Hell and Enlightenment

According to Immanuel Kant “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” (Kant, 85). As he defines it, “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another” (Kant, 85). Put negatively, Enlightenment for Kant is an event of revolt that occurs within the human subject and is directed against authority and tradition. It is, above all, the meaning of “human maturity,” for to be mature in Kant’s mind, is to be autonomous from all others. Put positively, for Kant Enlightenment is an event of freedom to seek knowledge and truth. Enlightenment opens up the individual to discover the world of ideas for oneself. The persistance of immaturity in human sociey is primarily to due to a “lack of resolution” and “courage,” which Kant attributes to “laziness” and “cowardice.” In this view, the reason why humans take orders from others or allow themselves to be dependent on others is by and large to due to slothfulness and reluctance to think for oneself.

In his article “What is Enlightenment,” Kant understands Enlightenment to consist of both an event of revolt and an event of freedom, which is primarily a task of the individual for the sake of the individual. However, for Kant Enlightenment is also a broader socio-historical process towards which human history points. In other words, Enlightenment is the telos of human history. Enlightenment as an event of freedom is most especially “the freedom to make public use of one’s reason at every point.” In contrast, one’s private use of reason must inevitably resort to some submission to authority. To illustrate this point, Kant uses the example of an officer in the military in direct military service and an officer away from duty to distinguish between private and public reason. The officer should obey his superior while on duty (private reason) and make critical remarks in in public “as a scholar” (public reason).

Kant’s distinction is an important one to note because it illustrates the essentially bourgeois nature of Kant’s Enlightenment. The officer is charged to obey his authority in private lest he becomes a cog in the wheel, so to speak, while in public he is charged to articulate his criticisms in a scholarly form in order to advance the workings of the system itself, that is, improve the system. But public scholarly discourse is almost exclusively in the hands of the elite, the educated, and so Kant’s Enlightenment does not provide any resources for the lower rungs of society, those who are charged to obey orders daily. The hope is that Enlightenment will, in a sense, “trickle down.”

Kant’s hope for the Enlightenment of human society, which is nothing but the ability of a society and particularly an individual to critique, presupposes the possibility of a disembodied human existence free from the constraints of all power and authority. Even if such autonomy and freedom were possible in Kant’s sense of the word, this would surely leave the individual in total isolation from others. The rejection of any dependence on others or what is other, whether this be in the form of another person, tradition, authority, or God, is to isolate oneself from the other. In the Christian tradition we have a name for this: hell.