Hey everybody welcome back to the new thinker if you're hearing my voice you know what that means that means David Barr is not with us today. The International House of Pancakes is having an all you can eat pancakes buffet that's kind of I guess that's the problem right? I think so yeah. He was he was hankering for the Rudy to the fresh and fruity is what he was saying he was going for the record.
Is that is not like a thing at the eye up? Well apparently it's local eye up there in North Carolina it is. I say right. He's doing well right now he's holding off a couple of competitors.
Yes. His words the other guy is a little hefty so he's a little scared his words not mine I'm just what he said. That's just mean spirit. I'm just reporting what he said that's when I agree it's mean spirit.
So what are we doing today? We're doing a manual. We have a guess. Yes.
Sam Stoner. Yeah you want to introduce him you said you have some bio on him right? Yeah sure Sam Stoner came home to his wife and family after serving in the conflict overseas and the time that he served frankly has shattered all his nerves and left him with a little trap and let's need but the morphine used his pain and he got his act together and he went to graduate school at Tulane and then and now he's here to study countless that's what I know about Sam Stoner. You got more Alex the books at home?
He had a study cop with us. That's something you know he's like a scholar. He's gonna learn us. But I want stated a girl and I would write one stated a girl.
I want stated a girl. Yeah. All of the times there were various vowel and fauna. Yeah exactly.
But she I would write her emails in iambic pentameter like sonnets but I wouldn't put spaces it would just be like a paragraph form and then she just was like why do you write so odd I was like just do we get as a joke and identify right. Right. Fair enough. He's using my jokes.
Are you a full you're emeritus now right close. Close. Yeah close. I see that because Sam Stoner looks like he's 12 to this day.
Oh come on. He used to win so Sam went to Notre Dame undergrad he studied comp there and then he and I met Tulane. He's just doing a rich avocados. He's not a conscal and now Sam has established himself as a conscaler writing on decart as well you have an edited volume which I actually have right here.
He's going to the mic. All right. All right. The possibility of progress.
You'll see you. You'll see you. I'm not the highlights at least every the chapter that Paul and I wrote. Yeah.
Yeah. No, that's true. And then so but to get to the point when Sam started teaching he looked younger than the students. Isn't that right?
You did. That's what I had. That's what I had. No, newer students saying they thought that this was like some make a wish thing that helps him get out.
That helps him get out. But you looked vibrant healthy. You also are a people on those about your world class diver. Right.
I was I was diving is one of those things though that you know if you don't continue on you quickly lose your capacity. So. Spentages. Yeah.
Well, thanks for joining us Sam. What are we talking about today? Short essay by Kant. It's a useful way to work your way into cons thought and for political philosophy podcast seem appropriate.
Cons essay and answer to the question what is enlightenment. So put the folks at home most of us are Shrall's which we don't even know who this guy is that you're talking about. So if you just use tell the people at home. I mean, I'm being a little bit cheeky but seriously who was what years we talked about what years this essay what is major works?
Why should someone should put a class in recon? So on support. Yeah, of course. So concierge our 1724 to 1804 is three most important works are sort of three parts of each religion.
The critique of pure reason which was published in 1781. So it's always a relief to me because it's like 56 years old when he published this landmark work in the history of philosophy. So there's still hope that as soon as 57 Sam 57 Sam be haven't done it by then. Yeah, it's a few years.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the second edition of that came out in 1787 and the year after that in 1788 published the critique of practical reason, which is a statement of its moral philosophy.
And then the third critique is the critique of the power of judgment which deals with the themes of aesthetics and teleology and that was published in 1790. And so these are three critiques. Content and foresee that he was going to write a trilogy when he set out to write the critique of pure reason. But when he completed the trilogy, he saw these three as parts of a whole.
We actually called them together the critique of reason. So all three critiques are just the critique of reason and his point. And that's just a further column. Is it further column to George Lucas of his day?
Sure. Yeah. He didn't know the prequel is it similarly bad with not? Right.
Right. The Enlightenment essay that we're looking at today came out in 1784. And so those are just some highlights of yours and his work. I don't know if you guys want me to say a little bit to introduce the essay or how you get into it.
Yeah. Yeah. So just some preliminary statements about the essay. There's an important set of questions about the Enlightenment essay that has to do with how it's related to Kant's critique of reason as a whole.
That's an interesting question, but it gets us pretty quickly into the Kantian needs. That's not a terribly pleasant place to be. Strazians particularly don't like to go there. So I'll spare you guys.
Let me make this for a preliminary suggestion. Kant's thought is often seen as a peak of the Enlightenment and Kant is often cast as an Enlightenment thinker. And so it seems reasonable to turn to the Enlightenment essay as a source of insight into self-understanding. And it's tempting to think that the essay is crucial for understanding Kant's political philosophy because it explores the question of how reason ought to operate in public.
There's a lot to that. But I would say at the outset that we should resist the urge to draw his conclusions about Kant's understanding of what Enlightenment is. And it's really important to see that he's at least as interested in the problems that confront Enlightenment as he is in sort of a Pollyanna-ish about the prospects for Enlightenment. There's another interesting set of questions about this essay having to do with its historical context.
