Kant and/as Enlightenment
Hello world. You have stumbled upon some lecture notes for my graduate seminar in Contemporary Rhetorics at the University of South Florida. In preparation for our first class session, students read Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?'” and chapters 4 and 5 of Bill Readings’s University in Ruins.
Preamble: syllabus. Why are you here? (poststructuralism, postmodernism, signification, context, history, hystery)
First:
Second, highlights from “An Answer…”
- Radical individuality
- Freedom / autonomy at the core of Kant’s ethics and his politics
- In America, via Emerson, the notion of “self-reliance”
- Kant is skeptical of immaturity, places immaturity in distinction to progress (below)
- Emerson, to an extent, praises immaturity (the young boy who offers opinions free of social restrictions). Civil disobedience. Working out of a Petrarchian/humanistic tradition that distrusts the human animal (Hobbes, Machiavelli, etc).
- Kant’s primary obligation is to Reason/Truth (secular, yet transcendental–a Platonic affair). Hence, deontological ethics. Using Reason to identify the right way to live. Working out of the optimism of Locke’s tabula rasa (all wo/men created equal). Hence, “think, but obey”
- University at the Intersection of Public and Private
- “Think, but Obey”
- In front of the literate “public” sphere, Burke’s Parlor, the subject is called to “think,” to critique.
- Private Obligation: as a citizen/subject of the state, the subject is compelled to obey.
- Frederick’s place in late 18th century politics; Frederick’s desire for cosmopolitanism, his cultural rivalry with conservative and orthodox France. Hence, the livestock metaphors have significance for a ruler looking to modernize beyond an agrarian image
- Interest in Scottish Enlightenment
- Revolution in America; growing tensions in France
- Public Freedom: as a scholar/participant in the great conversation of mankind, as a resident of Burke’s parlor.
- Think of Readings’s depiction of Humboldt; inspiration to Jefferson.
- Insists upon “public” freedom because of the belief in progress; our advancement toward the right way to live
- A Subtle Critique of Plato
- Kant is not looking to create philosopher kings, but rather aims to make each (wo)men a philosopher. He knows full well that many do not have the inclination, determination, or aptitude to earn the title. However, he believes that knowledge can promote emancipation from our cave of ignorance
- Cue Nietzsche: you see a will to knowledge? I see a will to power:
- Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations—that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called ‘truths.’ It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and has been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even ‘time,’ and to overcome the entire past—an enormous and wonderful task in whose service every subtle pride, every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, ‘thus it shall be!’ They first determine the Whither andFor What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power. (“We Scholars” Beyond Good and Evil)
- Cue Foucault
- Progress Narratives
- Hence the “slow” maturity
- Hegel’s sense of history as a dynamic unfolding of Geist through the triadic process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. From slavery, to rational, self-realization. Or, taken up by Marx, the gradual advancement of the proletariat’s unveiling of bourgeoisie control over the means of production. Etc.
- Cue the Lyotard.
So, let’s boil the Enlightenment down to a four principles:
- Autonomy / Individuality
- Abstract Thought over Material World (Purity over Messy)
- Universality
- Progress
Third, some highlights from Readings:
- From outside our assigned readings:
- “The University becomes modern when it takes on the responsibility for working out the relation between the subject and the state, when it offers to incarnate an idea that will both theorize and inculcate this relationship” (53).
- Excellence as the postmodern di.versity (which leaves Bloom’s University in ruins):
- “The need for excellence is what we all agree on. And we all agree upon it because it is not an ideology, in the sense that it has no external referent or internal content” (23). Like conservatives bending postmodern suspicions toward absolute truth to subvert policies targeting global warming, encouraging “excellence” can be seen as deploying poststructuralist ambiguity to defer/discredit/dismiss “political” (i.e., in Enlightenment terms, “critical,” education).
- This is what allows the University president, in chapter 4, to behave akin to DeLeuze’s schizophrenic–“from judge to synthesizer, to executive and fund raiser, without publicly expressing any opinions or passing any judgments whatsoever” (55). And, hey, Readings was writing this stuff in 1996!
- […] French thought becomes concerned with the idea of humanity, while the Germans focus on the notion of ethnicity” (60). and “the University is pressed into the service of the state once the notion of universal reason is replaced by the idea of national culture as the animating principle of the University.” In America, this shift happens sometime around the 1920’s with the introduction of America’s literary manhood. Bildung.
What I want to take out of Readings’s history of the transformation/tension between German visions for the University. The question: “Why are you here?”
Specifically, I want to use ancient Greece as a heuristic for thinking about the purposes of higher education.
- Plato, the University in terms of philosopher kings (an intellectual oligarchy)
- Isocrates, the University in terms of paideia, developing our cultural character (ethos, epideictic rhetoric); an institution of social conservation
- Socrates/Gorgias, the University as the seat of questioning (paging Dr. Kant); the University as a center of disruption, agitation; an instigator of social change
And, a fourth possibility, born out of modernity itself–the University as an institution dedicated to knowledge for knowledge’s sake (?)
Getting ready for Lyotard. Some questions to keep in mind as you prepare for next week’s class:
- Is performativity a bad word for Lyotard? for you?
- What is paralogy? Can it be taught? In fyc? Should we teach it, to approach paralogy denotatively and/or prescriptively?
- In what kind of University were you educated? Go look at its mission statement/presidential letter. Is it “excellent”? Is “excellence” rhetorical? (Bonus: what does it mean to be rhetorical?)
- I would argue that the most important section of this book is its brief and implicit echo of Nietzsche. Find it.
- Why, if dissensus cannot be institutionalized (p. 167), does Readings think it can operate as the foundation of the new University?
Things to share:
- Kant, from Lectures on Ethics, 1963 (Example of deontological ethics in action, the obligation to restrict my own consumption
- Nietzsche, “We Scholars” from Beyond Good and Evil
- Humboldt, “University Reform in Germany”
