By |

Kant’s Legacy: Free Speech and Individual Rights

In 1783, two years after the publication of his masterpiece, The Critique of Pure Reason, the 59-year-old Immanuel Kant could finally afford to buy himself a house. A wall had to be knocked down to create a lecture room, since lectures in those days were not held on university premises but in private rooms, often in the lecturer’s lodgings.

A year after purchasing his house, Kant published an essay in response to a question posed by the Revered Johann Zöllner in a German periodical. The reactionary reverend had asked against the liberals: “What is enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as what is truth, should be answered before one begins to enlighten! And still I have never found it answered!”

Kant’s Famous Essay: What is Enlightenment?

Kant published his response, entitled, Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment, in his preferred outlet, the Berlin Monthly. The short, thousand-word piece remains widely read, and is especially remembered for its first paragraph:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere aude [Dare to Know! Dare to be Wise!] “Have the courage to use your own understanding!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.

Kant goes on to advance free speech, “the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters”, as the prerequisite of progress and enlightenment, and praises his king, Frederick the Great, “a shining example”, for having granted it to him and other Prussian subjects.

What All Enlightenment Thinkers Had in Common

In 1754, following the success of his First Discourse and his one-act opera, Le Devin du village, Rousseau returned to Geneva and converted back from Catholicism to Calvinism (a form of Protestantism). But in private, he embraced a personal, natural religion, or “religion of the heart,” which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilization, set him apart from other Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Voltaire, who championed reason, progress, and atheism.

For all their deep differences, what united the proponents of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung in German, les Lumières in French), from Hume and Voltaire to Kant and Rousseau, was a faith in reason as the source of knowledge and authority, and a commitment to applying reason to challenge superstition, dogma, and absolute authority and achieve human progress.

The Impact of the Enlightenment on Modern Democracy

Enlightenment concepts and principles such as government by consent, the separation of church and state, and individual rights and freedoms including religious freedom and free speech are at the heart of the modern democracies that, much better than any other system of government, guarantee our security, liberty, and prosperity—and, dare I say, dignity.

In his essay, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, published in the same year as What is Enlightenment, Kant argues that history is a teleological process (a process with an end or goal) tending to the full expression of human rationality and morality, manifested by the establishment of a perfectly just and stable constitution within states (initially, European states), which come together to form a federation, or league of nations, to secure universal individual freedoms and perpetual peace. In 1795, Kant followed up his essay with a much more substantial book entitled, Toward Perpetual Peace.

Thus, although better known for his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, Kant is sometimes regarded as the intellectual father of both the European Union and the United Nations, and, more generally, of the rules-based international order.

It’s fair to say, he merited the house that he bought, which, ironically, was bombed and destroyed in the Second World War.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

By |

Schopenhauer on the psychology of nationalism.

Although he thought of existence as a sorry mistake, the philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer retained a strong “Will to life”. One of his reasons for settling in Frankfurt was the reputation of that city’s doctors. 

In Frankfurt, he took many precautions, bordering on the paranoid, to preserve his life and comfortable lifestyle. For example, he kept loaded pistols at his bedside, carried a leathern flask to avoid drinking infected water, and forbade barbers from shaving his neck. To prevent robbers, servants, and others from reading them, he wrote his business records and personal thoughts in English, Latin, or Greek, or in a shorthand code.

In the final year of his life, he moved to a ground-floor apartment not because he could no longer manage the stairs but from fear of being caught in a house fire. “A man of genius” he wrote in typical style, “is like a person who lives in a house where there are no other people but only dogs and cats; he is the only one who has any intelligence, but he is constantly in danger of being bitten or scratched.”

The 1848 riots

In September 1848, there were violent riots in Frankfurt following the murder of two conservative politicians, a prince and a general.

Schopenhauer, who was then sixty years old, became worried about his property and safety. He welcomed the arrival of Austrian troops, and even allowed some twenty soldiers into his elegant apartment to shoot at revolutionaries from the window. In a parody of his social class, when the soldiers moved next door for a better vantage point, he lent one of the officers his large, double opera glasses.

Shaken by these events, he altered his will to leave the bulk of his estate to a fund for Prussian soldiers who had been maimed while quashing the 1848 revolutions—a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions across the German Confederation aimed at establishing a unified nation state, constitutional governance, and civil rights.

Schopenhauer on nationalism

Schopenhauer had no truck with either nationalism or rabble utopias. National pride, he held, is the cheapest form of pride, because it requires no individual effort or character. In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), he wrote: “Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resort pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” The Germans, he opined, benefited from having such long words in their mouths, because they “think slowly” and need “time to reflect”.

While the Young Hegelians (most famously, Karl Marx) were agitating for political and social reform, Schopenhauer claimed that misery is the natural, inevitable state for human beings, regardless of external conditions, and would not be alleviated by “progress.” He made a point of stepping outside the torrent of history and “minding not the times but the eternities”—and considered this ability to “rise into timelessness” to be the mark of a genius.

Whereas for Hegel, the state was the aim of human existence, for him it was simply its guarantor. The role of the state, in his Hobbesian view, was strictly to limit “the war of all against all” and afford him the conditions to philosophise and enjoy the arts without having to forsake his opera glasses. States with any higher ideals jeopardised their true goal of simple security.

How the Nazis interpreted Schopenhauer

The Nazis viewed Schopenhauer’s older contemporary G.W.F. Hegel with hostility. They abhorred his emphasis on reason: on history as the march of reason and the state as a body of rational laws and institutions. In 1933, Carl Schmitt, the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich, famously declared that “on the day Hitler came to power, Hegel died.”

In his Table Talk, Hitler, who did not have much philosophy, dismissed Hegel’s “tedious” and “Jewish” rationalism in favour of the “irrationalism” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—even though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both strongly rejected nationalism. Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the slave morality of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the “good European.” In 1886, he wrote to his mother, “Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.”

Hitler and the Nazis praised Schopenhauer’s ideas on the “will to life,” which, with Nietzsche, became the “will to power.” They glorified this “irrational will” over reason to support their “social Darwinism,” according to which brute force and action are superior to intellectualism, justice, and the rule of law.