Kant published the essay in a popular magazine, intended it for a wide audience. He wrote it in response to sort of public debates among German thinkers about the Enlightenment and just to relate this to political philosophy and some of the themes you all focus on in the podcast here. The debates ultimately dealt with the question of the proper relationship between reason and custom in general and between reason and religion in particular. And so that this makes the essay something that fits fairly nicely into the types of discussions of the history of political philosophy that you all are one to have.
All that said, I think the essay provides a matter for fruitful reflection on its own, independent of any background about Kant or his historical context. I'll say I often assign it in my introductory philosophy class, which here at Assumption, I teach at Assumption University, same place as former guest, Vijay Dobsky. The introduction to philosophy class here is called, you guys will like this, Socrates and the search for truth. So that's a little bit of Russian philosophy class.
But I decided as a complementary counterpart to the allegory of the cave. I think that works pretty well. And I'm glad you guys released the episode on the cave before we're recording. But I think it'd be interesting to discuss how conservation of enlightenment relates to the vision of enlightenment, terrorist complete-nism on one hand and sort of the kratik understanding of enlightenment on the other hand.
And I admit that I'm still not 100% sure I understood how you all understand socratic enlightenment. So maybe you can enlighten me a bit later. Very good. Sounds like you're in the cave, my friend.
That's up to you. So it's to be liberated. Yeah. Great.
You got something? No, I was just going to say, I think I just wrote down to make sure we return to that Socrates business at the end because that sounds super interesting, but probably more borgillagely at the con first. But yeah, I think that's something fascinating topic. But how convenient do we adoption and then did the cave right here before we had, you know, we need to do a friend on top of the book.
I was saying we had about adoption, comma, then we did the cave and just develop those things. Let's start. I don't know. This is a wild idea.
Let's start at the beginning. And Greg, you said you wanted to read the first paragraph. Yeah, I'll just read the first paragraph. I was disappointed to see that this is like, I taught this too.
I used this console, right? So I was like, oh, we got the same one. I was like, oh, no, it's not the same one. So all my notes and then I was like, it's a different translation in the Cambridge political writing series.
It's funny. So anyway, so here's the different. The first paragraph of the first paragraph of the console is an answer to the question, what is enlightenment? Enlightenment is the human being's emergence from his self-encurred minority.
Minority is inability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-encurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sabeir, Audé, are you guys going to correct my Latin? Have courage to make use of your own understanding?
Is das the model of enlightenment? And that Latin phrase is dare to be wise. Dare to know? I would say.
Okay, very good. Yeah, that seems right. Yeah, so where would you like to begin with that? Go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, so on the one hand, it's sort of a simple first paragraph. And it seems like contest up to the normal business of philosophers, which is sort of making a claim and defining some terms. You know, it's interesting. It tells us what Kant thinks enlightenment is.
It doesn't say that this is, doesn't defend that claim in any way. It's worth noting. But I think what I would point to, especially interesting in this paragraph is kind of doing two things at once, it seems to me. He's both telling us something and showing us something.
And he tells us something by laying out a definition and then clarifying the meaning of its terms. But I think he's showing us something with this Latin quotation, which comes from a work of Horace that I'm unfamiliar with, called the Epos, Alex Greg, you know, this work at all, deeply actually, so some of the lines of the 14 paragraph. Yeah, good. But yeah, it means something like dare to know or dare to be wise.
And Kant does something interesting with this because the line that follows his quotation of that says, have the courage to make use of your own understanding. This seems to be const translation or reinterpretation of this notion, this idea dare to know or dare to be wise. And I mean, it seems to me that there are a few things going on here. One is that Kant is quoting an ancient author and then providing a sort of reinterpretation of the meaning of this ancient author.
And so there seems to be something of a modern reappropriation of an ancient. So there's an ancient modern issue going on here. And you've got to know that insignificant change real quick just before you go and like, yeah, dare. I mean, we did move down to episodes of Thucydides and there are other places where, in my head, daring is not the same thing as courage.
Yeah. I mean, daring can seem a little edgier, a little courage, like it can be sort of innovative or something like this. And I didn't think about this way, lay out the ancient modern distinction. It's like, it's the risk of maybe going too far.
Courage can be more democratic than daring. Like, dare, it sort of maybe is limited to the few who can dare to be wise and go sort of past ordinary boundaries of knowledge like this. I don't know. Yeah.
But then to make you say your own version, you go, yeah, no, that hadn't occurred to me, though. I like the point. The thing that I thought about in the past is there seems to be a move. I mean, there's a difference between saying dare to know something or dare to be wise, which emphasizes the sort of purpose of thinking or the purpose of philosophy that tell us.
And Kant abandons that and it's a concern with process. He was from purpose to process, it seems, that what matters is just making use of your own understanding. There doesn't seem to be any commitment about where it will end up, whether it's knowledge or wisdom. And so this move from purpose to process seems interesting to me.
And then Greg, you brought up, there seems to be an attempt to combine to combine in some way what Aristotle would distinguish something like moral and intellectual virtue. Right. And so I don't know if you guys have thoughts about that, but those are just some things that now this one's different. I'm going to print them just one small point just to amplify what you said.
The first seems to imply that the highest thing to aim at is this knowledge of wisdom. And the second one kind of explicitly subordinates it to the use of your knowledge or wisdom to understand. So that's really good. And it also says democratic or modern, the subordination of knowledge to other ends.
