, critical journalists or indeed laymen. This polarisation increases social pressure and the risk of groupthink, which can quickly degenerate into mass psychosis. We are already seeing the signs of this. It is precisely the political authorities, and increasingly large parts of the mainstream media (with fortunate exceptions), that are currently displaying a culpable inability to pause for reflection, think critically and facilitate a truly critical debate—all with the prima facie attractive-sounding excuse of ‘we don’t have time for reflection, we must act now’.

After almost two years of pandemic without any exit strategy, the media is mainly to be blamed for forsaking its fundamentally critical role towards failing governments and instead lambasting, as a true guardian (Vormund) in state service, those who criticise the government. The media’s active role, as a quasi-propaganda tool of an increasingly authoritarian government, in denigrating or outright slandering (Schwurbler! Staatsfeinde!) those who remain critical, however ostensibly unfounded, and do not comply with the dictates of power, is quite recent. This poses a potential danger to the fundamental freedom to be allowed, within the limits of the law, to have a different point of view and express this publicly, which is precisely what Kant strives to illuminate in Aufklärung. A pandemic, and certainly not one of the magnitude as the one now plaguing us, is not a sufficient reason to suspend that freedom, both the freedom to think and being able to make choices for oneself. When we give up that freedom in favour of public health or a supposed right to körperliche Gesundheit, say, the foundations of a liberal democratic society, in which we have to hold out and tolerate difference of opinion even in crisis situations, are undermined. If you think that the freedom of an individual as its innate right is negotiable, you have never really understood what freedom basically means.

Kant demonstrates a psychosocial insight by way of his Bequemlichkeits-argument: namely, it is all too convenient to be placed under the ‘guardianship’ of an expert or a group of experts, lest one be compelled to think and investigate for oneself. One thus relies solely on the transfer of knowledge by the expert. But by unquestioningly accepting the expert’s absolute authority, as one’s guardian, one in fact also ascribes all responsibility to him. In this way one entmündigt oneself. This implies that per impossibile one wishes to divest oneself of one’s autonomy, the innate capacity of man to follow only that rule or law that one has prescribed or legislated oneself through reason.

Another social phenomenon that Kant touches on here is the lurking groupthink mentioned earlier: people consider maturity not only to be a burden because they find it uncomfortable for themselves, but also ‘very dangerous’. One might be tempted to make up one’s own mind! Here the risk of group coercion (bürgerliche Zwang) and conformity is a real one. This is of course especially true when the state takes on an excessively patronising role or encourages conformism: paternalism is a form of a state-ordained Entmündigung of the freethinking and autonomously acting citizen (paternalism is a symptom of despotism, as Kant says in his Rechtslehre [5:290–1]). But it is not only the state (the monarch, in Kant’s argument) that risks acting outside of its lawful remit here: it is precisely those who set themselves up as guardians, the experts, the media foremost, who may play a censoring role.

Of course, Kant is not saying that we should not rely at all on the expertise or guidance of a scientist, church pastor or physician, or that the state should not have a regulating or steering function at all. It certainly doesn’t mean that anyone can think and express what they like in any arbitrary fashion, without being bound by any rule or law; Freigeisterei (libertinism) is certainly not the motto of the Enlightenment (cf. Was heißt 8:146). Even the greatest nonsense is still subject to laws, Kant says, and certainly thinking, despite its internally anchored freedom, is bound by laws, namely its own laws. Neither thought nor freedom is unbridled (Was heißt 8:145; consider also Kant’s metaphor of ‘the light dove [that], in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space’ [Critique of Pure Reason, A5]).

However, the issue here revolves around the question to what extent and in what sense the individual assigns authority to the expert or body of experts and takes into account the relationship between the transfer of knowledge by the expert and himself as a subject thinking for himself; and, very importantly, the extent to which he is given the space to do so, by the state and by society (including the media).

