Ep. 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought more and more and more. And now we've hit episode 200 on what is enlightenment? And we read two essays from 1784, what is enlightenment? By Immanuel Kant and on Enlightening the Mind by Moses Mendelssohn. And we read the response to Kant, what is Enlightenment? By Michel Foucault from 1984. For more information and links to the readings, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, enlightened and cultivated in approximately equal degrees in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, differentiating himself in modernity from the ancien régime in Austin, Texas.

0:44 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:47 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:49 Wes: Yay.

0:51 Mark: What you say? What you say. Anybody waiting for us to start episode 200 to quit?

0:57 Wes: Sorry,

0:59 Seth: what?

0:59 Mark: Nobody was like, I'm going to wait until we introduce episode 200, then I'm going to quit the podcast forever. Well, that's good. We got that out of the way.

1:08 Dylan: Now we know it was on Mark's mind.

1:10 Mark: Things happen when you hit, you know. I thought we'd have to reprogram the website because it wasn't equipped for digits starting with number two.

1:18 Seth: The year 2000 bug.

1:20 Mark: I bought a whole bunch of bottles of water to make sure that I would be okay.

1:25 Dylan: So it's what, episode 209 and a half years.

1:29 Mark: Yes. So we had talked about actually getting together for this, but couldn't really get it together to get together to schedule a public outing. I'll blame it on Seth's baby, let's say that.

1:40 Seth: Yeah, that's fine.

1:42 Mark: I think we also decided that let's decide now to start planning for a 10 year get together. So I'm going to have a survey up partiallyexaminelife.com pel live. So if you go to that URL, that is a survey where we're trying to see where should we hold this next live event. That's going to be in the spring when we hit our 10 year anniversary. Should we do it in New York City? Should we do it in la? Should we do it in the Bay Area? Where should we do it? The more demand, the more people respond saying they want it in a certain place and, and we want to figure out how much we can charge people so we can actually make it happen and pay for our plane fare to get there, get a venue, all this stuff. So let's consider the planning phase has begun for that.

2:24 Seth: Okey doke.

2:25 Mark: But enlightenment. So yes, we're looking for what is a good episode 200 topic. Wes, I think you had put this little essay by Kant on our list quite a long time ago. So I happen to see that there. And then put out a call on Facebook like what should we read with it? Oh yeah, there's this Foucault thing that's responded to it. We got many, many suggestions. Other things having to do with Enlightenment, of course, many of them having to do with Eastern wisdom or there's a new Steven Pinker book about that. We're not covering any of those. This is focused very tightly around Kant's reflections at the end of what we call the Age of the Enlightenment on what Enlightenment actually is.

Even though it came out within a couple months in the same publication as this one by Moses Mendelssohn, they did not read each other's essays before these things came out. Mendelssohn's came out in September. It had not actually been published. Finished writing his. His came out in December. Wes, what made you notice this in the first place? If I'm identifying that correctly, I'm not

3:21 Wes: sure if it had been suggested or it was something I was of course aware of that it existed. I think when we came around to the discussion of having this episode, there had been some buzz in the press about the Enlightenment and some left leaning authors writing anti Enlightenment screeds, including the Enlightenment was responsible for racism screeds, at least in the strident political domains of Twitter and other publications that I hang out in. I thought this is on people's minds. And so it might be a good timely episode.

3:54 Dylan: Just even thinking about Enlightenment as an idea, even apart from an era, it makes sense that it would come up in the public sphere along with the notions of when you're talking about fake news and what is truth and even political institutions, freedom of the press and how our political institutions are built and what authority is. I mean all that stuff is tied up in both the era of the Enlightenment and in what we're reading.

4:21 Wes: As we'll see, the question of what the Enlightenment is is tied to an ongoing conversation in Berlin among intellectuals at that time. Not just Kant and Mendelssohn, but a bunch of other people about whether the Enlightenment is actually entirely good, whether it might lead to the corruption of public morals and societal stability, whether freed from censorship and complete freedom of the press is desirable. All of those things are tied up in this. And so that makes it even More timely because those are the sorts of discussions that are going on today.

4:55 Dylan: I also like it as an episode 200 because there's something about philosophy in general and what we're doing as being about. You don't want to be as grand as saying, enlightening oneself. You can say that there's something about the question of self improvement and being different than what you were before. And the question of what it means to become enlightened is tied up with the activity of doing philosophy.