I mean, it's also to me, I don't know what the German is here, but to make use of your own understanding, he is using a noun there. That's speaking in terms of the faculties, right, which is not what Horace is doing. I would also say that if he is, it's almost like a syllogism, right? If he is correcting Horace or modifying Horace while also talking about having the courage to understand something outside of your self-encurred minority, he might be presenting modernity as a sort of escape from the minority of the antiquity, right, from the minority of the ancient philosophers.
So he might be in a way subtly nodding that, you know, what he's about to lay out is an attempt to overcome antiquity. I mean, this is a good transition to the next, to the general sort of tenor of this, which is that he's talking about popular enlightenment, right? We're going to talk about the cave eventually, but this is a completely different view of enlightenment, right? And maybe he's cautiously trying to overcome this political obstacle, right?
So when you lay out, like if you lay out the Greeks, right, there's sort of, I'm going to lay out the bar from the various here, but there's three modes of discussion, right, or argumentation. The highest is demonstration of the loss of philosopher, dialectics, which is a kind of motion up towards that, but then the lowest form is rhetoric, which is often paired with poetry, and that's how you speak to the people, with the laws and things like that. This is not what he's talking about, right? I guess, I think there's wiggle room here, but, you know, perhaps in this escape from minority, he's talking about overcoming the cave in some way that it had not been attempted before, right?
Yeah, he moved, I mean, there's sort of movement. I think you're correct that he eventually focuses on the question of the possibility. And the conditions for popular or popular enlightenment, even universal enlightenment. But it's interesting, I mean, he starts by defining enlightenment in terms of the individual.
It's the individual human beings emergence from his self-encurred minority. And then he undertakes to show why that is virtually impossible or exceedingly rare. And the reasons that make it exceedingly rare make it so that it's necessary to have popular enlightenment. And so it's interesting to see the sort of reasoning, we can talk about this in a second, but yeah, it's usually just noting that it starts with the individual.
And then based on some problems, moves to the popular enlightenment. Can you lay out that argument in like a sort of course reform? I think that'd be helpful. Yeah, so in the, we read the first paragraph aloud, and then in the, the, the subject of three paragraphs, he lays out what he sees to see, it seems to me that there's sort of four obstacles to enlightenment.
On the one hand, there is the natural desire or comfort of individual human beings. Thinking is hard. It's easier to listen to someone, right? I mean, has this line, five a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regiment for me and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all.
And so the natural desire for comfort gravitates against the hard work of thinking for oneself. But the problem is exacerbated because there, it turns out that there's a class of guardians or leads or rulers who in order to preserve their own authority, take advantage of the natural desire for comfort of the many and emphasize how uncomfortable sort of exacerbate sort of elevate the sense in the many that thinking for oneself is dangerous and troublesome and uncomfortable. And so people don't like to do it. And the guardians kind of calls them the sort of elites, the rulers, keep the many down in order to preserve their own authority.
And so this is the second obstacle. Greg, did you want to jump in? I just, I'm, I'm, I'm interrupting. You're doing so pretty.
I'm just thinking about, I mean, like, look, I'm thinking about, I haven't read much Constance undergraduate, but of course, the most famous thing we all know, everybody knows from Kant is the category of imperative, right? This idea that morality should be considered universal as I'm wearing on the fits in here. And here's, yeah. And I'm wondering if it's relevant for this discussion, because is this dare to know, is it a categorical imperative for all of us, like, tell the truth or something like this?
And in, I don't know if this does pay the waiver or how democratic this enlightenment can ultimately be or not, especially if we recognize that, like you're pointing out that this great part of humankind doesn't like to think for itself because it's dangerous or burdensome or whatever. So does that fit in at all? Here? Yeah.
I mean, it really just takes us a little farfield, but it's a good question. It's related to a question I have about this essay and to a temptation I have to think that Kant is more impressed with the limits of what he's describing as enlightenment than its prospects, which is that the way he talks about enlightenment here is user-owned understanding, and wherever it gets you, that's fine. And in his, you'd say, less popular and more serious works, the critics, he argues that a truly philosophic examination of the nature, power, and limits of reason reveals that reason is essentially moral. And so reason self-knowledge, knowledge of reasons, knowledge of itself, leads not just anywhere, but to a particular conclusion and a particular understanding of morality.
And so Kant seems to abstract from his own understanding of the essential ends of reason, as he calls them in this essay. So that's a question I've thought about in the past. Well, also one other connection is the categorical imperative while arguing for it, and using your piece into understanding and getting sort of trained in it takes a long way, he's had pains to emphasize more than once that it's actually pretty easy to understand, act in such a way that everyone were to do what you were doing. It would make sense.
I think actually there's a connection here between Hobbes and Kant, because Hobbes is like, look, everything I'm saying is just the golden rule. Do you want to other explain it to another? And so I think all these matters are in a weird situation, these enlightenment things are in a weird situation, because one, they're involved in these very complex arguments and very arcane stuff that they're sort of arguing against the Galatism of the ancient Alumni. On the other hand, they want everybody to get it.
So they kind of have to boil it down at a certain time. I think one relationship would be right that, you know, while it's difficult to get there and to get through the three critiques, you can't understand in a very rudimentary way and have communicated to you by the enlightened scholar Kant, you know, this moral teaching. Yeah, there's a an important passage in the first section of the groundwork for the metaphysics of morals, where Kant explains that he's a critic, because he says what he's doing is no different than what Socrates did, which is revealing the, revealing to people the principles that are always already at work in their understanding and sort of leading people to self-knowledge. And that once you clear away the various sort of misconceptions and problematic understanding people have, you know, what you get is that basically everyone sort of already, you know, might say, divides the truth of the categorical imperative.
