Great Ideas of Philosophy

Lecture Thirty-FiveWhat Is Enlightenment? Kant on FreedomScope: One of Kant’s last contributions was an essay titled “Was ist Aufklarung?” (“What Is Enlightenment?”).And he answers his question in a word: freedom. Here, the limits of reason and the very framework ofthought both complete and, in another respect, undermine the very project that was the Enlightenment.Kant developed a moral theory based on the powers of a rational being, a theory that placed such a beingoutside the natural realm of causation and within the intelligible realm of freedom. He developed a solutionto the problem of knowledge that subsumed all knowledge under various forms—within “purecategories”—that exhausted the epistemological possibilities. His famous “answer” to Hume, read in acertain light, might be thought of more as completing than wrecking Hume’s project of absorbingknowledge, morality, and science itself into the domain of mental life and mental constructions.OutlineI. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) devoted most of his adult life to the three following questions: “What can I know,what ought I to do, what can I hope?”A. In one of his more accessible essays⎯“What is enlightenment?”⎯he asked and answered a differentquestion1. His answer was that enlightenment was synonymous with intellectual freedom, with expressing one’sown authentic ideas, not echoing the thoughts of others.2. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity… For enlightenment of thiskind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all:freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.”B. Kant is, at once, the culmination of Enlightenment thought and the author of a philosophy that would setworrisome limits on the entire Enlightenment project.C. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason credits Hume with awakening the author from his “dogmatic slumber.”1. Hume argued convincingly that that everything we know is the product of experience. The concept ofcausation should be understood chiefly as a kind of habitual mode of mental operation. Morality is thedomain of passions and sentiments, grounded in considerations of self-interest and utility.2. Kant can also be shown to have been influenced by Reid’s concept of common sense.D. Kant’s Critique (not a broadside or polemic against reason but an inquiry into it, into what can be knownusing our rational resources and what cannot) takes up these challenges.II. In his “first critique” (the second is the Critique of Practical Reason and the third, his Critique of Judgment),Kant agrees with Hume in insisting that all of our knowledge arises from experience. However, he makes afundamental distinction, saying it is a mistake to assume that because our knowledge arises from experience,that it is grounded in experience.A. According to Hume’s theory of causal concepts, we come to regard A as the cause of B, when A and Bhave been constantly conjoined in experience. This is not the conclusion of an argument but merely a habitof the mind.B. In Kant’s terminology, cognitive or epistemic holdings that are not the result of experience are referred toas “pure.”1. Pure in Kant’s sense refers to what is non-empirical.2. A Critique of Pure Reason means a critical examination of the forms of rationality that could not comefrom experience but make up the framework within which experience is possible.3. There cannot be experience except by way of time and space. Thus, Kant reaches the concept of thepure (non-empirical) intuitions of time and space. Kant uses the word intuitions to mean a necessaryprecondition for something else to come about.4. Logically, then, this precondition must be prior to all experience—Kant’s famous terminology apriori—or there could be no experiences.28©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership