Ping Pong 22: In Quest of Maturity
Kant seeks to transform the very basic Rousseauean story of humanity’s path from childhood to civilization in two basic ways. On the one hand he wants to rethink what it was that composed our ‘childlike status’. Thence Kant asks ‘Was that status merely a product of a history or was it something far deeper, and are we so really very sure that we are grown up now?’. On the other hand, Kant wants to create an account of a General Will which can roll up all of humanity within its imperatives. Morality needs for Kant, not to be the product of individual cultural prejudice, but rather it must relate to some deep principle of rationality, a principle that all humanity could share. The second of these moves has been considered in detail in a previous Rant, and will therefore will only be examined in this one as it informs the first, very provocative move.
In the short, challenging and highly thought of essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Kant issues a battle cry for thinking, and an ongoing challenge to both his day and ours. What is it, he asks that makes or rather is making, his time enlightened? His answer is that it had the courage to debate. Old prejudices about the body or the physical world or even religion were thereby held up for public examination and consideration. The ‘General Will’ of his day, was therefore, Kant argued, not merely to be composed of this or that closed nationalism, but was rather a hot house of debate and public expositions.
The maturity of a society lay, for Kant, in this ability to publically debate matters of great consequence. In the courage to allow for thought. Or perhaps more accurately it lay in the belief that if one allowed dissent of conflicting voices, their own space for speech, one will eventually create, from this discussion, a far deeper, richer and more flexible consensus. However Kant thence turns the Rousseauean equation that civilization=maturity on its head. Maturity is not something simply present in his (and our) times, it was rather something that was so very hard to win, and once won, was rather easy to lose. Kant thereby foretells that the history of the post-enlightenment world will be the history of the loss and regaining of this ethic of debate, and faith in discord. To this end, Kant identifies two deep forces which unsettle the debate. Firstly there are the forces of laziness, which conspire with people’s minds to encourage one not to think. Secondly there is the very complex system of private or public duties that Kant argues, need to be allowed for, for debate to wax fast and furious: Each element needs to be examined in turn, and given this modern context.
Kant maintains that laziness is the most destabilizing element in any enlightenment. The forces of mental laziness are those forces (in his day the priests) which encourage any and every individual to simply accept ideas with an unquestioning faith. Here Kant is fairly ‘realistic’ about his fellow humanity. The public simply do not want to debate. They will have to be gently encouraged to think. Moreover this process of gradual encouragement is even more difficult because if it is carried out too quickly, the general public will actively enforce their rights not to think. They might then demand that the guardians of certainty (priests or rulers or whatever) stay in their roles, and reject any attempt on the part of their custodians to modify these roles. The warm snuggle of lazy thought will then, Kant thinks, lead many an individual to fight for their own oppression.
Thence Enlightenment becomes not a God-given right or even a simple historical fact, but rather becomes an ongoing debate, in which every generation much fight and re-fight for its rights to be mature. Since Kant's day this debate has of course become all the more complex, and the priests and despotic rulers of his day have scintillated themselves into a thousand little agents of laziness: anything from the heroin syringe through to advertising, and the culture of 24 hour news, to those subtle lazinesses of individual selfishness and partial self examination. We are constantly being encouraged to be as children in the face of the world. This fact has led to a three fold series of complexities in the struggle for enlightenment.
Firstly as different individuals become able to choose between different axes of enslavement, their minds becomes differently lazy. The society dissolves into a series of fracture lines or contours, where different elements become the unquestioned orthodoxy for differing groups, all of which look askance at each other. For one group, coal-fired power stations are necessarily bad, for another drugs are an unspeakable idiocy, while for another reading tabloid newspapers reveals a laziness like no other. Moreover there is of course nothing stopping an individual mind from choosing a pick and mix of these prejudices. We choose some lazinesses for characterizing what we are, and reject others.
Secondly and leading on from this point, the rejection of other’s viewpoints has also lost its Kantian edge. For Kant in his relatively simple dynamic of enlightenment, it was the necessary duty of those who would question to allow others to be as them. Once however the lines of debate are fractures, two things happen. On the one hand it becomes increasingly difficult to be an apostle of public questioning. On a personal level there will very likely be layers or levels of unquestioned thought, beliefs that might well be palpably wrong for others. We all are therefore caught up in having a ‘Mote in our own Eye’, and therefore unworthy to aid others. Even more problematically, the mechanics of enlightenment itself is no longer simple. There are so many ways of being lazy, that if by encouragement one encourages another to reject one laziness, there is then no guarantee that they will not simply find another! Every act of help is therefore trapped with numerous pitfalls of belief and becomes utterly complex.
Thirdly the mechanics by which the public defend their laziness has clearly become massively institutionalised. Entire agencies exist, be they state, or media or criminal fraternity, for preventing thought. These agencies are moreover rather subtle in their effects. They do not simply enforce uniformity of perspective but rather both manufacture false consensuses and spurious debates. That is on the one hand, they operate by ensuring that peer pressure to conform to a certain point of view is always brought to bear on those whom they wish to sweep into their dogma. On the other hand they ensure that all debate is carried out on acceptable lines, and between known clichés which reveal stale and really rather safe paradoxes and enigmas. Our ability to question is therefore forced to lose its radical edge. It becomes merely an adjunct of a deeper and more endemic laziness.