They just haven't articulated themselves yet in a formal sort of formal philosophic way. Yeah, the categorical imperative, as you said, is Kant's way of describing the moral law that is inherent in reason. It's an imperative because it tells you what you must do, and it's categorical in the sense that it necessarily applies to you. It cannot be denied.
There's a number of formulations of this, but sort of the initial is you should act in such a way that the maxim that determines your will should be able to be universalized. So what if everyone walks on the grass is my dad used to say? Yeah, exactly. If everyone lie, then there would be no point in lying because your lie could never be efficacious.
Right. Then telling the truth is the true power. No, sir. No, sir.
No, sir. No. Can I, so wait, I don't want to get us further off track because you were laying out the four points of getting to this relationship, but I also want to just quick guess or no question. When he mentions guardians, do you think he hasn't been the Republic?
Yeah, I've wondered that before, especially if it's like this natural right, three-part hierarchy. Yeah, I'm inclined to think that he must, but I will admit that because I know scholar, I haven't sort of gone through all of the German translations of the public to the extent that they existed or people's discussion and the Plato's public adjournment of the time. So that's just a hard one. I wonder if you ever discuss any letters or publish writing such as Don't No Con, if you ever discuss as the Republic, they don't.
But he certainly discusses ideas from the Republic. Sure. But it's a content sort of, it seems, it seems to have had sort of an encyclopedic knowledge of Roman authors, but not so much the Greeks. He seems to be familiar with them, maybe through less than studying them directly than through sort of secondary accounts of them or something like that.
I think even if it's not the case that it's sort of a direct illusion, it's certainly true that the guardians described here are serving a function similar to the guardians that we get in Plato's Republic. And so that's one of the reasons it's good to teach this in conjunction with the Republic. It's remarkably parallel to the censorship and control of education. Okay, so for these four steps, the first is this natural desire for comfort on the part of the many.
The second is the way that the few rulers take advantage of that natural desire in order to preserve their authority by sort of stressing it and elevating it and therefore discouraging any free thinking that people might be otherwise tempted to do. Now, after emphasizing those points, Con says that there are a few who, despite all of these challenges, will succeed in thinking for themselves. But he goes on to point out that the one problematic consequence is that people become habituated to not thinking, making enlightenment actually impossible in a way. And so it's not just that people are inclined not to do it.
And the guardians discourage it, but sort of the collaboration of those two things creates habits that are virtually impossible to overcome. And finally, what happens is because those habits become so ingrained in both the guardians and the populace, the guardians end up being ruled by the habits that they instilled, the habitual beliefs and ways of thinking that they instilled in the many. And so even if a guardian were to come, an enlightened guardian were to come about that wanted to encourage people to think for themselves, they would be run out of town on a rail, not only by the other guardians, but by the people who have so imbibed and accepted the form of minority that Con describes that they're unwilling to give it up. And so this brings to mind the part of the algorithm that came from me where Socrates is imagining, well, what if someone returns, and what if they try to show other people that they're the shadows or shadows, on the one hand they'd be laughing stock, but they probably kill them in the end or they try to kill them.
So you're in good. Let's say, yeah, so how do these four things working together lead from lead kind of away from the idea that we ought to focus on enlightening individuals and toward the idea that enlightenment ought to proceed in sort of a public way? Well, he said, I think the argument goes something like this, this is not explicit, but I think this is what you have to reconstruct. What do you need to overcome the problem?
It's something like you have to have a solution that prevents the ability of the many and the guardians to conspire to shut down free thinking. How you have to somehow guarantee freedom of thought, but you also have to guarantee somehow the ability to disseminate the spirits or the commitment to free thinking. Con talks about the spirit of rational valuing of one's own worth and of the calling of each individual to think for himself, somehow that has to be disseminated. And so you need to allow for the expression of alternative views to the commonly accepted views in public.
And therefore you need a freedom to make use of one's reason in public. And Kant seems to think that if there's sort of a culture of people engaging in rational discourse and debate in public, then enlightenment will just take care of itself. It's like, I mean, the thesis of this thing is that good. It's probably going to read what he says.
He says like a revolution may well bring about a falling off of personal justice and an average or tyrannical oppression, but never a true form of thinking. So that he does hold up hope for some sort of serious, at least on the surface, at least some there is hope for some great enlightening that could happen if we can if we can sort of make this possible. And I hadn't noticed how guys clearly as you just like out of four, how much both groups are opposed to public enlightenment. That's something that I hadn't really paid much attention to.
But does the regime type matter? That is maybe taking us too far up you again. But like, it doesn't seem to seem to be okay with Kings. There's this I'm in the first full paragraph on page 18.
One ruler in the world says argues much as you will and about whatever you will but obey. So at least one King seems to be okay with rational discourse. I take this to be, I don't know why I have this in my nose but there's a illusion of Frederick the Great. But is it something serious or is it or is it something tongue in cheek that he's of course arching does a good job?
He brings that up here in parentheses, but in the final paragraphs of the essay he makes this really explicit and really lays it off thick in phrasing Frederick, you know, that the right of the end of light to the world that this is the age of enlightenment or what comes to the same thing, the century of Frederick. And yeah, and so yeah, that is an illusion Frederick the Great. And I do think regime time matters here. This is something that I just realized for the first time.