5:20 Wes: Yeah. And the other questions that come up during this debate in 19th century Germany is why aren't the public more enlightened by now, after 40 years of Frederick? And what institutions are required to help with that? That's also especially a pressing question today in which I think social media and the Internet might be seen as having degraded the conversation. And of course we're trying to use those tools to a different end. I mean, we are in a sense an institution, an unusual institution, which is having the sort of conversation that was had, that was done secretly in 19th century German. We tried to do it in public.

5:56 Seth: Part of the story of the Enlightenment, at least from the respect of Kant's paper, is that it's the emergence of the individual to use their own reason to make decisions and determine what's both true of the world, that is knowledge and what's right action, without submitting to an external authority like the church or the state. And it's an appropriate topic for us as the 200th episode, because as Dylan said, what we do is essentially this kind of exploration without the guidance of authority. At least we're not at an institution. We're trying to deal directly with the texts and the ideas in front of us and not necessarily somebody's opinion or interpretation.

And we don't represent ourselves as authorities. And so we have this community of people that have joined us on this journey for nine years now that are interested in enlightening themselves in that sense of the word. I think sometimes we straddle the line, sometimes our audience treats us as authorities and sometimes they don't. But we certainly don't represent ourselves that way. And so this is like enlightenment in action, if you will. Pel.

7:05 Mark: That is, I think, the surprising thing about Kant's initial formulation that Seth just articulated, that enlightenment is breaking free of your self imposed immaturity. It's thinking for yourself. And that seems different than what enlightenment means, for instance, in Eastern religions, as I understand, or really in any religion where enlightenment seems to be having the truth revealed to you. Right. That's what the light of God or something flows over you. You could see how this word enlightenment, especially if you were in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment, everybody would just be appropriating it for their own purposes.

If you think like me, then you are enlightened. So specifically, at least on the face of it, putting it in terms of thinking for yourself, that it is not being exposed to a particular wisdom, but being exposed to the wisdom making machinery itself. That seems a good way to articulate it.

7:59 Dylan: It also exposes the inherently political nature of thinking, that it's about relationships to authority. And you're going to very, very quickly again, get talking about what those structures in society that do or do not support one's thinking for oneself, it ends up having to be a cornerstone of the way you generate government.

8:18 Seth: That's interesting. Dylan, did I just hear you say it points at the inherently political nature of knowledge?

8:24 Dylan: Well, of enlightenment, I think that knowledge might come in there as well, but just to the extent that knowledge is related to it. But enlightenment involves a characterization of an individual or a community, as Mendelssohn would talk about. Right. And a condition that people are either in or attempting to get to. And in that way, it, I think, is inherently more political than just a term like knowledge.

8:49 Seth: Yeah, I think in the spirit of Foucault, I might talk about like an inherent power structure, because I can think of examples that wouldn't be overtly political, but where the point you're making would be relevant.

9:00 Dylan: Yeah, I'm not saying that it's solely political. I'm saying that it is overtly political.

9:04 Seth: Yep.

9:05 Mark: Right. I think the discussions of it took place in a political context. And the things that this group that actually was not a part of this secret society that was meeting regularly, that Mendelssohn was that sort of kicked this off and actually was discussing this issue for a year or something before either of these essays were published. They were specifically interested in the question, how enlightened can we let the citizenry get right? Was Machiavelli right? That the rulers are justified in deceiving people? Or should people be enlightened, be given the truth about all things, be encouraged, be allowed to think for themselves? Or would that cause some sort of social unrest? And so we saw that on full display in the Spinoza on Politics episode that we had pretty recently.

9:50 Wes: And Mark, this goes towards your question of whether the Enlightenment, just the word could be adapted to anyone's purposes. This is occurring at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, where, you know, I think the term is already associated with all the scientific advances. You know, Basically it's the 1600s and the 1700s and corresponds to what we call the early modern period in philosophy, where scientific advances have really already disrupted the social fabric. And here we are towards the very end of that period and 40 years into the reign of Frederick the Great, who had done a lot to open up tolerance of religion and freedom of the press and reform institutions to make them more rational, the judiciary, and they're working on educational reform.

So all this policy stuff is already going on. So there's a firm concept of what the Enlightenment means here that they're addressing historically at least. And as far as political policy goes. And the questions they're asking are in many ways practical. So it's not just whether the Enlightenment is going to corrupt people initially. It's about, well, how do we make the citizenry more enlightened. And what they mean is, after 40 years of Frederick, people are still superstitious. There's still quote unquote superstition and fanaticism. There are still people who believe these absurd things like ghost of a woman in white will appear in a household before the death of a male in that household, or things like that.

