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Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College. And Welcome to the course of “History of Modern Philosophy” at the spring of 2021. As modern philosophy constitutes the very foundation of so many crucial aspects of today’s human society at large, and American society in particular, let me celebrate your presence in the course and expect that we can all learn a great deal from it.

The course is organized with three major parts: Part I is called “enlightenment, war and peace,” Part II is “modern scientific revolution,” and Part III is “rationalism, empiricism and Kantian synthesis.” The rationale to organize it as such is to put the course in a narrative which answers the following three major questions: firstly, what is the most emblematic accomplishment of modern philosophy? How did modern philosophers get there? And What does modern philosophy look like in details? To put it briefly, the answers I try to furnish in the course for your own judgement and further learning are that: the most emblematic accomplishment of modern philosophy is the so-called Age of Enlightenment, and this accomplishment starts from modern scientific revolution when Copernicus decided to put the sun, rather the earth, at the center of his universe. Furthermore, continental rationalism, British empiricism, and Kant’s synthesis of both constitute the rich inner texture of what modern philosophy looks like in details.

So, in this first week of the course, let’s start to learn the narrative through reading Kant’s very famous, relatively short explanation of What is Enlightenment?

The “Enlightenment,” if understood narrowly, refers to those bunch of French “philosophes” such as Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, whose philosophically provoking and groundbreaking work prepares the French revolution in 1789. However, understood broadly, the Enlightenment as a philosophical movement spans almost every major intellectual hubs of the early modern Atlantic world: Scotland, Germany, America, etc. When Kant wrote this pithy yet impactful essay, it was 1784, rightly in the heyday of the Enlightenment.

Another background to understand the essay is that, as it indicates, religious matters lie at the front and center of such an essay which advocates humanity’s continuous independent use of of human reason on all human affairs. But why is religion so important here? Before this video, I post another one for you to learn the so-called Thirty Years’ war between 1618-1648. It speaks to another event which took place at the dawn of the modern world, and had such powerful repercussions over how modern society is structured. The event in question is the Protestant reformation, and the engendered religious Thirty Years’ war between varying Protestants themselves, and between Protestants and Catholics. The solution reached by the rulers of European states in the so-called Peace of Westphalia is to institutionally separate state and church, so that no matter what faith you hold on to, as an individual citizen, the state has no business to impose faith on you, and you are also hoped not to bring your faith into the state’s public business. However, this solution as implied by the Peace of Westphalia was purely strategic; European rulers at that time had to do so because otherwise, war would be endless. Intellectually and philosophically, those troubled Europeans still needed to figure out how to deal with the relationship between religion and politics as such. If we take consideration of the immense progress that natural science has made in the same period, not only the relationship between religion and politics, but religion and human reason in general becomes naturally a prominent theme for philosophers to ponder. Therefore, it would not surprise us why religious matters got such a prominent treatment in Kant’s summary of what is enlightenment. And this also speaks loudly to the central commitment made by enlightenment philosophers cross varying countries of the emerging modern world, that is, they rely upon human reason to prescribe laws to humanity themselves so as to organize an ideal human society of perpetual peace, progress and prosperity.

So, what is enlightenment according to Immanuel Kant? Kant gives the answer at the very beginning of the essay: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance.” So, to put these two sentences together, and in consideration of the whole logic of the essay, we can put the answer in an even more succinct form: Enlightenment refers to the state of human mind which relies upon a courageous use of human reason in order to achieve the endless progress of human life.

Three concrete practical steps to realize this state of intellectual enlightenment are proposed by Kant: “think for yourself,” “argue in public,” and “obey in private, viz., in varying institutions.” To translate these three steps into a religious context, Kant’s appeal to the enlightenment comprises the following three guidelines: think for yourself so as to believe in the faith which you personally judge as the most reasonable, argue for your faith in public, but obey the leaders in your church. An implication of this guideline is that if you think your church contradicts your own faith to a significant extent, what you are suggested to do is either to collect public opinions in the church to reform it, or to simply leave the church. For Kant, the same practical guideline can be used to other modern institutions, such as government, school, hospitals, or even an international union of states (which will be our topic in two weeks).

Despite being short and pithy, the essay “what is enlightenment” is an exemplary writing of modern philosophy regarding the topic, and later scholars’ studies and debates about the writing are also multi-faceted and ceaseless. I attach a few recommended readings in this module of the class to give you a glimpse into the vibrant discussion of the essay and the topic of “enlightenment” in today’s scholarship. However, in the remaining part of this lecture, let me raise two points which I think particularly worth mentioning, which speak to some intrinsic flaw of the essay, and also, potentially, to why the enlightenment can be seen as an incomplete project even if measured against its own philosophical expression in Kant’s essay.

Firstly, Kant’s definition of enlightenment focuses upon the use of human reason in all human affairs. However, ironically, whether one human individual would like to use her reason, according to Kant, is determined by whether she has “courage” to do so. But “courage” is not a virtue derived from human reason, and it has nothing to do with either reaching a consistent conclusion from premises, or inferring true premises from empirical evidences, viz., two most prominent forms of human reasoning. Courage is actually about the sheer power of human will, which can be motivated by strong emotions such as love, pride, self-satisfaction, fear and hate, to channel human thought or behavior to one direction or another. Wouldn’t we think of it as being ironic that for a project to which the strengthening of human will is so pivotal, Kant almost has no concrete word to say about how to nurture the virtue of courage? As we will study later, within the entire system of Kant’s philosophy, emotions are indeed paid much less attention to compared to human reason. Understood as such, without a robust program of cultivating needed virtues or habits which lead to the courageous use of human reason, the philosophy of Enlightenment is incomplete.

Secondly, we hear much kudos given by Kant to the Frederic the Great, a monarch who reigned in the Kingdom of Prussia in the time when the essay was written. Doesn’t it sound very odd to contemporary readers that while defining the enlightenment as essentially a dissenting voice in public against varying institutional authorities, Kant’s final practical solution to how we can have that sort of needed public space of free thought and speech actually rests upon the existence of an enlightened monarch? If this is the only practical solution to how humans reach enlightenment collectively, then Kant needs to answer how we can expect to have this sort of enlightened monarch at the very first hand. Isn’t it just a random chance for a state to have its enlightened ruler, or something else can be done to guarantee the production of such leaders in the long run? However, even in a more democratic context such as ours, how the entire structure of a state can be organized so as to promote the continual realization of enlightenment among its citizens obviously remains an issue to resolve, rather than one to have been perfectly answered. In other words, without a robust practical commitment to installing a general institutional structure for sustaining the free and open public space needed for the enlightenment, the philosophy of Enlightenment is still incomplete.

Let me clarify my view before conclusion. My point is not that the philosophy of Enlightenment, as articulated by Kant’s thought, is complete, and it just needs time for human beings to figure out how to realize those noble ideals of enlightenment. Instead, according to the above analysis, the philosophy per se is incomplete, and thus, to genuinely take seriously what Kant and other enlightenment philosophers have said, we need to pass on the torch, try to make up what the philosophy per se is lacking, and then, seek a better human society based upon the enlightened state of each human individual. In my belief, we humanity as a whole obviously still have a long way to go before claiming we are in an age of enlightenment.