So you can, I want to. It seems not to. This is an exclusive. I think that it follows from this argument that enlightenment is only possible in a monarchy at the beginning.
Okay. Public enlightenment must can only emerge in a monarchy. And I think you are going to go something in place. Sorry about that.
Yeah. Because if you have a multiplicity of guardians, then the problem is that and if you have a multiplicity of guardians and if using your own understanding is exceedingly rare, even among the guardian class, then what would need to happen is a majority of those guardians to start to for whatever reason think for themselves at the same time. And that seems, you know, really unlikely from the hypothesis impossible. And so what would likely happen is maybe get one or two of the guardians that think for themselves, but the majority of the guardians and all of the people, you know, run them out of town in the way we were describing before.
And so what you really need is one ruler and you have to get lucky and that one ruler would have to start to think for themselves. Right. And so what you need is not a philosopher king, but an enlightened king. You don't think it's possible that the idea here might actually then therefore actually be an illusion to a singular philosopher who actually can articulate this for folks like an indirect rule of one.
I mean, this is a popular essay. Yeah. Does const see himself as performing this sort of legislative function? Interesting.
I mean, by that idea, I don't know. It's funny. He's not writing this. It's not like, you know, big and straight instillation or the prince or something where it's addressed to the monarch.
He's addressing the people about how great it is that the monarch lets them say whatever they thought. And in a way, it shifts the term of praise. It's, you know, it makes it incumbent. Now, this is obviously it's not like contrary to all of a sudden politics change, but as a sort of rhetorical effort, you start to realize that, yeah, I guess if you just start publishing stuff and you start talking about it, the princess to become enlightened or it becomes a democracy.
But I think I would go to Sam and say, I mean, he starts talking about a prince right after the Frederick of Common about enlightened princes in a way. Yeah, it does seem like once you throw a democracy in the mix, which is obviously the other extreme, it messes everything up. Because then if you have everybody's because he has a, you mentioned the rule of experts thing. I think that's what we're talking about.
But there is this kind of, you learn something, you spend your time, you're experienced in it, you're now like among the learner or the scholars and you can speak on the subject. There is still a kind of top down, you know, relationship here that you wouldn't get from a democracy where, you know, you get to be past judgment on everything regardless of experience or knowledge. Yeah. Yeah.
Just to add one caveat. I mean, I think that the logic of the argument entails that popular enlightenment to the kind that contest envisioning must begin in a monarchy. But I think then that the trajectory of the argument is once it begins in a monarchy, and that monarchy is an example, then others will imitate that in the process of enlightenment, will eventually have reverberations on the regime type that might a make enlightenment possible in different types of regimes, but b, or laterly, might mean that enlightenment is a cause of regime change. A cause of a move from a sort of monarchy of that kind that Frederick led to something more like a republic which is kind of own favored regime.
And so that's going to run with that idea. Again, just to a small point, I mean, like, to the extent that this is rhetorical, if it is rhetorical at all, I mean, we're only talking about monarchies in Europe, right? So I mean, it's in a way like, of course, it's gonna happen in a monarchy. But other than the logical reasons you just laid out, just as a practical matter, yeah, yeah, and Europe, certainly 1784 is the year of this.
And so it is aware of the American Revolution. I heard some interesting talks about it, fascinated awareness of it. But so you might wonder what do you think about that, right? Right.
Can I throw in something here? I think the regime types matters. I think also the religion matters, because all along, like, says in paragraph five, he says, as a scholar, the clergyman has complete freedoms even called upon to communicate to the public, all his carefully examined and well-intentioned thoughts. I'm like, what about Catholicism, right?
If you have to disagree, it doesn't have to work its way up the ranks and then do this, or I was just thinking about it very least, right? Like, I mean, very his whole claim is you can't utter demonstrations to the public, right? And we're a dialectical examination. And it might be erroneous, certainly you should, even if it's correct.
And then he goes on in paragraph six, to kind of address implicitly this objection, where he says, but should not a society of clergyman such as an ecclesiastical, sinot or a venerable classes be authorized to bind itself by oath to a certain unalterable creed in order to carry on an unceasing guardianship over each of its members and by means of them over the people who even perpetuate this, such a contract he goes on to say concluded to keep all further enlightenment away from the human race forever is absolutely null and void, even if it were ratified by the supreme power by imperial diets and by the most solemn peace tree. So that's for all time, but a little later he says, but it is absolutely impermissible to a great, even for a single lifetime to a permanent religious constitution. And I'm like, where's it? What's the justification for this, right?
And then he eventually goes on, it's incumbent upon one to know, and in fact, to violate this imperative, I guess it seems like a duty, but correct me from wrong, Sam, I had that question, whether it's a writer or duty, he says that the secret right of humanity, this is divinely the secret right of humanity and trembling underfoot. So it seems like what's most sacred, right, is not any kind of church or religious organization, any kind of religion, but the secret right, not just to inquire a question, which I think I've always certainly agreed with, that's incumbent upon those who are learning and able to learn, but to also to propagate, right, which is not something I think ancient somebody evolves would go along. So I guess there's a number of questions, thoughts there, but I mean, it does seem, and I know you had thoughts on this, but it does seem like you need a kind of Protestant religion, right, as well as a doctrine of human rights. Yeah, that's interesting.
