Immanuel Kant S Response to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784)

CS 203 Common Lecture

Monday October 24, 2016

Dr. Nadia Bou Ali

Immanuel Kant’s Response to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784)

1-Twentieth century and post modern-critiques of enlightenment

2-Enlightenment as homeless-ness

As a demand for universality and a transcendence of particularities
As the courage to think for oneself
Kasper Hauser example

3-Kant’s Copernican revolution

Previous methods of reflection as optical delusions
Transcendental structures of thought
Valsquez’s Les Meninas and Magritte’s Human Condition
Enlightenment irreducible to a teleology of progress
Age of Enlightenment and not an enlightened age

4-Kant’s Response to the Question what is Enlightenment?

Ethical and pedagogical text, Kant as public intellectual
Enlightenment as critique
Speaking versus seeing (irreducible to liberal freedom of opinion)
Overcoming self-incurred immaturity (quote 1 and 2 below)
Natural law versus ideology (knowledge/ book, religion/ pastor, science/ doctor)
Make full use of understanding
Freedom to make use of reason
Paradoxes of freedom:
Freedom and natural causality:
For Kant the idea that everything is determined by natural cause is made possible by the position that brackets freedom, and conversely only when determination by natural cause is bracketed can the idea of freedom intervene.
Civic and spiritual freedom versus free thinking
Private use of reason versus public use of reason
The “public use of reason” does not simply oppose the individual to their particular surrounding community, but opposes particular communal institutional belongings against a universal exercise of reason

5-Kant as a thinker who offers us an account of the split nature of subjectivity:

Oedipusas Enlightenment figure
As a hostage of his words to the Sphinx
Leaves us with a paradoxical gift of speech
Freedom as the recognition of the causal determination of subjectivity
Oedipus’s ethical act as the choice of the impossible: blindness (while he had always been blind) over suicide
Faced with a moment of terror, an encounter with the truth of his own constitution, Oedipus is reborn as another subject

6-Enlightenment as the persistence of the riddle of the sphinx

Selections from Kant’s “What is Enlightenment”:

“Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from self-incurred immaturity.

Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.”

“I have a book that has understanding for me, a pastor who has a consciencefor me, a doctor who judges my diet for me, and so forth, surely I do notneed to trouble myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; otherswill take over the tedious business for me. Those guardians, who have graciouslytaken up the oversight of mankind, take care that the far greater part of mankind (including the entire fairer sex) regard the step to maturity as not only difficult but also very dangerous.”

“A revolution may perhaps bring about the fall of an autocratic despotism and of an avaricious or overbearing oppression, but it can never bring about the true

reform of a way of thinking. Rather, new prejudices will serve, like the old,

as the leading strings of the thoughtless masses.”