And that sort of susceptibility to quackery and to irrational ideas that they're addressing, and they're wondering why all their policy accomplishments haven't seemed to reduce that. So part of the question is, how do we make these advances be more suffused, broadly effective publicly? And then the other question is, how much of that do we do without undermining religion and mores? We want the public to be enlightened, but we want society to be stable. We want religion and mores to be retained.

11:50 Mark: So a tech transfer communications effort was required to give another inside joke from the profession that until this year, Wes was a part of. So in other words, there's science going on all around. How do you make sure the science get used by the intended audience and philosophy? Yes, yes. Well, let's write two page summaries and distribute them to the masses. That's essentially what this Kant article is.

12:12 Wes: For one thing, they just need the 19th century version of TDC and Associates, our company there.

12:18 Dylan: Yep, already there. There's explicit inherent acknowledgement that saying let's think rationally and presenting even rational scientific thought doesn't naturally lead to goodness. Right. If you're worried about the undermining of public mores, you explicitly understand that scientific activity doesn't give you the answers to

12:39 Mark: behaving well we haven't gotten into the Mendelssohn yet. But he gives this distinction within being civilized overall, between enlightenment and cultivation. So cultivation has to do with practical things, enlightenment has to do more with theoretical things. And I think that kind of corresponds to this common like, oh, we developed this cutting edge science, but we weren't wise enough to use it. And that's why we're going to blow ourselves up with atomic bombs or whatever the supervillain or the evil government of the particular work of sci fi or suspense or whatever you're reading is.

13:10 Wes: The cultivation is also advances in the arts as well.

13:13 Seth: Right.

13:13 Wes: It has to do with refinement and beauty. So industry and the arts basically. And one might not just benefit from technology, but be quite refined, but still be a nihilist or amoral essentially and be cultivated.

13:28 Dylan: Yeah. Mendelssohn, I think, is interestingly prescient in this respect. At the end when he says the abuse of this enlightened state of mind weakens the moral sense, leads to insensibility, egotism, irreligion and anarchy. The abuse of cultivation gives birth to licentiousness, hypocrisy, effeminacy, superstition and slavery. And both those made me think of what Wes was just talking about, about the problem of nihilism. But then also in the first one of the criticism, not just that science doesn't present anything to say about a way of living, but that in fact, let's call it being too scientific or doing it the wrong way can lead to activity that are in fact morally dead.

And that makes me think of modern criticisms of science and saying the kinds of egregious behavior in the 20th century that you would criticize as being a result of science gone too far, whether it be the atomic bomb or whether it be genocide or eugenics or any number of other things like that.

14:34 Mark: I think that might be an anachronistic take on the division between science and ethics, that science in this time was still taken. When Descartes or somebody talks about science, that includes philosophy, because it's any kind of systematic. It would definitely be on the side of enlightenment as opposed to praxis. So I'm kind of seeing this distinction that Mendelssohn is making as more in line with what we've seen in Plato, that sort of the practical things, which could include technology, what we would call science, but also the craft of doing a good painting or something like that, that all that could go into and even the craft of living.

Right. He talks, he. I think he. He gives the example he uses this to rip on the Chinese. Right. The people of Berlin and England are more enlightened. The Chinese are highly cultivated, but very unenlightened. In other words, he has to explain why, from his Western point of view, the Chinese have a really elaborate. You know, they're the most ethical people in the world in terms of like, knowing where your place and knowing where to step is. Just think of our whole Confucianism episode and how deeply that Confucianism pervaded the culture. That seems like, isn't that what philosophy is trying to do is like have the biggest philosopher, have his writings be so popular that everybody knows them and everybody has taught them and they really live their lives by them.

But no, Mendelssohn wants to dismiss that as being merely cultivated. That's merely practical. That's as Confucius was saying. It's kind of knowing how the rituals work, like that was an important part of the actual activity. Whereas this enlightenment is supposed to be a more purely theoretical, purely mental. So I think what we call science now kind of is between those two things. We do the conceptual difference now differently.

16:13 Dylan: That's a good point, Mark.