At the very least, here's a temptation, it's tempting to conflate all modern philosophy into one big heap, and to think that the moderns all basically agreed on what it meant to be modern and what the modern meant and how modernity should handle issues related to authorities that had previously been accepted via God or nature or the church, and that's false, that assumption about the nature of modernity. And it's false for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is there are different views on modernity among the moderns about how to deal with the question of Christianity. And there are differences in part because different parts of Europe are confronting different forms of Christianity. And so you have, you know, you might think that there's a link between Catholicism and France, and the form of radical enlightenment that was highly materialistic and atheistic that arose in France.
And you might think that there is a connection between the Church of England and the sort of deism, the sort of Lockean moderate deism that arose in England, sort of the form of the modernity took. And lastly, it's just a case that not only the German, that sort of modernity, the wave of modernity crashed on Germany much later than it did the rest of Europe for a variety of reasons, but then Germany for, you know, 200 years by the time account is writing had been under this way of Lutheranism. And this is very important for thinking that for Lutheranism gives a different inflection to enlightenment or modernity. And one way that I've thought about this in the past, you know, Luther at the Diet of Worms says, yeah, gross.
It's my New Year's resolution. No, no, check the pounds, eat the worms. Says, you know, he's famous for saying, do I stand? I can do nothing else more, whatever.
Turn that I don't think he said that turns out that that's not historically accurate. But he says at one point, you know, he's famous for calling reason a whore. But at this diet, he says, unless I can be convinced by reason, by scripture or reason, scripture or reason, I'm not going to change my mind. And so there's this issue within Lutheranism that once you vest scripture with authority and not church or tradition, then you need to interpret scripture.
And what you do, it seems like when you interpret scripture is rely, in some degree, and in some way, on reason. And so there's a way in which Lutheran Christianity seems more open to rationalism. It's simultaneously more opposed to reason and more open to reason than other forms of Christianity, that sort of a paradoxical fact about the situation in Germany. I don't know if that is if that's making sense or if you're a prophet.
Absolutely. I mean, this is right. Yeah. I mean, there's a, I mean, you can even include Machiavelli in this, right?
When he's dealing with the church and he sees this connection between spiritual power and temporal power that opens the door to, well, he's talked about this on the podcast before, but that opens the door to thinking about the sort of intellectual power of reasoning about necessity, right? That is sort of just as they're trade-offs and they have to like, there might be trade-offs politically that you can sort of pin down, right, that are necessary. And it seems like the church reveals or if you want to be more cynical, the church sort of creates the opportunity for this kind of thing. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That might otherwise be there. And so if you just bring it back to me, I'll say, if you want to have a form of enlightenment that enlightens religion, as opposed to a form of enlightenment that sort of defeats or abolishes or refutes religion or something like that, then it seems like you have to, you have to attack formal ecclesiastical structures.
So you have to have like the descendants and classies and these sort of that, thinking about religion can be reserved for sort of a set of authoritative priests or something like that. It must be open to rational inquiry from all, because all are rational. And that's not to say you won't get sort of mystics and enthusiasts and all sorts of crazy and silly things emerging out of everyone thinking about religion. But nevertheless, it seems like the enlightenment of religion, if I can use that form of religion, can only proceed if you have sort of religion being open to rational investigation.
So can I raise a question going back kind of earlier on, right? You already read this line, but let me go back to it because it just resonated with me, but it was so counterintuitive to hear it and enlighten an essay arguing on behalf of a certain, I understand it in line, but on behalf of enlightenment, to read this, let me just read it again. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that understands for me, the spiritual advisor who has a conscious from 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, but readily undertake the irks of business for me. It's a word for the word pay really juffed out of me. And I don't really ever hear, and you guys really go into this, but I don't ever hear a talk about economics. And then we just jumped out to me, because it reminds me so much of today, right?
Like, we're so system dependent, we're so expert dependent, we rely on sort of external authority, just even Google Wikipedia, anything, right? But now the AI that writes our essays for us, right? It's all done for us. And so we're put it's strange at the end of enlightenment, we're like, no, this is just a different minority, which might just be a nod to Plato that the game goes away.
But more of the point, one of the things that I think, if you were to say, well, how did this happen to enlightenment, you would have to say, well, it's economics, right? It's business, because there's a lot of money to be made in exploiting this feature of human nature that he himself outlines, right? That we like this, and we'd rather pay part of the problem, I think, with the enlightenment is that it pairs this free thinking also with free trade, right? So it's not, it's not now Descartes says, out of generosity, I'll share my scientific discoveries with you.
Like I said, no, forget it, I'll just make something you buy it, and then, you know, we'll get involved in trade. I'll tell you it's healthy, whatever you're eating, I'll tell you it's good for you, whatever you're doing, and you'll, you know, really do it. As an aside, I saw a news article today about this new game controller that's designed for disabled people so that they can sit and play for longer, more comfortably. And in my mind, I was like, oh, that's so nice of them to make them addicted to being divorced from the world.
You know, I was like, this is, it looks nice, but it's actually quite insidious, right? So I guess my question is, does it kind of a write about economics, because it seems like economics and trade does threaten some of his sort of optimism. Yeah, so yeah, he does have, he does not have a treatise on economics, on the other hand, he was familiar with and admired Adam Smith. And if you look at his essay on the idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent, in which he is attempting to describe the mechanisms by means of which civilization has developed, has developed and does develop, it does seem like implicit in that is a sort of understanding of something like remarket capitalism and the way that incentives drive people to do things.
