Kant vs the Algorithm
What the German philosopher knew about independent thinking.
In 1784, Immanuel Kant wrote the short essay “What is Enlightenment?” It’s not quite as influential or as pored-over as some of his other work, especially the major books (the three “Critiques”) which secured his reputation. Nor is its style as opaque as those famously dense works. It’s a slim essay written to answer a prompt that had appeared the previous year in the Prussian newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift. The prompt was an opportunity for respondents to pen a manifesto summarizing the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. And for once Kant, who was born 300 years ago today, was willing to give a straight answer.
Kant summarized his reply in the first sentence: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” He defined immaturity as “the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” The solution Kant offered was a simple slogan taken from the Roman poet Horace: “Sapere Aude!”, usually translated as “Have courage to use your own understanding!”, or more pithily: “Dare to be wise!” This, Kant argued, is “the motto of enlightenment.”
The essay is a meditation on the importance of thinking for yourself, of not letting other people do your thinking for you. On the face of it, that’s a fairly obvious thing for Kant to be worried about. But the closer you look, the more revolutionary his defense of independent thought actually appears. Rather than simply enjoining us to think critically about the world, as he is often taken as doing, Kant was drawing our attention to something very specific: the myriad ways in which words can become a substitute for thoughts.
Say you’re an activist for a political party. You joined the party because it aligns with your values. You believe that certain causes you care about are best advanced by that party. You may not agree with the party on everything. Still, you’re happy to go out into the world as its representative, confident that overall you agree with the party’s ethos. So you spout the expected slogans and policy positions. You say the lines you were taught to say in activist orientation. The political party, you don’t mind admitting, has done some of the work of thinking for you.
This is an example of what Kant calls “private” uses of reason. Private reason is reason—speech, thoughts, actions—that you perform either on behalf of someone else, or that is heavily influenced by an external person or organization, to the extent that their words become your words, their thoughts your thoughts. And it was not Kant’s aim to condemn private uses of reason. He knew that there are many situations in which we rightly let other people do our thinking for us, mostly when we have specific roles to perform. For example, our employment often requires us to act like an “employee,” to use standardized language and interact with other people in a highly codified, constrained manner. Regardless of how we act outside of work, our thinking whenever we inhabit the role of “employee” is by definition unfree.
But Kant was also adamant that we have to make room for another type of reason, which he called “public” reason. There are spheres of life in which we should think, speak, and act as autonomously as possible. The paradigmatic case for Kant was that of the scholar. “By the public use of one’s own reason,” he wrote, “I understand the use that anyone as a scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world.” So even though, for example, “a pastor is bound to instruct his catecumens and congregation in accordance with the symbol of the church he serves … as a scholar he has complete freedom, indeed even the calling, to impart to the public all of his carefully considered and well-intentioned thoughts concerning mistaken aspects of that symbol.” (Emphasis added.)
Kant wasn’t saying that it is possible for a person to ever be completely free of external influence. But he did think that any age worthy to be called “enlightened” should foster the conditions in which independent thought can emerge—in which a diverse range of people might inhabit the role of “scholar.” Doing so requires putting aside factional, religious, political, and other prejudices and speaking for and to an audience that potentially encompasses the whole of humanity. In such cases there can be no tailoring the message, no yielding to ideological pressures or financial incentives. Kant argues that this is the difference between acting like a dignified human being and acting like a machine. When we think independently, without the influence of others, we are at our most human.
Kant’s ideal of the independent scholar making public use of their reason is one that anyone can aspire to. It’s also a standard by which we might judge public figures and anyone in the business of selling ideas.
But one criticism of the modern world is that it seems to have drastically narrowed the scope for people to use their “public” reason, while at the same time exponentially expanding the incentives for them to use merely “private” reason. Take legislators. The Founding Fathers had something like Kant’s ideal of public reason in mind when they warned about the danger of factionalism. They feared what would happen if lawmakers were influenced in their deliberations by narrow commercial interests rather than the public good. Just imagine what they would think of the state of lobbying today—a multi-billion dollar industry in which many members of Congress are openly in the pocket of specific commercial or financial interests, rather than being shielded from such interests as the Founders hoped. The corrupting influence of money in politics essentially amounts to the privatization of reason.
Or take the internet. In theory, the internet is the new public square, a place where anyone can employ their public reason free from external influence. But do we really reason publicly (in Kant’s sense) when we post online? Kant argued that “Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of [a person’s] natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity.” Aren’t we increasingly constrained by “rules and formulas” in the form of algorithms and reward-feedback systems that force us to tailor our expression in drastic ways? Think of “influencers,” people whose job involves pandering to a self-selecting audience on social media while chasing the monetary reward of advertising, clicks and sponsorships. The “influencer” model is so successful that it has seeped into all aspects of writing production, changing how publishers commission books and how authors tailor their work to be competitive in the marketplace, resulting ultimately in work whose style is increasingly difficult to distinguish from everything else. This is another example of reason being privatized, where what you say ends up being heavily circumscribed by the market mechanisms or algorithmic incentives you labor under.
Finally, take the actual scholars working in universities. A frequent complaint is that much of the job revolves around box-ticking and grant-chasing rather than producing impactful research. The culture of “publish or perish” encourages academics to produce mountains of work on increasingly niche topics destined to be read by only a handful of other academics. In many institutions there is also the incentive to hew closely to the “rules and formulas” of academic or activist jargon—to substitute these codes in the place of clear, urgent writing. Kant believed that scholars ought to write as if their audience is “the entire literate world”—but today we incentivize them to burrow deep into a tidy academic niche and stay there for most of their career.
300 years after his birth, there are many other reasons why Kant remains relevant. His philosophy is still cited in support of the highest ideals of justice and universalism. His theory of “perpetual peace” in international relations is often invoked during times of war. But Kant was first and foremost a philosopher of freedom. Despite the many formal freedoms we enjoy today, his arguments about public uses of reason and independent thought can help us imagine a world in which our thoughts and speech are unshackled from the influence of impersonal network forces and the algorithmic incentives that everywhere seem to constrain us.
Luke Hallam is the senior editor at Persuasion
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I so love this! Kant not only still relevant, but leading the pack. I vigorously disagree with a lot of Kant’s works and even more so with Neo-Kantianisn, especially as espoused in lRawls’s A Theory of Justice. But one cannot deny how important and influential his ideas have been and continue to be. And in THIS particular essay, Kant is spot on.
Great essay, thank you!!