This brings us back to the first crucial element of maturity that I quoted above from Was heißt: namely, the necessarily public and argumentative or communicative nature of thought. This is an element that resurfaces several times in Kant’s thinking. For example, in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, published six years later, where Kant, in the context of a discussion of the sensus communis, elaborates on the following three ‘maxims of the common human understanding’:

1. To think for oneself; 2. To think in the position of everyone else; 3. Always to think in accord with oneself. The first is the maxim of the unprejudiced way of thinking, the second of the broad-minded way, the third that of the consistent way. The first is the maxim of a reason that is never passive. The tendency toward the latter, hence toward heteronomy of reason, is called prejudice; and the greatest prejudice of all is that of representing reason as if it were not subject to the rules of nature on which the understanding grounds it by means of its own essential law: i.e., superstition. Liberation from superstition is called enlightenment, since, although this designation is also applied to liberation from prejudices in general, it is superstition above all (in sensu eminenti) that deserves to be called a prejudice, since the blindness to which superstition leads, which indeed it even demands as an obligation, is what makes most evident the need to be led by others, hence the condition of a passive reason. As far as the second maxim of the way of thinking is concerned, we are accustomed to calling someone limited (narrow-minded, in contrast to broad-minded) whose talents do not suffice for any great employment (especially if it is intensive). But the issue here is not the faculty of cognition, but the way of thinking needed to make a purposive use of it, which, however small the scope and degree of a person’s natural endowment may be, nevertheless reveals a man of a broad-minded way of thinking if he sets himself apart from the subjective private conditions of the judgment, within which so many others are as if bracketed, and reflects on his own judgment from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by putting himself into the standpoint of others). (5:294–5, emphasis added) 

The concept of sensus communis is actually more applicable to aesthetic judgements, Kant writes, yet before the enumeration of the three maxims of common human understanding quoted above, he says that we can understand it as

the idea of a communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole and thereby avoid the illusion which, from subjective private conditions that could easily be held to be objective, would have a detrimental influence on the judgment. Now this happens by one holding his judgment up not so much to the actual as to the merely possible judgments of others, and putting himself into the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that contingently attach to our own judging; which is in turn accomplished by leaving out as far as is possible everything in one’s representational state that is matter, i.e., sensation, and attending solely to the formal peculiarities of his representation or his representational state. ...In itself, nothing is more natural than to abstract from charm and emotion if one is seeking a judgment that is to serve as a universal rule. (5:293–3, emphasis added)

Kant makes it very clear here that self-thinking is not pure subjectivist Freigeisterei (cf. Was heißt 8:146). Thinking for oneself comes with a certain responsibility that is inherent in the reflexive character of thinking itself. The purposive and justified use of one’s reason, the ‘broad-minded’ way of thinking of which Kant speaks, aims to rise above one’s own subjective prejudice and put oneself in the position of ‘die gesammte Menschenvernunft’, i.e., of ‘everyone else’. We must seek ‘a judgment that is to serve as a universal rule’. This could be called the universalisability requirement that is inherent in maturity, in enlightened thinking. The consideration must be whether I can imagine that my thoughts yield a universal rule. But of course that also applies to the thoughts of the other, in whose at first sight ‘narrow-minded’ world of thought I must be able to put myself.

Mature thinking is not based on a standpoint epistemology, which persists in one’s own bias (Kant’s term is ‘prejudice’) or indeed ignorance, nor on shifting responsibility to ‘science’. Thinking is based on a reflective consideration of a wide range of differing views. Self-thinking is therefore always also thinking with the other. It requires a certain ‘formal’ distancing from one’s own ingrained empirical prejudices or one’s sense of moral-epistemic superiority. We cannot exclude the other simply because we—and by ‘we’ is meant each individual thinking ‘I’ for himself—believe that we have truth on our side, that we consider our view to be ‘the only true one’. Freedom of thought also implies the freedom to be wrong. And the possibility that we ourselves are wrong cannot be ruled out either. Maturity therefore not only means freedom of thought, but also implies a certain epistemic humility.

In contemporary debates about freedom of speech and academic freedom—the latter a subject that is more complex than can be addressed here—it is often said that no-platforming a particular speaker does not imply that his or her specific beliefs are thereby censored. By making the distinction between having beliefs and having a platform to express them, one believes the charge of cancel culture or censorship can be evaded. It is also believed, erroneously, that censorship can only be exercised by the state. But such a distinction comes down to sophistry, based on a misguided distinction between freedom of thought and freedom of publishing. Of course, no one has the right to publish on a particular platform or medium, but in principle denying someone the opportunity—by means of social no-platforming or withdrawing invitations under social pressure, for example—to publicly express their beliefs is de facto censorship.

