The collegial structure of Kantian public reason

ABSTRACT

This article accounts for how Kant’s understanding of enlightenment gives normative, communicative structure to public reason as a practice. Kantian public reason is argued to be collegial. As public reasoners promoting our enlightenment, we should seek optimal scrutiny from a generally unrestricted, intellectually and epistemically diverse audience. To receive this scrutiny, we should communicate in a way that facilitates this audience’s ability to scrutinise our views – situating others as our colleagues – which in turn facilitates their promotion of their own enlightenment. As a practice in which we help others promote their enlightenment by helping them help us promote ours, Kantian public reason is argued to be cooperative. But intriguingly, Kant offers a sufficient justification for this cooperative communication on first-personal grounds. The article details some of Kant’s more concrete thoughts on how we should communicate as public reasoners, and concludes by appraising his parsimonious justification of collegial communication as a resource for addressing contemporary concerns about public discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Immanuel Kant
• enlightenment
• public reason
• social epistemology
• communication

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Zach Hall, Dylan Shaul, Ana Vieyra, and Julian Wuerth for giving me comments on earlier drafts, and for illuminating conversation around the philosophical and interpretive issues discussed here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a sample of this scholarship, see Deligiorgi (2005), Gelfert (2006, 2010), O’Neill (2015), Pasternack (2014), Thomason (2020).

2 See Habermas (1989, 51) for a helpful distinction between the literary public sphere (literarische Öffentlichkeit) and the political public sphere (politische Öffentlichkeit).

3 Citations of Kant include common abbreviations of the translated titles of his texts along with standard pagination. Where, as here, no abbreviation or standard pagination is given, Kant is simply cited in the same manner as other authors.& nbsp;References to the original German draw from Kant (1902).

4 See also Merritt (2009, 991).

5 See also Deligiorgi (2005, 88).

6 ‘Learned individual’ is Pippin’s preferred translation (1999, 48). In Section 4, I argue that it better articulates Kant’s understanding of the Gelehrter role than terms like ‘scholar' or ‘pundit'.

7 I say ‘generally unrestricted’ to acknowledge that some groups may have been excluded from Kant’s reading public. For discussion of whether Kant’s reading public included women, see Deligiorgi (2005, 72–73). For a suggestion that Kant’s reading public is at least de facto non-rural, see Schmidt (1992, 95). For broader discussions of how the public sphere has been variously restricted throughout history, see Habermas (1989), Honneth (2014).

8 Because readers must also act as writers to provide scrutiny, we may think of the Gelehrter and Leser roles as embedded within what Honneth nicely calls ‘mutually supplementing role patterns’ (2014, 261). However, I cannot justly discuss such dynamism between these roles here.

9 One may note that calls for ‘collegiality' can be weaponised to maintain unjustly asymmetrical communicative relations, which might instantiate what Fricker (2007) has influentially called ‘testimonial injustice’, where, e.g. someone who speaks out against unjust communicative relations is dismissed as ‘lacking collegiality’. This suggests, likely rightly, that good faith and reflection upon prevailing communicative norms are required for establishing collegial communication. While I suspect that a satisfactory understanding of the place and relevance of issues regarding testimonial injustice in Kant requires more attention to the role of Leser than to that of Gelehrter that interests me more here (as testimonial injustice pertains more to how one’s thoughts are received, examined, and responded to than to how one’s thoughts are communicated), it seems clear that acts of testimonial injustice are inimical to enlightenment-promoting communication, and that unfortunately, the terms we use to express our ideals and values (like ‘collegiality') can be weaponised against them. So there is at least a cursory sense in which such a use of ‘collegiality’ would be akin to what Stanley (2015) calls ‘undermining propaganda’, invoking the ideal of collegiality against its realization. Thanks to a reviewer at Inquiry for inviting me to reflect upon the place of Frickerean themes in Kantian public reason and ethics of communication.

10 See Schmidt (1996).

11 Translation modified.

12 Translation modified.

13 In his Theory and Practice essay, Kant is clear that application of methods cannot be fully determined by methods themselves, which accords with the idea that we ought not act ‘mechanistically’, i.e. as if the applications of our methods were fully determined in advance, without requiring any reflection on our part (1991, 61).

