A note on Optimism and Reason

“However, far from superseding Kant, it seems as if, after two revolutionary centuries, the ‘lesser evil’ of Kant’s accommodation with the ‘century of Frederick’ and the studied equivocations and sensitivity to aporia which characterize his philosophizing still offer a future to which it might be worth returning.”
– Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, p.29

This is the last sentence in his introduction and refers to the impatience and perhaps actively destructive effects of post-Kantian philosophers. Often, indeed to this day, philosophy is too busy destroying the old to provide us with anything but the most vague positive accounts of what to do next.

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.”
– Immanuel Kant, Was Ist Aufklarung? (What is Enlightenment?), 1784

This was written in the wake of the American Revolution, a time of great socio-political turmoil, a time in which it seemed possible that authoritarian governments could be replaced by republics everywhere. Today perhaps our ‘self-imposed immaturity’ is of a different sort, but it still remains in many corners of the world. And yet, as so many have and continue to rise up and ‘dare to know’, I think his optimism and demands for public rationality truly are worth holding firm.

Another optimist and proponent of our ‘daring to know’ was… you guessed it, Buddha:

“So, as I said, Kalamas: ‘Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, “This contemplative is our teacher.” When you know for yourselves that, “These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness” — then you should enter & remain in them.'” (from here)