Kant's Dare to Know leads him to make a political or at least quasi-political
statement that he really does borrow from the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as
we'll see in subsequent lectures.
This is from paragraph 9, you'll see a slide, in, in the lecture, and I hope you
had, have had a chance to read this.
Kant writes, the touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law for a
people" lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on
itself.
A law would be legitimate only if people would impose that law on themselves.
That is the core, the foundation of democracy.
That's why democracy is an outgrowth of, of Kant's thinking even though he himself
was hardly a democrat because he would have been arrested.
and he was a very cautious man.
but would people impose the law of themselves?
That's really important because it shows you two things about Kant.
The first thing it shows you that he thinks that people should impose the laws
on themselves, that in other words, they shouldn't just follow the law because
somebody is making them do it.
This goes back to Kant's categorical imperative, really.
It's, it's not, if you do the right thing because somebody's forcing you to do it,
that's no great, big deal.
If you do the right thing because you know it's the right thing and you are
acting in accordance with a law that you give yourself, that's a good thing.
That's a moral thing.
In politics, following the law because the policeman is right behind you and,
you know, you might get clubbed or something if you don't follow it, that's,
that's, that's not a great thing.
But if you follow the law because you give that law to yourself, you know it's
the right thing to do.
That's the sign that you are enlightened. and as Rousseau will say, as we'll see
later on, that's a sign of your freedom.
That you're, you're obeying a law that you give yourself.
The other thing to notice about this in Kant is that for Kant, it's really
important that you will follow the law.
[LAUGH] In other words, he doesn't think that when you dare to know and you're
independent as a thinker, that you're going to go wild and crazy.
That actually, no.
If you're really thinking hard, if you're thinking clearly, you will realize that
you want to live in the world where people behave in a certain way.
They behave according to universal laws that they themselves, they give to
themselves.
I mean, in simple terms, if you're stopped at a traffic light and there are
no police around and there's no one else around.
But you don't go through the red light because you decide you want to live in a
society where people obey the rules.
Then, you're, as Kant is saying, free.
And you're enlightened.
You're thinking for yourself.
You're not just afraid to go through the red light because somebody might catch
you, you have decided to live your life in
accordance to, with a rule that you have given yourself.
That is showing that you have entered this path, this path of enlightenment.
the middle way for Kant is important, not just in philosophy.
Remember, I said that contrast to steer a course between the rationalism of
Descartes and the empiricism of Locke and Hume, but he also wants enlightenment to
steer a middle course between obedience to the past and some wild revolution.
Kant is no wild revolutionary.
So, you see in the text that he says, men work themselves gradually out of
barbarity if only intentional artifices are not made to hold them in it.
So, what's intent, in other words, for Kant, again, in the middle course.
On the one hand he's saying, don't put artifices in front of people to keep them
ignorant.
If you take away the obstacles, people will learn.
But he also says, they'll learn gradually.
[LAUGH] So, if you're an aristocrat or whose afraid that people might learn,
Kant is saying get the obstacles out of the way, let them learn.
But he's also saying, they will learn gradually.
You don't have to worry about them learn.
("Kant) is, at the end of the essay, makes an appeal to the King Frederick the
Great.
He makes this appeal and saying to the, to the King and to the King's officials
that you don't have to be afraid.
As he says, argue as much as you will, about what you will, just obey the rules
while you argue.
And here is an important thing about Kant, what we call in this slide, the
public and private use of reason.
Kant says, that, that we in our private use of reason,
when it is in our capacity where we are obeying an official above us.
an officer of the state of the army, somebody who is our boss.
And as he calls out our private use of reason,
we actually can be limited.
We we have to, we have to obey the people who give
us orders.
But as in, in our public user reason, that is as scholars who were, were
thinking about scientific issues or investigating logical problems.
As scholars we have to be free to think as we will so that we can make
intellectual progress.
Again, Kant is steering a middle course, he's telling the officials, don't worry,
we will obey you and so far as, we are, have pledged to serve you.
If you're my boss, I'm going to obey you.
I can think about whether your order is rational,
but I will obey you because that is my obligation.
But if I write about this in the public sphere,
then I should think clearly and logically whether you're right or wrong.
Again, obedience on the one hand, freedom on the other.
this is this is the Kant's typical move.
He is having two worlds.
The noumena, remember that from the early part in the
lecture, the things in themselves, and the
phenomenal.
You can have noumena, you can have the faith.
Things in themselves, phenomenal, you have reason.
In politics you have obedience and you have free thinking.
You have enlightenment but it's gradual.
So, Kant is a crucial figure in the enlightenment, crucial figure for modern
philosophy because he actually thinks so clearly and logically, but for our
purposes, he's also the thinker who says, modernity is here.
You have to do something about it.
You can't just try to keep modernity at bay.
But if you do something about it rationally, if you do something about it
prudently, modernity and enlightenment will not break down the order around us,
it will not destroy our civilization as we know it.
In fact, in the end, it will enhance that civilization.
So, as we conclude with Kant, I have to remind you that Kant was an
extraordinarily complex thinker, and we're just scratching the surface of his
thought in, in this lecture and in this course.
But for our purposes, I want you to remember this, that Kant strove to steer
a middle course in the history of philosophy, that is, he wanted to
preserve an ins, a, a concern with the ideal as well as the real.
He wanted to make room for faith and have reason limited.
He wanted enlightenment, but he wanted it gradual.
Remember, we said that Kant, through his critique of pure reason, established that
we have firm knowledge but we have firm knowledge through our space time glasses
through our minds of the world we create.
They have firm knowledge of that but it might not be the world in itself.
The phenomenal world of which we have knowledge may, is different from the
noumenal world which is what we just believe in with the simple faith, the
simple faith of the common peasant or the common person.
Kant also said that you should dare to know,
dare to know.
Use your reason.
Don't be immature for your whole life.
But he said, when you dare to know and you leave your immaturity, you will do so
gradually.
You'll still obey orders.
You'll, you won't wreck the whole society.
Enlightenment is something we can encourage but it's not something that
will destroy the world as we know it, Kant said, we would really hope.
[LAUGH] A middle course.
He embraced modernity because he didn't think modernity would go too quickly.
Next time, we'll see how Jean-Jacques Rousseau who who wrote books that Kant
loved and Kant was attracted to, how Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes a much more
radical stands.
Rousseau was much more harsh in his criticism of modernity.
Rousseau was willing to say that modernity was a tremendous mistake and
that we had to find a cure for modernity, not a way of encouraging its gradual
development.
We'll talk about that next time.
I look forward to it.