16:14 Wes: Yeah. So when he says the Chinese are unenlightened, he means that the scientific revolution and the, you know, sort of age of reason stuff is not going on there, despite the fact that they're highly cultivated. They have all the practical stuff, but the theoretical stuff is lacking.

16:32 Seth: Right.

16:33 Wes: And Confucianism itself, as we saw, does not seem to be a very theoretical endeavor. Right. It's more a call to tradition and ritual.

16:43 Dylan: Mark, as you said, although we alluded

16:46 Mark: in that Confucius episode to also how Daoism, which is chock full of talk of Enlightenment, Taoism and Buddhism, both prominent in China, that these things have equally spread so that somebody would be. Their manners would be Confucian, their professional life would be Confucian, but their personal philosophy might be Taoist. So that they probably feel, again, with much greater permeation of this. Well, probably the same amount of permeation as, say, Christian personal morals would have in the spiritual aspect of that. That in Christianity it kind of all comes as a package that you act according to rules.

But then especially with Protestantism, it's even more so your personal relationship with God, your sort of personal enlightenment feeling, a spiritual sense that I think the word enlightenment, again, maybe this is a political aspect of the word. It connotes whether it's coming from God, whether it's coming from the light of reason itself that guides the scientific method. But it's something that is coming from above any given state. Right. If you're a Daoist sage, it's not because the government has told you what the way is. It's because you are personally, through your own attitude, through your own actions, in touch with something greater.

And I think that, yeah, there's a

18:08 Wes: tension between Daoism and Taoism and Confucianism, obviously.

18:12 Dylan: And I hadn't even thought of the connection with religious enlightenment in this way. And it makes me wonder about the terms, whether there's a kind of accidental or essential overlapping of those terms in English. The reason being is that when I was reading about enlightenment, the period of time is that the various French and German and English words used had a different flavor to them. I wonder if the terms in German and French have that same overlap that we do in English where we think of enlightenment. We use that same word to refer to spiritual enlightenment or nirvana and stuff like that. And I wonder if that's also true in Chinese or in those Confucian traditions or in Buddhist traditions, if those words have that same overlap of having to do with uncovering darkness and stuff like that or something different.

19:06 Wes: In this case, in this conversation, the word is. It's not anti religious, right? Because it's part of Kant and the project of Kant and a lot of these other thinkers is to show that science and reason are compatible with Christianity and faith. But it is certainly in tension with religion and it's linked to Protestant reforms and it's also in tension with tradition and again, public superstitions that are linked to religion. Mark, you're talking about religious enlightenment, but the Enlightenment we're talking about and that Kant's talking about and Mendelssohn is talking about, there's an immediate tension with religion. It's the scientific form, Right.

19:48 Mark: I guess I'm just thinking about Spinoza, who actually looking more closely, more than 100 years before this was 1670 and 1677, where his and this is 1784. So. But in his view, it was one and the same thing, that being enlightened was to have an enlightened take on religion that put it in line with reason. It was also, he stressed, to eschew superstition in the same way and that it's getting caught in the superstitions that bring about the conflicts that religion had brought. Like the anti religious sentiment in the air was largely because of its political implications and the fact that it caused wars, that it had caused repression when you had a state religion.

So this was one of the Great things that Frederick was kind of following in what Spinoza's recommendations seemed to be, as far as I understand, in allowing, promoting religious toleration. And these folks writing just wanted to make sure that religious toleration shouldn't just mean this is. This is a similar issue. Now, religious toleration really can function just as having the right to say whatever ridiculous thing you want like that is not what, according to Kant and Mendelssohn, that we were fighting for and wanting religious toleration.

We didn't want to allow free rein for superstition.

21:04 Wes: Spinoza, though, distinguished superstition from specific ritual practices which he thought were sort of inevitable delivery mechanisms for religion. Right. And Mendelssohn says the same thing. You know, Mendelssohn says it may be the case that certain prejudices and certain superstitions are actually necessary, even though they're false, because they are delivery mechanisms for higher truths. And I think Spinoza is also onto the same tension between. Right. Ultimately, religion for him is about obedience. It's about obedience to God. And God turns out to be a manifestation of the principle love thy neighbor. But it's not that people have specific rituals or believe in transubstantiation, for instance, that's the problem. It's that when they believe it to the point where they must stamp out other beliefs and treat those people with other beliefs as being enemies.

21:57 Seth: And.

21:58 Mark: Has anyone else read any Mendelssohn besides this?

22:01 Wes: Nope.

