Kant’s Political Theory: Interpretations and Applications

Chapter 5: The Progress of Absolutism in Kant’s Essay "What Is Enlightenment?”

Introduction: The Essay’s Immediate Intellectual Context1 In December 1784, Immanuel Kant published his essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in the Berlinische Monatsschrift (BMS). The question that Kant was answering had been posed the previous December in the BMS by Johann Friedrich Zöllner, who was writing to defend the role of clergy in marriage ceremonies against a proposal to make them purely civil, as with other contracts.1 After arguing that attacks on the role of religion in social life would only hasten an ongoing decline in morals and that writers should not, “in the name of enlightenment, confuse the hearts and minds of men,” Zöllner asks in a note: “What is enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as the question, what is truth? should really be answered before one begins enlightening! And yet I have not found an answer to it anywhere.”2 Zöllner’s question and his concerns about the possible negative effects of enlightenment arose in the context of an ongoing discussion within Berlin ’s Mittwochsgesellschaft (Wednesday Society), a secret society that was tied to the BMS and whose members included Zöllner, J. K. W. Möhsen, Moses Mendelssohn, and other notables of the German Enlightenment.3 In the Portions of this chapter were published in different form as “Democratic Transitions and the Progress of Absolutism in Kant’s Political Thought” in the Journal of Politics 68, no. 3 (2006): 556–70. Cambridge University Press Copyright © 2006, Southern Political Science Association , reprinted here with permission. 5 the progress of absolutism in kant’s essay “what is enlightenment?” Robert S. Taylor 136 kant’s political theory same month that Zöllner’s essay appeared, Möhsen had presented a paper to the society that asked a series of questions, the first of which was, what is enlightenment?; he went on to ask whether enlightenment was “useful or harmful, not only for the public, but also for the state and the government .”4 Möhsen’s presentation sparked months of debate within the society , prompting Mendelssohn to address the issue in a contribution to the BMS in September 1784, three months before Kant’s essay appeared.5 Mendelssohn defines enlightenment as the cultivation of our theoretical reason through scientific inquiry; moreover, he entertains the idea that friends of enlightenment may have an obligation to withhold certain truths lest “prevailing religious and moral tenets” be destroyed, and worries that “the misuse of enlightenment weakens the moral sentiment and leads to hard-heartedness, egoism, irreligion, and anarchy.”6 Kant’s essay, which is easily the most famous of the many responses to Zöllner’s original question, takes a radically different approach, as we shall see. Instead of emphasizing theoretical reason, Kant shifts the focus to practical reason, both pure and empirical. Rather than agonizing over the possible dangers of enlightenment, Kant argues that free and informed public discussion in a protective political environment is the only way to teach people to think for themselves and to prepare them for intellectual and political self-government.7 In the remainder of the chapter, I will offer a detailed exegesis of Kant’s essay, emphasizing its use of botanical and mechanical metaphors and showing how it anticipates his later works and their defenses of representative government and a progressive philosophy of history. An Exegesis of “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant begins his essay by defining the term “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) as “the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority,” where “minority” (Unmündigkeit) is defined as an “inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another” (WE, 8:35). Though our own “laziness” and “cowardice” are the primary reasons for our minority , those who guide us (priests, doctors, officers, tax officials) have an interest in maintaining and reinforcing it. How, then, are we to surmount such obstacles and achieve enlightenment? Kant discusses three possible paths to enlightenment, although two of them turn out to be false ones. The first progress of absolutism 137 path requires each individual to overcome immaturity through his own effort , but Kant argues that the “precepts and formulas” (Satzungen und Formeln) that weigh us down are too heavy to be removed by individual initiative alone—except for a talented few who succeed “by their own cultivation of their spirit, in extricating themselves from minority.” The second...