In a world of fractured questions, lazinesses are partially captured questioning, and so the Kantian appeal to enlightenment appears to be somewhat hopelessly idealistic. Or perhaps more darkly, the forces of laziness were and are just more powerful than poor old Kant thought. The Lazy are always able to define new ways to s/mother any axis of debate, by dragging that radicalness into a complicity of thought. Enlightenment led then, not to the glorification of debate, but rather to its problematization.
The second aspect of Kant’s original argument was that debate could only be free, if we were all prepared to be very grown up about the difference between our public debate and our private function. One must therefore debate a point with the wider public, but ensure through one’s private actions that society itself continues to function. Kant therefore argues for an Augustinian division between the public city or debate, and the private world of individual occupations. That is, a priest might question a faith and yet should still, as he is a priest, fulfil his duties to his congregation; or a doctor might always be looking for other cures but that quest should not prejudice the cures which he uses in the here and now. Such an argument has in effect two rather distinct dimensions to it. Firstly it is clear that Kant is pitching his enlightenment at a very interesting level. What is enlightened are those thoughts which can be shared with others, and not those thoughts which relate to the individual alone. Secondly, the division which Kant is imposing between thought and action is an absolute one, and cannot be easily questioned. Both these moves have become in different ways problematic to our times, and so will be examined in turn.
Enlightenment for Kant was never a private concern. And individuals cannot know whether they are enlightened in themselves, but rather must always commit their thought to public scrutiny and debate, a debate which they moreover contract to listen and respond to. To be enlightened is therefore to trust others with sharing one’s ideas, and to trust oneself to respond to that sharing. What is more, enlightenment can be torn asunder if this double axis of trust collapses. On the one hand it is all too easy to breed individuals who want to keep their thoughts to themselves and thereby confuse those thoughts with personal identity and private function. A confusion which is all the more dangerous as it encourages deep laziness in one’s thinking. On the other hand, one has of course to have an arena for public debate that is worthy of complex ideas. If that arena cannot be managed (or can only be managed in the context of some ideas, sometimes) then the entire edifice of the enlightenment collapses, and we all revert to the most vapid of childhoods.
In this light one understands the ethic of private enlightenment found in the New Age (but also elsewhere) to represent a strange pole-axing or partial reversion of this problem of trust. Enlightenment becomes a private concern, where one gets to choose the individual manner of one’s own enlightenment. This ‘choice’ is then based on one’s reading or hearing of public debate, a debate in which there is relatively little actual exchange of problematizing ideas and much confirmation of established dogmas. The debate becomes then the exchange of prejudices, while the individual becomes the private site of the enlightenment, in a glorious parody of Kant.
The second element mentioned above concerned the divisions between one’s private duties (to be a good child or citizen) and one’s public doubts. Modernity has confused this debate in three quite distinct ways. Firstly, we have simply not accepted the very basic premise on which the debate is carried out. We therefore constantly hear the argument that one should not write this or that because the mere writing of a thing might encourage others somewhere down the line to behave in a certain way. One cannot write then in praise of Jihadists and one must watch one’s back on the issues of knives. The entire Kantian faith that individuals might be mature enough to think and not act, has therefore simply been rejected. We are, the case goes, far too much children to ever reach his goal. Moreover this element was been problematized because the individuals who writes such tosh are often unsure about what they wish the result to be. That is they are very likely to revel, albeit it in a very removed form, in their power to make others act. The writers themselves therefore are likely not to be mature enough to accept the Kantian imperative that their writings should stand alone as ideas, and not manifestos. (What is more, of course if this move is accepted then much of the vigour of their writing is lost).
Secondly we have further complicated the Kantian picture by setting up endless guilds for debate. These guilds arise in two different ways. On the one hand there are those guilds, be they government organizations or the media which seek to control or at least regulate what is said. To be able to talk in public one has had to, for a long time, play the media’s game; while to know certain things, and therefore debate with all the security of knowledge behind one, one had to be an insider to government. On the other hand, there are academic journals, where theoretically the debate is open and free, and yet the complexity of the issues are so great that most people cannot participate in it. The free concept of free public debate became therefore an oxymoron. Real debate was between individuals who knew they could professionally at least trust one another, and therefore was carried out behind partially locked doors.
Thirdly, and most problematically of all, Kant clearly assumes that quality will out. Eventually. That is, that such is the nature of enlightened ideas that given time and access to the public they will triumph. This model might have been viable for the Germany of his day, where the prejudices were easy to define, and the population small. It was theoretically possible therefore to master a debate and answer the immature beliefs that might question that debate. But now? It is clear that we have accepted the Kantian imperative that everything be caught in a medium of debate (the internet), and yet that medium is so chocabloc with prejudices as well as ideas that it has become next to impossible for any settled series of debates to resolve in any ways. We might then have at last reached the Kantian domain for discussion, and yet have so complexified our path there, that it does not produce the happy world of maturity that Kant envisaged.
Kant’s challenge to his fellow man was that they should all just Grow Up. They should accept that they all could never simply reconcile beliefs with thoughts, and yet should live with the fact. Kant’s fellow man responded by on the one hand inventing endless new pretexts for never growing up; and on the other inventing a society that is so complex that Kant’s appeal to maturity itself looks immature and naïve. That is it has invented a society where it is simply impossible to be a Kantian anymore, and one needs to find yet other ways to just grow up. Moreover these other ways of being grown up were made all the more complex when the crucible of revolution (this time the French and the American) threw up new and even more problematic ideas, an issue which I will turn to in the next Rants.
