Today we're going to, let's talk about

The Enlightenment. I'm going to do so by looking at a German

philosopher, Immanuel Kant, writing in the second half of the 1700s really when
there was no Germany yet. I think that's important for everybody to
remember. That German speaking Europe is a whole
bunch of principalities with some strong big states like Prussia, Austria,
Bavaria. But there's no unified Germany yet.
And Kant is writing this text, which we've assigned for the course, WWhat is
Enlightenment?," as his attempt to articulate why the progress, in education
progress, in knowledge progress, in thinking is not only good for
individuals, but will it have a salutary effect on society.
Lots of the leaders of these societies were very worried about enlightenment
because they thought as people became more educated, as people became more
independent, they might actually not want to be
subjects to kings anymore, or subjects to aristocrats.
And so, Kant on the one hand is saying, enlightenment is really important.
It's something we need to extenuate, emphasize to, to energize.
On the other hand he wants to say, don't worry about it.
[LAUGH] If you're, if you're member of the elite, you have nothing to fear from
enlightenment because enlightenment in the end can be a powerful ingredient in
the increase of power for the whole state, for the whole society.
These two magically, powerful thinkers in the middle of the 1700s, late 1700s
Rousseau and Kant. so, 17, 1784 is when Kant writes, writes
the, What is Enlightenment? What happens, what's the big event in the
1780s? Alright.
French, French Revolution. When is the French Revolution?
1789. 1789. Okay, there we go.
That's a date that we all should know. Think, think, think.
That's going to be very helpful to us, alright? This is a Euro, we're very kind
of, Euro snobs in this class. so 1776, okay.
1789, that's really an important date for us.
So, what we're doing is reading two texts here or three really, prior to the French
Revolution, which changes the world of culture, dramatically, and politics, and
economics. As does 1776, but that's a different
course. So What is Enlightenment?
is, as I said, a small text of Kant's. It's even a work of journalism.
Today, we, we need to understand a little bit about the philosophical context that
Kant operated in. In some ways, the intellectual context of
the 18th century, to which he is responding.
May be I should say a word about enlightenment from our perspective at
least from, I should say, my perspective as your professor.
There are lots of definitions of enlightenment. Here is one I think that
you can find useful for the, for the duration of this course, and perhaps even
beyond. And that is enlightenment is the project
to make the world more of a home for human beings.
Enlightenment is a project to make the world more of a home for human beings
through the use of reason. Through the use of reason.
That's really important because making the world more of a home for us, that is
reducing its dangers, bringing out its potential through the use of reason, is
going to demand science, is going to demand education, and is going to demand
certain call for freedom that will allow people to transform the world to make it
more hospitable for human beings. The enlightenment also though is a social
movement. It is not just a bunch of big shot
philosophers talking about big ideas, it's a whole range of writers who take
Voltaire's injunction to ecrasez l'infame which really means, well it means, squash
out infamy. But it, it, it means, get rid of all the
nonsense. Get rid of all the bologna getting in the way of progress. And for
many journalists, for many small time intellectuals, we could call them, this
just means that showing that people who are already full of themselves, people
who have power and prestige, and a certain kind of snob appeal, [LAUGH] that
those people are just nonsense and we have to get rid of them. We have to show
that we can do better than that. So, the enlightenment is a philosophical
side, and then there's this kind of journalistic, social movement side.
Kant is responding to both of those things in this essay.
What is enlightenment? Before we dig into the essay a little
bit, I just want to say a little bit more about Kant's philosophical concerns and,
and what drove those concerns. Kant describes himself, and you'll see
this on, one of the, the slides we'll show you during the course of this video,
as steering a middle course for philosophy.
Steering a middle course for philosophy. What did that mean?
It meant for Kant that he would defend reason, defend science, defend this new
form of enlightenment. But also he said, he would make room for
faith, make room for belief. He wanted to have his cake and eat it
too, if we can use that expression. History of philosophy from Plato to Kant
is consumed with the problem of how do you,
how do you connect the ideal and the real?
For Plato it was the ideal forms, the ideas, sometimes you call them, how are
they related to the real. In Kant's time, that question took the
form of a battle about skepticism. And I want to give you a little bit of
background about that before we go into more into Kant proper.
The mona pre, the battle skepticism can be framed beginning with Descartes.
Rene Descartes, who wrote famously on the discourse on the method a sentence that
everybody who study a little philosophy should remember.
And that is, I think, therefore I am, this is Descartes.
I think, therefore I am. What did her mean by that?
He meant that, he could doubt everything around him.
He could doubt that this was really a book case, he could doubt that he was
really in the room now that I am talking to you.
These are could doubt because maybe I am dreaming.
But one thing I cannot doubt, Descartes said, is that I am doubting.
And doubting, for Descartes, is a form of thinking.
So, this becomes the bedrock for Descartes.
I think, therefore I am. So for Descartes, you can keep skepticism
at bay. Keep skepticism at bay by the certainty
of your own subjective thinking existence, doubting existence.