I mean, again, it's not explicit at all, but it doesn't seem to be in the background. But this actually, I just relate to something that comes at the end of the essay that I'm really confused by, but I think really sort of find provocative like the last paragraph. And this seems to me to come out of nowhere. Or let me say it has some, it has anticipated slightly by cons claim that a few come, comes claim that he focuses on matters of religion, because minority, religious minority, being unenlightened when it comes to religion is the most dangerous form of minority.
And he talks about the problem of spiritual despotism. And in the final paragraph, he introduces what he claims to be a paradox, which is that it seems like having more civil freedom, which for God seems to mean the freedom to do what one wants, would help promote a freedom of spirit, by which kind seems to mean something like the freedom to think for oneself. But in fact, more civil freedom creates insurmountable barriers to freedom of spirit, that more civil freedom makes rational thought less likely. And conversely, if you restrict civil freedom, it creates space that allows for spiritual freedom, which then will allow for a more healthy development of civil freedom in the future.
So that is just a striking claim. And I never quite know what to do with it. It seems to come out of nowhere. It's introduced in the last paragraph of the essay, but it seems to run directly counter to like basic principles of verminarity.
And so I don't know what you guys thought of that. I mean, it reminds me of Tochel, who says similar things, right? I think so. I mean, maybe cons on to something that it's how you do this, how you have this regime devoted to liberty that doesn't undermine freedom of thought.
I mean, maybe it goes back to the first paragraph that Alex was hammering away at. Maybe the problem is people who left to their own free devices will actually, you know, what do you call it? All sorts thinking for themselves, right? Because all of these economy.
And also just, I mean, I don't see much evidence for this here, but just that this is deferral to experts. There's no difference to the majority like you see in Tochel. That people just sort of, you don't see that here, which I think is persuasive to me in Tochel. It reminded me a little bit of the critique of democracy and we're talking about maximal civic freedom.
We're talking about democracy in a way, right? I guess. Yeah. And so it reminded of the critique I just pulled out the Republicans from book eight, 561 CDP, where he's talking about how we in democracies, we don't like to order our desires, but we rather honor them on an equal basis.
And he describes such a person here, always reminds me of my students. He says, then he also lives a long day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him at one time drinking and listening to the flute and another time downing water and reducing. So that's like, sometimes I hop, sometimes take a new ninja too. Yeah, well, yeah, you bingeing and then you purge.
Yeah, I hop ninja too. Yeah, that's far. I know, right. He's gymnastic and again, idling and neglecting everything sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with velocity.
All of any engages in politics and jumping upstairs and does whatever chances to come to him. And if he ever admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction and if it's money makers in that one. And there is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling this life sweet, free, and blessed, he follows it throughout. I think there's a similar point here, right, which is that maximal freedom leads to lack of order, lack of necessity.
And while the order you get from society, under Frederick or whatever, might not be ideal, it at least teaches you discipline and that certain fruits only come through learning and study. I think he might just be right about this. And this is a problem with enlightenment and liberal democracy, which is that it looks like everybody's free, but it turns out nobody has structure, nobody has order, nobody follows any kind of necessary path to learning, to the point that often students can't read a sentence correctly, write a sentence correctly, and so what's the end result that kind of flit around from one thing to the other? And therefore massively susceptible to snake oil salesmen, fake numbers or whatever you want to call it.
And it seems like we can't hear, want to argue for the need for order. The moral law would seem to provide the principle of the order. Because here seems to be concerned with the more basic need, which is to do any of that, you have to be able to be thoughtful, to have a thought, not just to be sort of slavishly listening to other people. And it seems like even that, the ability to think in some sort of meaningful way, in any form seems to be undermined by giving people civil freedom before they've developed the capacity to think.
And the ship has sailed at that point, you can go back and you can only go back by sort of having a move back to monarchy in order to institute fewer civil freedoms in order to create the spiritual freedom before rolling out the civil freedoms again, and it's a strange thing. It reminds me of the beginning almost, right? Dare to be wise, right? If daring to be free from ignorance, right, to throw off these shackles, if it's kind of daring or courage at bottom, I wonder if it's too optimistic to think that daring or that spiritedness, that the root of enlightenment is going to let itself be shackled by anything, right?
I mean, even just as a core, I mean, we've all had this experience, you walk into a course, you're excited about it. And you're just kind of don't want to read the stuff that's on the syllabus, or you don't want to follow that path, even though it might be reasonable, or you don't like the teacher, so you reject it. A lot of that comes from a spirit of sort of independent learning, right? That's foolish because it's not loaded yet.
So it's very difficult to cultivate that passion and then, you know, expect it to stay within bounds. Yeah, I do think that what so if the thesis of the essay is something like the freedom to make public use of reason is a necessary and sufficient condition of enlightenment, then it seems to me that at least the second claim that it's sufficient depends on an assumption that the daring use of reason will converge, and it's possible for everyone and will converge upon sort of a common set of principles that can guide common life. And I think that there's no art, it's a big assumption to make. Before it's worth, I want to make the case, I want to make the case with the number of times, it kind of comes to question the conception of enlightenment he lays out here, in part because he comes to question that assumption, and in particular it comes to question that assumption in response to the pantheism controversy, and the sort of rise of forms of beatism and irrationalism associated with figures like Jacobi and others, but that's a longer story for another time.
