When I used to teach students about Descartes and the Scientific Revolution, I would distinguish between the scientific dimension of the revolution – i.e. the revolution in physics – and its epistemic dimension, by which I mean its rejection of an epistemology grounded in the authority of great traditions, institutions, and texts, in favor of one grounded in the faculties of the individual human mind and particularly, perception and reason. Descartes is quite explicit about this in the Discourse on Method, employing both arguments and metaphors to make the case that both as individuals and as a civilization, we must critically examine our intellectual inheritance if we are to ever have confidence that we are in possession of the truth, in science or elsewhere.
Descartes’ focus was primarily on science and on providing it with epistemically sufficient foundations and a sound method by which to proceed from them, but as I would explain to my classes, in the century after Descartes this epistemic revolution was exported from the scientific context to the moral and political arenas, resulting in what is commonly known as “the Enlightenment.” As one would expect, what followed was a sea change in both areas, for just as an authority-based epistemology quite naturally supports aristocratic politics and divine command morality, a (small ‘r’) rationalistic approach to knowledge tends to support liberal, democratic political ideas and deontological and consequentialist ethical ones.
It is in this context that I would take up Kant’s essay with my students. It begins as follows:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!
This strong opening would give me the opportunity to extend the discussion beyond philosophy and into our personal lives. While Kant’s point is meant to be applied to whole civilizations, it resonates at the level of the individual as well. Indeed, one can think of the processes by which a civilization matures and by which a child comes into his or her own maturity as parallel, along the axis set up by Kant and by Descartes, whose Meditations, written in an intimate first person, also provide an opportunity to personalize the relevant message. Civilizational and individual maturity both involve the adoption of a critical attitude towards our intellectual and sociopolitical inheritance, which not only is the means by which we develop ideas and practices that are genuinely our own, but is the way in which we become autonomous and capable of self-governance.
Kant maintains that in the modern era, when we refuse to accept epistemic authority and reject self-governance, the reasons, typically, are laziness and cowardice.
It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.
He also makes it clear that his case should not be confused with the advocacy of a kind of knee-jerk defiance. The soldier shouldn’t disobey his commanding officer’s order to attack the enemy, and the clergyman, while conducting services, oughtn’t express his opposition to the practices of his religion. Accepting external authority in such circumstances is entirely consistent with the idea of epistemic independence and self-governance since the soldier, when in the voting booth, can vote for candidates who will cease his country’s war-making, and the clergyman, when engaged in scholarship, can make his case for reforming the faith. As autonomous, individual people, considered separately from our official roles and professional functions, we retain ultimate epistemic authority and have both a right and a duty to question and challenge. In an age of enlightenment – in a modern age – there can be no unquestionable dogmas and no incontrovertible practices.
Kant directly relates the imperative to self-governance to social and political freedom, and I would explain to students that he makes a parallel connection between metaphysical freedom and morality, the only action having any moral worth being that which comes from a free and rational will. It is Kant’s view that this epistemic authority and the self-governance that follows from it reflects the fundamental, intrinsic value of the individual; indeed, that it is from the individual that all authority and value ultimately flow. This represents a powerful, secular way of articulating fundamental human rights and grounding morality, and it is worth noting that twice in the essay, Kant says in the strongest possible terms that to deny human beings the capacity to critically examine and judge the beliefs and practice under which they live, is to violate their most fundamental rights.
One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters… This would be a crime against human nature…
[I]t is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution which no-one might publicly question. For this would virtually nullify a phase in man’s upward progress… [T]o renounce such enlightenment completely … means violating and trampling underfoot those sacred rights of mankind.
