In this section of the textbook there will be a brief overview of the “European Enlightenment” or, more often, simply, “The Enlightenment.” After this overview, you will read about the philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche who famously announced that “God is dead.” The reading is designed to assist you in understanding the philosophical significance of both the European Enlightenment and what Nietzsche means by the Death of God. In reading this, you should reflect upon the fact that the philosophical ideas we are discussing are foundational to contemporary conceptions of the self and of society. Who you are, how you think about yourself, and the social and political world you are part of are as they are because of the ideas we are discussing in this part of the book. The core motivating notion running through this part of the book and the subsequent sections is the question of freedom and how this intersects with the construction of the self. Part of what is integral to the self-understanding of so many individuals today is that they are individuals. To be an individual, as it is understood today, is to be a person separate from others whose obligations are largely to oneself and oneself alone. Think about how much this contrasts with the relational view of self and universe that informs Confucian and Daoist thought.

1. The European Enlightenment

The Enlightenment or, more precisely, the European Enlightenment refers to a European-wide philosophical (“Philosophy” here is broadly conceived; it includes natural philosophy which is similar to what we now call “science” and social philosophy which is similar to what we call “social science.” ) social, and political movement that originated in the 16th and 17th century pan-European scientific revolution, the religious individualism of the reformation, and the rise of epistemic individualism in thinkers such as Descartes, the empiricists Hobbes, and Locke, and the rationalist philosophers Leibniz, and Spinoza. The Enlightenment’s innovations in how human beings understand themselves and their world undermined centuries of religious dogmatism and traditional social morality. This was a period of philosophical liberation in which individuals were given both the freedom and the intellectual tools to challenge religious and aristocratic authority and social and political tradition.

The “idols of the mind” that Francis Bacon wrote of were no longer the rulers of thought.

Enlightenment thought clustered in many European metropolitan areas. The most famous of these clusters is the French Enlightenment which was primarily centered in Paris. The French Enlightenment is associated with a variety of mid-eighteenth-century French thinkers, the so-called “philosophes.” These included, most prominently, thinkers such as Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, and Montesquieu. However, there was also a Scottish Enlightenment centered around the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and associated with Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The German Enlightenment was called “die Aufklärung.” Key figures of this tradition include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing, and Immanuel Kant. There were other hubs of Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century scattered throughout Europe and even America. The American Enlightenment played a critical and often underappreciated role in laying the intellectual, moral, and political foundations for the American Revolution and the founding documents of the United States of America.

Here is Crash Course history video on the Enlightenment:

Descartes’ rationalist philosophy lay the foundation for many key Enlightenment ideas. Among Descartes’ foundational approaches are the method of doubt (the notion that we have the ability and the responsibility to doubt everything it is possible doubt so that we can know what can be known) and the epistemic individualism associated with it. Also, of vital importance is Descartes’ notion that the mind is rational, and, thus, capable of knowing the world and itself. The mind also free, and, thus, able to choose how it, and its associated body, should act and think. This conception of human beings as free and rational beings who are responsible for their own beliefs and actions lies at the core of Enlightenment thought and the belief systems (including much of what you believe about yourself and your rights to self-determination) that have grown out of it. Many contemporary social and political ideologies of freedom are grounded in Enlightenment thought or are reactions to it.

It is, in part, because of the emphasis on our capacity to use reason to know ourselves and the world that the Enlightenment is also called “the age of reason.”

Empiricism and the philosophical skepticism that develops from it are also crucial to Enlightenment thought. For with philosophical skepticism comes a skepticism about epistemic authority. If Hume is right about his empiricist critique of the possibility for rational justification of our core metaphysical beliefs, then even the newly erected authority of science is subject to question. With this questioning of epistemic authority also comes a questioning of the authority of political regimes and moral systems. As with Descartes’ view of the rational self, the legacy of Humean skepticism is very much evident today. In the United States individuals with little scientific training anoint themselves as rational skeptics criticizing scientific consensus on questions such as anthropogenic climate change or the safety of vaccines. Such “anti-scientism” it, itself, a legacy of Enlightenment thought.

As we found with our foray into the way of ideas, the rationalist and the empiricist strands of Enlightenment thought are brought together in the thought of Immanuel Kant.

2. Kant on Enlightenment

In addition to, and integrally related to, his response to Hume’s skepticism and empiricism, Kant was also deeply concerned with questions of practical philosophy, that is with questions of how one should live one’s life. Key to Kant’s approach to a well-lived life is our ability to use reason and knowledge to make responsible choices about how to live.

Thus, the first paragraph of one of Kant’s best known essays states:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity [Unmündigkeit]. 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.

Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 1784

It is interesting that the word translated as “immaturity” is “Unmündigkeit.” Literally this means “without a mouth.” If you are “without a mouth” you cannot speak for yourself. (you also cannot feed yourself, but that is another matter). Unmündigkeit is used to both refer to someone who is “non compos mentis” (“not in control of one’s mind”) and to someone who is a minor. It can be used to characterize both someone who is insane and a child. Thus, someone who is immature — Unmündigkeit — is not fully responsible for their own actions. Such a person is in a state of dependence on others for their wellbeing.

Kant distinguishes the dependence or immaturity of children and the mentally ill from “self-imposed” immaturity. Self-imposed immaturity, he says, comes from the lack of will to use one’s understanding for one’s self. One is dependent on the ideas of others. Kant exhorts us to “dare to know!” This means cutting off dependence on others and having the courage to think for yourself.