And on the basis of that clear certainty of my, of one's own existence,
you build up other clear and distinct ideas.
This is what he called the kind of bedrock of thinking on which you can then
build secure notions of science, of calculation.
Especially of mathematics, of optics. And you can keep skepticism at bay
because you are building on something secure.
Clear and distinct rational ideas that must be true because they are part of the
apparatus of our thinking, the logic of, of our minds.
So, that's Descartes on one side. On the other side, you have Locke in the
English Enlightenment, if I can use this shorthand.
He didn't say I feel, therefore I am, but he should have said that I guess.
In other words, Locke thought what we get knowledge not by closing our eyes and
thinking really hard about what must be true.
For Locke, we get our knowledge by, through experience. We want to know if
this is real, we tap on it enough, we tap on it enough our hand starts hurting,
gosh that's real. We want,
we, we, we get our knowledge by more and more sensation, by more and more
experience, by more and more experiments. And so for Locke, the way you keep
skepticism at bay is by piling up experience.
Experience leading to knowledge. Now David Hume came along and close to
Kant's time. And argued that, well, experience didn't
really give you knowledge. It really just gave you habit.
It just gave you customs that you got used to.
So, I get used to this being hard. And that's all it is.
It's just a custom. It's just a habit.
It's not something with a foundation. And that's a new kind of almost we can
call imperasist skepticism that really worried Kant.
So when Kant was writing his major philosophical works, he was trying, he
said, to steer a course between the rationalism of Descartes and the
empiricism of Locke and Hume to, to actually make a place for clear and
distinct ideas that you understand by really thinking hard, and also experience
that you get from being out in the world and registering yours, these sensations.
Kant said, I need to def, create boundaries around reason,
to make room for faith. I need to steer a middle course.
And Kant is an awfully complex thinker who write, who wrote Mammoth Works, the
critique of pure reason, the critique of practical reason, the critique of
judgment. These are his great major works, as well
as a slew of other important essays, and so we can't go through them all here.
And by any means, all I want to give you is one vehicle through which Kant steered
this middle course. And that's what was his, really his two
world theory. That is, for, for Kant, in order to have
your cake and eat it, too, in order to have a belief in ideas as well as in
experience, all you had to do was to understand that
we have knowledge of one side of the world.
He called it the phenomenal side. And we have belief in things in
themselves, things that not just as they appear to us
but things in themselves, that he called the Noumenon Side.
So, the knowledge piece, the phenomenal piece for Kant was we, through, how we
see the world, through what he called our categories of perception.
I put my glasses on because for Kant, the world makes sense for us.
We have knowledge of the world because our minds are, if you will, our glasses
organize the world for us, in space-time categories, in other kinds of co,
categories because the world makes sense to us because our minds construct the
world as a sensible place. And then, we could actually understand
the world and have rules about it because it's all organized for us, by our
space-time glasses if you will. By our minds.
Knowledge for Kant comes from our construction of the world as a sensible
place. And that means we can make predictions,
we can build bridges that don't fall down.
We can make clocks that keep the right time.
All of this is about the phenomenal world.
And then, some people come along and say, but is that the real world?
Is that the deepest world? And Kant says, well, I can't actually get
my glasses off. I can't get, I can't see the world
without my mind. But, I know there must be something there
when my mind isn't seeing the world. This is the noumenal world.
The noumenal world. For Kant, that was the world of faith.
The world where you believe in the immortality of the soul, your salvation,
the love of God, the simple truth at peasants nose, Kant sometimes said.
That's the noumenal world, the world of things in themselves.
You can't disprove that with science. You can't prove it with science either.
It is the world of faith. The noumenal world is the world of faith,
and the phenomenal world is the world of science.
They can coexist, Kant said. I, Kant, have steered a middle course
between them. They both are valid.
The enlightenment doesn't threaten faith because faith is about things in
themselves. And nobody knows that for sure, but you
can feel it as deeply as possible in your heart.
And the phenomenal world is about things that we can test, things that we can
calculate, things that we have organized through our minds, through our, if you
will, space-time glasses. So in What is Enlightenment, Kant is
writing having already done this philosophical groundwork, if you will.
And having done that philosophical groundwork in the enlightenment kind of
saying, we must liberate ourselves from immaturity.
If you remember in the very beginning of what is enlightenment, Kant says,
enlightenment is man's release from his self incurred tutelage.
And he says, dare to know, dare to know. Have the courage to use your own reason.
That Kant says is the model of the enlightenment.
And for Kant, that means the enlightenment provides you with maturity,
autonomy, the ability simply to think for yourself.
And that for Kant is a precious intellectual and moral ability, moral
capacity. Kant says in, in paragraph nine of What
is Enlightenment?, the touchstone of everything that can be
concluded as a law for a people lies in the question of whether the people could
have enclosed such a law on itself." We'll talk about that next time, and I
look forward to it.