Kant is very explicit about this in the text from Was heißt quoted in part earlier:

Of course it is said that the freedom to speak or to write could be taken from us by a superior power, but the freedom to think cannot be. Yet how much and how correctly would we think if we did not think as it were in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts, and who communicate theirs with us! Thus one can very well say that this external power which wrenches away people’s freedom publicly to communicate their thoughts also takes from them the freedom to think—that single gem remaining to us in the midst of all the burdens of civil life, through which alone we can devise means of overcoming all the evils of our condition. (Was heißt 8:144)

Freedom of thought implies the ability to communicate one’s thoughts ‘publicly’. If one deprives someone of the latter, one deprives that person of the freedom of thought tout court. As we have seen before, and what Kant again confirms in the quotation above: Freedom of thought only exists ‘in community with others’, to whom we must be able to communicate our thoughts and vice versa. If we exclude someone from that community, then freedom of thought is at stake.

Let me briefly return to Aufklärung. Halfway through the essay, Kant introduces the familiar, and at first blush confusing, distinction between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ uses of one’s reason or speech. We have not come across the notion of ​​a ‘private’ use of one’s reason or speech until now. The private use of one’s speech does not exactly concern an individual person’s right to have his own opinion (freedom of speech). In fact, the private use can be quite limited.

By the latter, Kant means the use a person makes of his reason ‘in a certain civil post or office with which he is entrusted’ (Aufklärung 8:37). This is, of course, primarily aimed at officials of the state and civil servants, whose ‘positive’ function is to achieve certain public goals. As officials, they must be ‘passive’ with respect to their own freedom as citizens of the ‘commonwealth’, to which they belong just like any other citizen. The state must be able to perform its function without interference or opposition from its own officers. As Kant puts it, ‘it would be ruinous if an officer, receiving an order from his superiors, wanted while on duty to engage openly in subtle reasoning about its appropriateness or utility’; he must just obey (Aufklärung 8:37). As functionaries they are ‘passive’, in a sense ‘biased’ as Kant says in the above-quoted passage from the Critique of the Power of Judgement, for they are subject to the heteronomy that comes with their passive role as civil servants. Only as citizens of the commonwealth can those same civil servants also make ‘public’ use of their reason, by actively criticising the same policy that they officially, passively must support. This passive/active distinction also applies to ordinary citizens themselves: as residents of a state citizens passively have to pay taxes on pain of a fine or even imprisonment, and yet as mature citizens of the commonwealth they can at the same time actively criticise tax policy—as long as they pay.

By making public use of one’s reason, Kant means ‘that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers’ (Aufklärung 8:37). It is this public use that is essential to freedom of thought, as we have discussed at length above. And here too in Aufklärung, Kant makes it clear that thinking takes place before a readership (Publikum der Leserwelt), a forum where one can make one’s thoughts known. Everyone, whether public servant, priest or citizen, is a member of a ‘commonwealth’, and therefore ‘a scholar who by his writings addresses a public in the proper sense of the word’ (Aufklärung 8:37). It is striking that for Kant everyone can be a ‘scholar’. So this label is not limited to scientists! To be a scholar in this sense does not mean to possess a vast wealth of knowledge; one can have so much objective knowledge (Kenntnisse), and yet be ‘least enlightened in the use’ one makes of one’s faculty of cognition (Was heißt 8:146, footnote). Self-thinking, maturity, means ‘seeking the supreme touchstone of truth in oneself (i.e. in one’s own reason)’ (ibid.). The maxim to always think for yourself, which is a ‘negative principle in the use of one’s faculty of cognition’, that is enlightenment. And every layman is capable of thinking for himself.

Let me close by quoting the passage in Was heißt which best encapsulates Kant’s view on enlightenment:

Thinking for oneself means seeking the supreme touchstone of truth in oneself (i.e. in one’s own reason); and the maxim of always thinking for oneself is enlightenment. Now there is less to this than people imagine when they place enlightenment in the acquisition of information; for it is rather a negative principle in the use of one’s faculty of cognition, and often he who is richest in information is the least enlightened in the use he makes of it. To make use of one’s own reason means no more than to ask oneself, whenever one is supposed to assume something, whether one could find it feasible to make the ground or the rule on which one assumes it into a universal principle for the use of reason. This test is one that everyone can apply to himself; and with this examination he will see superstition and enthusiasm disappear, even if he falls far short of having the information (Kenntnisse) to refute them on objective grounds. For he is using merely the maxim of reason’s self-preservation. (Was heißt 8:146, footnote, emphasis added)

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© Dennis Schulting, 2021