22:02 Mark: Yeah, that made it difficult. I mean, it's always, well, what about Seth?

22:06 Dylan: Seth, Seth. Have you read any Mendelssohn besides this?

22:09 Seth: I believe I have, but I can't recall what it.

22:12 Dylan: Okay, so it's just as good as not having read it.

22:13 Seth: Yeah, exactly.

22:16 Mark: Well, that was my wonder, you know, when I'm talking about Confucianism and the relation in there between enlightened attitude, what they would consider an enlightened practice like that actually seems to line up pretty well with what I understand Jewish ritual to amount to and even a lot of Christian ritual as well. That there wasn't the sharp Protestant distinction between my personal relationship with God and, well, all the rest of it. This is in rejection of Catholicism and its long history of specific acts of devotion and going to confession and now do 20 Hail Marys and sale of indulgences and all this stuff that as a rejection of that.

That's what introduced maybe the strong emphasis on the mystical aspect as opposed to going through the motions. That at least there was a. Even if in the lives of individual Protestants, those things still amounted to about the same thing. And this might be in fact why Kant would say those people maybe are still unenlightened because they're going through the motions, they're doing the practices. But that is not sufficient for having the attitude of enlightenment. In other words, thinking for yourself. In fact, doing that because it's the custom in your society is exactly the opposite of thinking for yourself.

But it seems like, am I right in that? In the kind of Judaism that Mendelssohn would be pulling from, that distinction was not so sharp.

23:36 Wes: I don't know.

23:36 Seth: I'm sorry. Yeah, I kind of. I didn't quite get the.

23:39 Wes: I don't know that we can say. But certainly, yeah, Kant is thinking about. When he talks about thinking for yourself. Right. He's opposing that to the taking of direction from others, basically. So when you act by custom, when you act according to tradition, when you simply are a receptacle for whatever your clergyman is saying and putting into you all that sort of passive stuff to which we are all by the way, susceptible in 99% of our lives. Right. We do things unconsciously, we do things because they are habitual. Maybe the word habitual is a good opposition for that. Thinking yourself is rather, is quite, according to his essay, a sort of rare accomplishment when you rise above that and are willing to act on that, which you have to be quite courageous to do because people are going to think you're weird.

24:28 Dylan: And I think that's why he uses this phrase immaturity. At least that's what it is in translation. I don't know what the German word was, but of self imposed immaturity or self incurred immaturity.

24:41 Wes: Meaning you still have a kind of parent, a psychological parent that you're following you.

24:45 Dylan: Yeah, exactly. Yes. But also you have a psychological parent, but you also inherently have the capacity to grow beyond that.

24:55 Wes: Good point.

24:57 Mark: The German is Unmündigkeit, which in the selection that I will link people to is the self incurred minority. One of the other ones I found commonly online was nonage. Like neither of those words means as much to us as immaturity.

25:13 Wes: Minority as in being a minor.

25:15 Dylan: Yes.

25:16 Wes: Not as in being a minority in our. In our sense.

25:19 Seth: But.

25:19 Dylan: Well, interestingly, this at the end also comes with in your enlightened state or being in that enlightened activity of your being. You would also understand how to obey, in line with Spinoza, but in this case obey the tenets of your society and the rules of that life. He wants to preserve a. The ability to criticize authority openly and Publicly. But the consequence of that is that you, in this enlightened state would understand that you ought to obey, even if they don't agree with you, maintain the peace. So you can criticize the authorities in the church regarding interpretations or anything else, and be as open as possible in that. But in the end, you would obey what they say. Same thing with government, with your monarch,

26:15 Wes: not in your capacity as someone attending church. But if you are a clergyman, for instance, and you have certain. Yes, you might disagree theoretically, with certain religious stuff, and you could publish about that as a scholar, that's what he calls the public use of reason. But in your. What he calls private. And this sounds kind of counterintuitive to us, but in your private use, which is insofar as you're acting in your civil post or your office or your status as a clergyman, you have to do what the church says, unless it's so against your conscience. In that case, you have to resign your position. But. And you have to do that by sort of finding the practical and useful upshots of the stuff that even though you think it's wrong, you have to sort of massage it so that you get whatever's good out of it and give that to your flock, let's say.

27:03 Dylan: But the same exact thing would be true in parallel with being a citizen.

