What is Enlightenment? (Kant's Questions)
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0415497817
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Have the courage to use your own understanding! - that is the motto of enlightenment." - Immanuel Kant
The Enlightenment is one of the most important and contested periods in the history of philosophy. The problems it addressed, such as the proper extent of individual freedom and the challenging of tradition, resonate as much today as when they were first debated. Of all philosophers, it is arguably Kant who took such questions most seriously, addressing them above all in his celebrated short essay, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
In this engaging and lucid book, Samuel Fleischacker first explains and assesses Kant’s philosophy of Enlightenment. He then considers critics of Kant’s views - from Burke and Hegel to Horkheimer and Adorno - and figures he regards as having extended Kant’s notion of enlightenment, such as Feuerbach, Marx, Habermas, Foucault, and Rawls.
Throughout, he demonstrates how Kant holds two distinct theories of enlightenment. On the one hand, Kant proposes a ‘minimal’ view, where to be enlightened is simply to engage in critical public discussion, allowing diversity of opinion to flourish. On the other, he argues that Kant elsewhere calls for a ‘maximal’ view of enlightenment, where, for example, an enlightened person cannot believe in a traditional religion. With great skill Fleischacker shows how these two views are taken in a multitude of directions by both critics and advocates of Kant’s philosophy.
Arguing that Kant’s minimal enlightenment is a precondition for a healthy proliferation of cultures, religious faiths and political movements, What is Enlightenment? is a fascinating introduction to a key aspect of Kant’s thought and a compelling analysis of philosophical thinking about the Enlightenment. Including helpful chapter summaries and guides to further reading, it is ideal for anyone studying Kant or the philosophy of the Enlightenment, as well as those in related disciplines such as politics, history and religious studies.
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(“Two Moralities?,” pp. 148–49). But this is a standard view in the natural law tradition, advanced by no less a figure than Thomas Aquinas (hardly someone known for his “radical female positions”!). When one's life is at stake, according to Aquinas, one indeed acquires a property right in whatever one needs to survive. Kant tends to deride – and, I think, misunderstand – this so-called “right of necessity,” but it has a firm and honorable place in the rule-bound conception of morality that he
that everyone should resemble them. At best, this universalizing tendency impoverishes the Kantian conception of humanity; at worst, it can justify projects that attempt to obliterate human difference. This charge comes in many versions, in accordance with the specific kind of difference being advocated. Robin Schott, a feminist critic of Kant, writes that Kant's conception of the self “abstracts from concrete individuality and identity and thus ultimately makes the concept of the Other as
philosophically odd. What is intersubjectivity, after all, if not a relation among subjects, which is to say: among the sorts of beings characterized by their difference from objects? To take the subject/object distinction and lop off its second half is not to get beyond that distinction; it is, implicitly, to continue to use the distinction. Presumably, Habermas simply wants us to begin with the practices in which we speak and act together, but it is unhelpful, for this purpose, to characterize
correct the falsehood in them and because it will help us clarify what is true in them. Normally, says Mill, “conflicting doctrines … share the truth between them, and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.” Even when a set of embedded dogmas gets shaken up, “one part of the truth usually sets while another rises” (44). So freedom of speech is necessary because we will miss parts of the truth without it. These
reports to the contrary, under what circumstances are you ever likely to acknowledge scientific or journalistic expertise? Which is to say that people who uphold claims of this sort effectively refuse to test their beliefs against the empirical evidence upheld by the public in which they live – refuse, indeed, to accept the entire structure by which such evidence is gathered and assessed. This is very different from merely holding an eccentric metaphysical or moral or religious doctrine: an