ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century and since, diverse projects have been announced under the banner of “enlightenment.” One of the philosophically most influential was espoused by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?” with the injunction: “Have the courage to use your own understanding!” This has often been connected with his strong notion of rational autonomy and interpreted in individualist terms. But that essay immediately goes on to declare that thinking for oneself is best done not alone but in concert with others, and thence to define enlightenment in terms of the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason,”2 which is the topic of the remainder of the essay. The same interdependence between using one’s own reason and reasoning in concert with others is stressed in Kant’s account of the maxims of common human understanding in the Critique of Judgment: the first maxim, “to think for oneself,” is balanced by the second, “to think from the standpoint of everyone else.” And it is also central to his account of justice in “Perpetual Peace” and other political writings, where publicity is said to be no less a condition of right than is individual consent. Elsewhere Kant characterizes the public use of reason ideally as open, critical, free of coercion, and subject to the requirements of consistency and coherence. On this reading, Kant’s enlightenment project envisioned the gradual extension of the public use of reason, so understood, to all domains of cultural and political life. Is this today a viable project?