27:07 Wes: Well, you have to obey the law. Yeah. And this is where Kant's solution precisely matches Spinoza's right, is that we have absolute freedom of conscience and absolute freedom to say what we want and believe what we want and publish what we want. But when push comes to shove, we obey. We obey the requirements of our civil post and we obey the laws of our nation.

27:28 Dylan: It makes me think of civil disobedience and the way in which it has a similar ethos, but pushes the line a little bit differently, where you would purposefully contravene the law but obey the punishment meted out by the law. Right. So you do some kind of demonstration where you sit on the bus in the place that you're not allowed to, but when they come and haul you away, you let them haul you away.

27:52 Wes: Yeah. That exists in this sort of netherworld between speech and action. Right. Arguably, it's more essentially speech.

28:02 Seth: So one of the things that struck me in reading the. At least the early part of the Kant article is it made me think of Plato's cave. I'm going to read just a little short passage. It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind after nature has Long since emancipated them from other people's direction, nevertheless gladly remains minors for life. And that it becomes so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all, I need not think, if only I can pay others will readily undertake the irksome business for me.

Then he has some more uncharitable things to say about humankind. But the suggestion is that there's a certain kind of internal inertia that needs to be. It's a social ordering that essentially being a ward of the state or of the church or what have you makes your life easier. It's not easy to emancipate yourself by using your reason and thinking. And that's very similar to Plato didn't, in his analogy of the cave, didn't talk about the people in the cave in quite that same way. But it's the same idea that to leave the cave and comprehend the forms is a kind of emancipation.

And so I thought I saw it was an interesting connection there. Although in this case it's explicitly political.

29:29 Wes: Yeah. And Kant is also staunchly against the idea of intellectual intuition, which is sort of Plato's paradigm there. Right. So I'm just thinking of Mark's, you know, talk of religious enlightenment and the Neoplatonists, including Plotinus, which we haven't covered yet. But there's a sort of passivity to that. Right. In a way, you're intellectually intuiting the good, even though another place, of course, Plato's all about dialectic as well.

29:54 Dylan: There's still a daimon that speaks to you ultimately.

29:56 Wes: Yeah. So it's that weird tension within Plato. But also, Seth, what you said made me think of the fact that our guardianship. Right. Is actually accentuated by the age of the Enlightenment. And reason in the sense Kant mentions doctors, for instance. But technology in general, sort of the products, the technological and the other, the institutional products of science and reason, are things that actually, in the end make us more passive. Smartphones and social media. And I think these things actually undermine our ability to autonomously think because the thinking sort of gets baked into what's going on institutionally and socially. So there's that irony there.

30:43 Seth: It's almost like the authority of the majority or the authority of. And that's a different mechanism by which authority represents itself. So my question is on the Kantian view, what's the motivation for an individual if it's easier to just to not think, to not seek enlightenment, what's the motivation or what's the inherent reward in becoming enlightened? On the Kantian view, doesn't he say, it's just.

31:09 Mark: It's our teleology, it's the purpose of man. It's an inalienable thing to own our own reason. It's not saying necessarily it's going to bring you happiness. It's not equating, in the ancient Greek sense, virtue with happiness, with independence of.

31:25 Wes: Now, that's the way some of these other interlocutors, though, in the background talk about this in terms of whether enlightenment might actually make people unhappy because of undermining of social stability and. Yeah, and religion. But that's. Sorry, Mark. That's kind of different from what you were talking about there. But it is, right. Like, the motivation for these guys is that we don't want to be religious bigots. We don't want to go back to that. We don't want to go back to think about all the horrible shit that had happened in the name of religion, all the religious wars, and also just about general social misery in a country, for instance, with a crappy, irrational, corrupt bureaucracy and a crappy, corrupt legal system.

These are the sorts of things that Frederick had reformed. And all that policy stuff, all that stuff that's supposed to improve our lives is associated with enlightenment. But, Seth, you're asking the question of why do it on an individual level, though, yes, we might think, well, yeah, we want enlightenment in general to improve our institutions, and that makes our life better. But why not sit it out? Why not just be the one who benefits from all of it? Why do I need to be a scientist or a thinker or something?

32:39 Seth: That's my question.

32:40 Dylan: Well, part of it is. I mean, besides the teleology, I think the inherent good of freedom, in both these cases, there's the notion of articulating and developing and using one's own inherent freedom. And so I think whether you consider it to be enlightenment in sense of I'm in my immature state and I am naturally directed to become more mature, and so I develop into a full human being. Or I, in using my capabilities and faculties in order to be a free human being, I am more what I ought to be. I think in either case, there's a notion of fruition being invoked and that talking about being illuminated is about that fruition. Yeah.