In making this exhortation, Kant unites the empiricist skepticism about authority and our dependence upon it with Descartes’ confidence in the ability of the rational self to know on its own.

But, for Kant, such reason is not merely theoretical, it is also practical. In a sense, he is saying do not merely dare to know. Dare to will. Apply the same reason, use the same freedom that you have in your intellectual life, in your practical life.

In daring to know and daring to use your own understanding in daring to will, Kant depends on the notion of that we are self-legislating beings. We are capable of making the laws that will rule our actions. If you recall, Kant uses this notion of self-legislation when he discusses how, transcendentally, reason depends on self-legislating principles of understanding. These are his categories. When discussing the use of reason in daring to will, Kant is referring to how in, the realm of practice and action, one creates the laws by which one conducts oneself. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that self-legislating beings must be both free to choose and rational in choosing. A being that is free to choose and rational is called by Kant “autonomous.”

It is important to note here that Kant is talking about our ability and responsibility to create the rational laws that will govern one’s behavior. He is not saying we should act on whim or do whatever we want. Simply acting on whim or doing what one wants is not being self-legislating. It is acting without law and, thus, in Kant’s view, not being rational.

At the core of Kant’s conception of self-legislating choosers and actors is the concept of autonomy. Autonomy is contrasted with heteronomy which is acting according to impulse or desire. Heteronomy is particular to each individual. Autonomy is universal because the reason is universal.

So, practically, one can reason as follows:

If I want ice cream, then I should go to the store.

Such reasoning is heteronomous because you are thinking in terms of a means to an end. You should go to the store if you want ice cream.

One can also practically reason autonomously.

For example: One should not intentionally mislead another rational being. (aka, Don’t lie.)

This claim does not depend on impulse or desire. It is not thinking in terms of means to ends. It is universal. Kant calls such claims “categorical”, and they are derived from what he calls “categorical imperatives.” An imperative is a command.

Why Kant believes a claim such as “Don’t lie” is categorical requires an excursion into Kant’s ethics which we will not take. You can take an Ethics class, if you are interested in understanding this better.

For now, you watch this Crash Course video:

Kant goes on to claim that all autonomous beings should have absolute respect for each other. Such beings, because they are rational and self-determining, are “ends in themselves.” They should not be treated as means to ends. This is because using someone in this way takes away their autonomy. It reduces them to a mere thing. If you lie to someone to get them to do something they would not do if they knew the truth, it takes away their ability to be rationally self-determining. To in any way force someone to do something, whether through peer pressure or physical force, is to not treat that person as an end in them self. It is to treat them as a means to an end. Our contemporary notions of consent owe much to Kant’s understanding of autonomous beings as ends in themselves.

3. The Death of God

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) is one of the best-known philosophers and one of the most controversial.

Among the reasons Nietzsche is so controversial is the fact that his writing is intentionally confrontational and hyperbolic. This will be seen in the excerpts that follow. His writing is also very difficult to interpret. He often writes, as in the excerpts below, in metaphors, stories and parables. Nietzsche’s writing is about as different from Descartes as can be. He does not write clear and distinct philosophical arguments. He writes more like Zhuang Zhou. Due to this I always council people who are learning about Nietzsche to be very wary of both their own and other’s interpretations of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is very much a philosopher of his historical moment and a philosopher who is critically writing about other philosophers and about philosophy itself. The best scholarship on Nietzsche is the scholarship that reads him in terms of his historical situation and in terms of how he criticizes other philosophers and philosophy itself. Nietzsche is very critical of much of the philosophical tradition. He is particularly critical of philosophy’s reliance on truth and reason. For Nietzsche “truth” is often just a persuasive term for “what I want you to believe.” Reason is more like a rationalization or a facade covering our desires. Although this may seem like a cynical philosophy, I believe one of the great mistaken in interpreting Nietzsche is using him to support cynicism. Nietzsche proclaims repeatedly that we “all too human” beings are creatures “of the earth.” What sounds like cynicism may be Nietzsche imploring us to be honest about the fact that we are natural things (he uses the phrase “of the earth”) and to live our lives as natural beings that struggle, make mistakes, but also sometimes succeed and find joy and glory.

In what follows I am asking you to read, reflect upon and try to make sense of a few passages from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, literally, “The Joyful Wisdom”). Nietzsche considered The Gay Science to be one of his most personal and optimistic works. The title itself refers to the genesis of modern European poetry in the writings of “the Provençal knight-poets, those magnificent and inventive human beings of the “gai saber” to whom Europe owes so many things and almost owes itself.” (Beyond Good and Evil) These “knight-poets,” according to Nietzsche, created the concept of gaia scienza, the science of joy, a celebration of life where one “dances over morality.” In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes in aphorisms. Again, he is like Zhuang Zhou. Rather than give an extended philosophical argument, he writes in short passages that both stand alone and can be read in terms of each other.

Read these passages as, in part, a response to Kant’s Enlightenment. Also, think about them in terms of the problem of nihilism. Nihilism is the view that there is no meaning or significance to existence. That our lives are essentially without purpose. But Nietzsche is not a nihilist. His gaia scienza is not a science of meaninglessness. It is a joyful wisdom.

I have asked a series of guiding questions to help you, but I want you to think on your own. Try to answer these questions and use these answers to form your own view about what Nietzsche is claiming.