Kant and the Enlightenment: Reason, Freedom, and Morality
Kant’s thinking evolved during the eighteenth century, a period known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment had its origins in England and spread throughout Europe, influencing movements like the French Revolution. It is considered to have begun with the English Revolution of 1688 and ended with the early stages of the French Revolution of 1789. This century was marked by a strong belief in the illuminating power of reason.
Enlightenment reason was secular, independent, and critical. The highest aspiration of the Enlightenment was human emancipation, and the movement aimed to spread culture and knowledge, making it accessible to all. Education for all was a key goal, empowering each person to guide their own moral conduct.
This historical moment of tremendous upheaval on all fronts was inspired by reason and freedom. The social structure of the ancien régime was in crisis, with its stratified society divided into three classes: nobility, clergy, and the “third estate.” The crisis of absolutism, where kings and aristocrats disempowered the bourgeoisie, eventually led to the bourgeoisie’s rise to power.
Political and Economic Shifts
Politically, there was a rejection of absolutism and despotism. Against absolutism of divine origin, the enlightened thinkers defended the constitutional monarchy, the separation of powers, national sovereignty, and the general will as claims legitimizing power, culminating in the French Revolution and the Declaration on the Rights of Man.
Economically, the thesis of economic liberalism was defended, advocating non-intervention in the natural laws of economics, free competition, and free trade. In terms of religion, pluralism and religious freedom were championed. Against theism and revealed religion, two positions emerged: agnosticism and deism. The goal was an equal and tolerant society.
Philosophy in the Enlightenment
PHILOSOPHY during this time was torn between two positions: rationalism, which posited that reason could deduce all knowledge from innate principles, and empiricism, which denied innate ideas and conceived experience as the source and foundation of knowledge. According to Kant, neither model could reliably lead to scientific knowledge; rationalism led to dogmatism, and empiricism led to skepticism. Kant’s philosophy intends to carry out a critical review of reason, attempting to answer the question: Where does our knowledge come from, and what are its limits?
Kant’s transcendental idealism states that our knowledge begins with experience but is not limited to it. There is something that reason provides a priori; we only know what we put into things. We cannot know things as they are in themselves. Kant sets limits to reason: reason can never fully grasp realities that lie beyond experience.
Kant’s program aligns with the Enlightenment’s critical examination of reason, seeking to answer three questions: What can we know? What should we do? And what can we hope for? All of these questions are summarized in the fundamental question of his philosophy: What is man? In his treatment of man, Kant is guided by reason, challenging the tradition of blind obedience. For Kant, the principal task of philosophy is to promote freedom.
Kant’s Ethics
His theory of ethics makes reason the foundation of morality, asserting that morality must aspire to universality to be valid. This is the core idea found in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: to base a universal morality on reason as the exclusive source of moral law.