33:29 Wes: And also, we can't be ethical beings without freedom. And Autonomy, right. Morality is intimately tied to freedom and freedom is intimately tied to rationality. On the view of these thinkers.

33:40 Seth: I don't know that Mendelssohn would agree with that. I mean, freedom. I feel like there's a linkage here in the notion of enlightenment with emancipation. So freedom is a condition for enlightenment. If you're not free to argue, if you're not free to use your reason publicly, right. To do research and to dispute publicly with other people, then you're essentially a minor. And when you are given the freedom to do that, essentially you go through puberty or hit the age of majority, then to not essentially take advantage of that freedom is to willfully keep yourself unfree.

So I think there's definitely a teleological aspect, but it's related to this notion of taking advantage of freedom of conscience that's made available to you. And if you don't do that, you're essentially, you're unemancipated, you're voluntarily keeping yourself subjected. And I guess there's some notion that that's not something you would want to do.

34:42 Wes: The motivation not to do that, to stay subjected, though, I think is, I mean, I think it is ultimately ethical and it might even ultimately be related to the happiness. Although, you know, Kant, of course, is not a virtue ethicist and he thinks we can be entirely ethical and still be unhappy, but he still thinks it's a worthy choice, Right. For us to be, to try to be autonomous and therefore be able to capable of making those ethical decisions.

35:11 Mark: Yeah. So it's always nice when we return to, when we do these short essays, if we're doing it with thinkers that are already familiar to us, because we can kind of both with Kant and Foucault here, in a way we can't with Mendelssohn, write into it what we already know about the figure. So we know that Kant, as criticized by Nietzsche, ends up, yes, you want to think for yourself, but what is the result of that? You don't end up being a free thinker in quotes. Right. Freethinkers might be atheists, they might go any which way. That is what I see as the essence of philosophy, in fact, is you don't know in advance what destination enlightenment will bring to you.

But that's not Kant's view. Kant's view is when you actually have this freedom, when you have autonomy of mind, then kind of like for Plato, you end up falling in line with reason, capital R, which it enlightens you, it shows you the personhood of every individual the categorical imperative, the proper relations, just everything that comes through Kant's critiques. And so the proper attitude towards religion, which I think has a lot in common with Spinozas, in that it is rational to be religious to, in some sense say, affirm God, affirm the goodness of God.

But that. And as you said, Wes, in the details, if you actually practice a religion, yes, there's going to be more specific things that you have to do than that, but it does not so tightly dictate a particular creed, for instance, such that then you could then be a dogmatist about it. You would get the bad part of religion and cudgel people with it.

36:44 Dylan: Yeah.

36:45 Wes: What he calls true religion, what Spinoza calls true religion, is just this general framework and it has a few essential elements, like, for instance, love thy neighbor, and then the rest is just optional window dressing.

36:56 Mark: And you see that parallel to Kant in there as well then, Wes, that really, the upshot of Kant is kind of the same thing that you, through the practical reason and stuff, you do end up, even though theoretically you can't prove that there is a God, you end up. If you buy all the vicissitudes of reason in its various forms that he lays out, you do end up affirming even that there is a heaven. And religious. The general religiosity.

37:20 Wes: I mean, what I know from the Critique of Pure Reason is that, yeah, faith is not incompatible with reason. For Kant, I don't know the extent to which he thinks that reason. I mean, he. Right. So he debunks, for instance, proofs of the existence of God. I don't know how much he thinks that reason leads us in the direction of God. And for Spinoza, it's the same thing. Right. We don't get God through reason, we get God through obedience. And those. Those two things he directly contrasts. And there's no argument in Spinoza for that. It's just something that we accept or we don't accept. We sort of accept it as a first principle that we ought to love our neighbor and accept certain fundamental moral precepts, which I think amount to religion for Spinoza. Or we don't.

38:06 Mark: Yeah, I don't want to go off into Kant exegesis here. I thought you would remember more readily the discussion of Kant we had at the beginning of our Schleiermacher episode where we read another short essay by Kant and we. I think we considered in some contexts the moral proof for the existence of God, which is in Kant, kind of, because.