That'd be a fun number time. Any points to that? We are actually probably already over an hour, so maybe at this point we can transition to just talking a little bit about yourself saying, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, with guests, especially a little more established than you're roughly our contemporary, but still we're still interested with folks at home. How did you get interested?
That's the first place. How did you get down to philosophy? Was it accidental? Did you know going in?
Were there key teachers, key figures? Did you put a link to grab behind some bush? Whatever it is, it's true about you. I've been thinking about this today, I've heard you guys, you know a few other folks.
It's often been a theme that there was a particular teacher, and like a particular moment with a particular teacher, that sort of conversion moment. And though I had great teachers as an undergrad, in a way that wasn't true for me. I mean, I started my freshman year at Notre Dame. I was going studying to be a chemical engineer, but I didn't enjoy that.
I liked the philosophy class that I took as part of the core there, and eventually somehow found my way to the great books program. And it was really through reading the books, but especially reading the books. I mean, the small program, they're like 30 students, maybe 40 that graduated in our class, and we had classes together and it's really just being part of that community and making friends, where friendships, where we spent our time outside of class, thinking about the ideas that we're discussing in class. I think that that was, I love that type of conversation.
I think that that was, you know, one of the things that really made me want to continue on studying these things. So, that's a little more... No, that's fine. Yeah, yeah.
I wanted to include something, and we can cut this out. If you're like, there was a strange thing, when you came to Tulane, you had no idea you had had a stressing education. You had had a professor, right? You was into Khan.
And it was like, you should go study with Richard Valkley, and then you found yourself a bunch of people studying Plato, and I think you were a bit cut off guard. I don't know. But I got to hear about this once before about how nobody just comes down and says, hey, I was trained in a school of thought where we think there's secret teachings and writing between the lines. Here we go.
You know what I mean? So, there's always this weird... So, I thought maybe you could shed light on that, because there is this weird moment. You're like, what's going on here?
There's some kind of weird group. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, automatically, I'd never heard this rouse before.
I think it was like the second week of Rana's class on Aristotle, and she was like, oh, you should... You guys have probably before that, because... So, you know, the grad school, right? I'll undergrad it.
I had her... It's all I had to go through it. Same. I had her all undergrad.
And then the first time I heard of it is, oh, you should read, you know, one of the things you should read is this, you know, the essay on Aristotle and that big, purple volume, the history of political philosophy and whatever. And so, you know, I read this as sort of a secondary source on Aristotle, and only gradually came to become more familiar with stress thought during my time of too late, and since then. But I've been prepared for it by the Great Books program at Notre Dame, because the sort of guiding principle of that program is you just read the books and take them seriously because they might tell you the truth. And you don't look at other sources, you read them for yourself and, you know, try to think about what they mean.
It's funny how non-controversial some of the basic straws and stuff is. Like, just read the book and figure it out. Like, you don't need to... It's like, it's like, huh, boiling down in line, just trying to know stuff, you know, dare to know.
That's all. I mean, it's incredible, like, the cartoonishness that some critics have. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I just only realized, uh, the other day I was like, oh, he doesn't actually mention esotericism all that much outside of persecution, right? When he tells you about how to read Plato, it's very different from what you're getting when you're getting an introduction of medieval thought because it's just dramatic, right?
You can easily sell that point in a different way. And so it's like, it's not even an appropriate term in many ways for Plato to talk about quote unquote, esotericism because it's not using the same tools as like a minatowice or speech. Yeah. Right.
And then I mean, just stepping up related to this point, and you know, there's this Arthur Meltzer's book on reading between the lines, you know, one of the forms of, I think, also pedagogical, esotericism, which, you know, in some ways in my mind at least, it's really hard to separate from the fact that good pedagogy requires rhetoric. Yeah. Right, right requires meeting your audience where they are and then leading them where you want them to go. And so pretty common sense, you know, and it's pretty pretty nonsensical to see that, you know, everyone who's writing is employing rhetoric in some way.
So, you know, except for a media like the most extreme formal logicians of the 20th century or something like that. Right. Well, Sam, we don't want to keep you. I'll just say that I can't tell how good of a diver you were because while this was a deep dive, you did make quite a splash.
So I Greg texted me to that to say that. That's a very great one. I like it. I like it.
I like it. Thanks for joining us. This has been great. We should have you back to talk about another essay because, yeah, I mean, one thing I'll say that Richard told me about these essays is that the critiques had to pass through sensors, right?
But these essays didn't, right? They were written for more popular writings because the critiques were used in the universities, right? I'm not sure, at least the, I'm not sure if the critiques had to go through sensors, they may have, but at least their religion did. So I mean, one of it, just briefly, one of the things that happened is after Frederick died, then Friedrich Wilhelm ascended to the throne, he was much more conservative and instituted a sort of censorship.
The Frederick was quite liberal and there really wasn't much censorship. It seems during the time that the critiques were published. So I'm not sure about that. But yeah.
All right. Well, yeah, I just think that sometimes, really, that's his enlightenment curls down in these essays. I will thank you, Sam. Of course, yeah.
Thanks guys. It's a lovely show. I'm honored to be on it. Take care.
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