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Immanuel KantWhat Is Enlightenment?
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1784A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Thinking for Oneself
The Age of Enlightenment valorized human reason, and Kant is squarely situated in this tradition. The capacity for independent thought is among the most important components of his definition of enlightenment, which he says from the outset entails developing from immaturity into full adulthood. Enlightenment for Kant, like other Enlightenment philosophers, means overcoming persistent sources of error by returning to a source of true knowledge. For Kant this source is the capacity to reason.
The sources of error Kant is concerned with include custom and tradition, but they also include individuals’ own prejudices, biases, and interests. All humans possess reason; it is a public resource, so it does not favor any one person’s point of view over anyone else’s. Kant tells readers to “Have the courage to use [their] own understanding” (41, 8:35), but the structure of everyone’s understanding is the same, as his other works, especially the Critique of Pure Reason, make clear.
Thinking for oneself, then, means thinking disinterestedly—i.e., from a broader point of view than just one’s own. In a sense, thinking for oneself from the standpoint of reason means thinking for everyone. This is why Kant puts so much emphasis on the public use of reason over the private. Autonomy of thought involves thinking and acting on the basis of reasons that all people can in principle share, and it should appeal to no authority outside of reason itself.
Kant’s discussion of the temptation not to think for oneself presents some of his most forceful language and use of metaphor: If I have others to tell me what to believe, think, and do, “I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me” (41, 8:35). This condemnation of laziness and corresponding call to think for oneself find many echoes in contemporary discourse. The caricature of one’s opponents as “sheep” unquestioningly following a particular authority (or the social pressure to conform) directly calls back to Kant’s livestock metaphor. Again, however, this is not a celebration of rugged individuality, but a reminder that what makes people independent thinkers is reason, which is something all humans share. While people may have different talents and follow different inclinations in their private lives, the realm in which they think for themselves reflects what unites rather than divides humanity.
Freedom of the Pen
Referring to the freedom necessary for enlightenment as freedom of the pen rather than freedom of speech highlights that the freedom Kant wants is much narrower than the contemporary understanding of freedom of speech. The freedom Kant has in mind is the freedom to present claims and arguments to a community of scholars—in other words, to a community of people striving to see matters from the point of view of reason. This model of public discourse presumes that the participants will try to argue in good faith and assume a disinterested standpoint.
This employment of reason is public because it does not rely on any previously established goals. Private uses of reason largely involve reasoning about the means to a certain given end. In the public use of reason, ends may be up for debate. Public reason also cannot rely on appeal to any authority outside of the authority of reason itself; arguments presented in the public sphere must in principle be ones anyone can accept, and this will not be the case if any party appeals to an authority that others might not recognize. Such authorities could include political or intellectual leaders as well as religious texts or doctrines.
Public discourse is not a realm of no authority then; reason itself generates the authority. The public use of reason is autonomous in that it governs itself: It internally generates certain rules that discourse then submits to in order to be truly public. Kant gestures at the rules and norms governing public discourse when he says that the cleric “has complete freedom, indeed even the calling, to impart to the public all of his carefully considered and well-intentioned thoughts concerning” church doctrine (43, 8:38, emphasis added). The freedom, then, pertains to a certain kind of speech made with a certain kind of motive.
Despite the relative narrowness of this “freedom of the pen,” many contemporary arguments for free speech stem from the same Enlightenment impulse and apply primarily to the type of speech Kant has in mind. Readers may be familiar with the notion that free speech does not apply to acts like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, but Kant’s notion of freedom of the pen opens a door to even tighter constraints.
The Separation of Church and State
The Age of Enlightenment gave rise to the notion that the church and the state should operate in totally separate spheres—the so-called separation of church and state. This idea, enshrined in the founding documents of the United States by their Enlightenment authors around the same time that Kant was writing, is more radical than the arrangement Kant argues for under Frederick the Great. Lutheranism was the established state faith of Prussia at the time, and clergy of the Prussian church were government employees. Kant does not argue against this arrangement.
The fact that the Prussian clergy were ultimately accountable to King Frederick sheds new light on the importance of Kant’s distinction between public and private uses of reason. The monarch might control the actions of the clergy when they are operating in their official clerical capacities but cannot legitimately prevent them from employing reason for the enlightenment of the public. Governments must allow those within and subject to them to engage in public discourse even when that discourse criticizes the government and its laws. The same goes for other institutions: Members of the clergy, Kant maintains, can criticize church doctrine as scholars without in any way threatening the functioning of the institution of the church.
The role of the government—the monarch, in Kant’s case—becomes to safeguard the freedom of the pen, whether from government overreach or from non-governmental church officials looking to restrict criticism of the church. In keeping with social contract theory, Kant maintains that the authority of the monarch “rests on his unification of the people’s collective will in his own” (44, 8:40). A monarch must therefore act in the interest of the public’s enlightenment, which includes “prevent[ing] anyone from forcibly interfering with another’s working as best he can to determine and promote his well-being” (44, 8:40).
Contemporary US separation of church and state not only protects citizens from church authority but also protects religious institutions from government interference. This would have been impossible in Kant’s Prussia because the church was a state institution. Nevertheless, Kant anticipates a contemporary understanding when he argues that part of the government’s role is to protect the citizenry from religious overreach.
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By Immanuel Kant