38:23 Wes: Yeah, the. For practical purposes, Thing that we haven't really done that yet, the critique of practical reason and all that stuff. And so we. Yeah, that's something for the future. But, yeah, I mean, this. But just to bring it back to this essay, Kant emphasizes also in this essay, this distinction between obedience and conscience, and that the two are compatible. We obey a qua citizen and qua, you know, having some office, like being a clergyman, but we have absolute freedom of conscience. And he even says at the end of this and that the more restricted our civil society, right, the greater the ability, the more expansive our ability to think freely.

In the sense of, if you have a large army, for instance, this is what he says towards the end, you can keep public order. And so, you know, if you have a good set of strong laws and strong enforcement, strong executive branch, then you don't have to worry about public unrest resulting from freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. You can just. You can enforce public order, make people obey on the one hand, when it comes to the realm of action, but in the realm of thought, they have complete freedom. Sorry, Mark, was that. Were you onto that?

39:34 Mark: Well, I mean, again, that. That it points at what annoys me about Kant and what annoys a lot of people about Kant is as brilliant as he is. As much as he's inviting us here explicitly into free thinking, I feel like the destination is already preordained. And politically, it's even more evident and sort of disappointing, which, as we've seen with a lot of these political thinkers during this period, that even Spinoza, you just can't directly. You can't publish something that's directly criticizing the government. So that if you're making a suggestion to them, if you're saying there should be more freedom than there in fact is, then as in this essay, you have to do it in a sort of subtle, indirect way.

So he's saying, hey, you know, the only thing that gives a monarch his power is because his will is united with the will of the people. And so that's a way of complimenting Frederick the Great. Like, yeah, I'm okay with you being an absolute monarch for exactly the reason, Wes, that you just described. In fact, your heavy hand, your large army has made it so you have been able to allow us to debate freely, that you have enabled us to have religious toleration and intellectual public discourse going on because you are so confident in your power and the structure of society that gives you that power enables these things.

40:49 Wes: Yes, he is famously the enlightened dictator, but so.

40:52 Mark: So, yeah, Kant is sucking up here. And the irony here is that then as soon as Frederick the Great died, then his nephew, I guess, took over. This is just a footnote here that one of the follow up works for Kant to this was suppressed that he couldn't publish where he actually outlined more of the political ideas here because the same government structure that allowed Frederick the Great to have all this power allowed his much less pleasant nephew to have all this power. And it would have been inadvisable for Kant to publish it during the lifetime of that subsequent monarch, which luckily for Kant was short enough.

41:30 Wes: Yeah, everything's about to go to shit, right? French Revolution, all the Enlightenment is near the bursting of its bubble.

41:38 Dylan: Well, you'd want to factor in how you place the American Revolution in that line too, because all those political institutions and that thinking that are part of this time is heavily informing also the American Revolution.

41:55 Wes: True, we are a product of the Enlightenment, man. That's why we're the greatest country on earth.

42:02 Mark: That's where I see Kant's kind of respecting. Yeah, it's great if a government embodies the public will, but in the. I don't know if this is echoes what we heard from Burke thinking that actually maybe a republic is not the best way to get the public will right. A republic, or worse, a straight ahead democracy gets the public whim, but that includes all this superstition and things, whereas the public will really should be what the public should believe if they're enlightened. And so a monarch who is himself enlightened, a philosopher king like Frederick, can kind of see where that enlightenment should be as opposed to where the public will should be and embody it in a deep sense in a way that a simple elected representative of the government probably wouldn't.

42:50 Wes: Right. It's not implausible that we'd be better off under an enlightened dictator if they're truly enlightened. We just don't expect any given one person to be truly enlightened or completely free from corruption. But you know, it's not implausible that we might be entirely better off if we had someone were truly, truly enlightened and lived under their dictatorship. I think that's an open question until

43:14 Mark: they die and a bastard takes over.

43:15 Wes: And that's the other problem. Their son, who inevitably is going to be horrible, just like Marcus Aurelius, son Commodus, was just the complete opposite.

43:26 Dylan: How you value the particular solution depends on I think a little bit about what you're optimizing in terms of your government and whether you're optimizing the robustness of transitions in government and transitions in rule or not, or whether you're sort of optimizing the rule itself. But I guess my main comment was that it's important to remember that Enlightenment thinkers certainly were not all democrats. There were democrats among them in the sense of just proponents of democracy, as well as monarchists and even authoritarian. Voltaire was not a democrat. He was a huge Enlightenment figure, but he was definitely a monarchist.