14 In addition to these familiar, general factors, Kant also accounts for historical and cultural factors for applying the presumptive principle. See Gelfert (2006, 647).

15 Kant is clear about the dependence of genuine thought upon public communication in What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?, where he writes: ‘We do admittedly say that, whereas a higher authority may deprive us of freedom of speech or of writing, it cannot deprive us of freedom of thought. But how much and how accurately would we think if we did not think, so to speak, in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts and who communicate their thoughts to us! We may therefore conclude that the same external constraint which deprives people of the freedom to communicate their thoughts in public also removes their freedom of thought’ (1991, 247).

16 Despite Fleischacker’s endorsement of minimalism, he notes that there are maximalist moments in Kant’s corpus, and claims that Kant sometimes ‘equivocates between a minimalist and a maximalist understanding of enlightenment’ (2013, 37). One might take the reading offered here as questioning this equivocation charge by asserting that features of Kantian enlightenment that minimalists endorse have at least mildly maximalist implications, such that the dichotomy between the views is less stark than the equivocation charge suggests.

17 Cf. Fleischacker (2013, 37).

18 Cf. discussions of Kant’s notion of ‘logical egoism’ in Gelfert (2006, 644), Pasternack (2014, 80), Thomason (2020, 384–385). The logical egoist takes herself to not need others’ scrutiny on the basis of the observation that others’ scrutiny is external to her beliefs’ truth-grounds and so in some sense has no bearing on their truth or falsehood. As such, the logical egoist fails to appreciate the distinction between the subject-independent truth-grounds of her beliefs and her own at least potentially subject-dependent reasons for holding her beliefs, and thus, a fortiori, fails to appreciate how she could reject fallibilism about certain beliefs while remaining open to scrutiny.

19 Arendt rightly underscores the place of actual communication in Kantian epistemology, as when she remarks that for Kant, ‘there is no epistemically secure procedure for achieving correspondence to the object judged short of consensus arrived at in the actual course of truth-seeking communication’ (1992, 120). Thanks to a reviewer at Inquiry for reminding me of Arendt’s illuminating discussion of actual communication in Kant.

20 While Kant calls the basic enlightenment principle of thinking for oneself ‘the maxim of the unprejudiced way of thinking’ and calls the tendency toward ‘heteronomy of reason’ ‘prejudice’, one might challenge the formulation above by claiming that for Kant, we are always impacted by prejudice in that we, by nature, treat subjective grounds as objective, and thus cannot free ourselves from prejudice entirely (Kant 2000, 174/ CPJ 5:294). But even if true, this does not mean that we should not strive to free ourselves from prejudice in a partial or piecemeal manner. Prejudice, as just characterised, is essentially a form of persuasion (see above), and part of what we do in communicating our beliefs as public reasoners is to see whether they are mere persuasions that should be discarded, doubted, or distanced from, or whether they are convictions that we have good reason to maintain. As such, one could say that, for Kant, we as public reasoners are tasked with communicating our prejudices in a way that leads us either to free ourselves from belief in them, to moderate our credence in them according to the prejudicial character they may be revealed to have, or to overcome their merely prejudicial character by improving their grounds and our maintenance of them. Thanks to a reviewer at Inquiry for inviting me to think more carefully about prejudice as a particular way in which Kant discusses heteronomous thought.

21 See Fleischacker (2013, 16), Peterson (2008, 224).

22 Thanks to the editor at Inquiry for raising the concern about the relationship between intellectual and moral perfection.

23 See Deligiorgi (2005), O’Neill (2015), Peterson (2008), Schmidt (1992, 1996).

24 For excellent discussions of the intellectual, political, and historical context in which Kant’s essay was written, see La Vopa (1997) and Schmidt (1992, 1996). Moreover, we may note that Kant’s terminology clearly resonates with the idea of a literarische Öffentlichkeit. See Habermas (1989), Honneth (2014).

25 For an interesting discussion about the pedagogical preconditions for enlightenment that takes cues from Kant’s essay and specifically his appeal to Mündigkeit, see Adorno and Becker (1999).

26 See also Habermas (1989, 105–106).

27 Translation modified.

28 For a strong account of these background conditions that inform Kant’s appeal to writing, see La Vopa (1997, 99–100). The second, reader-based argument for why Kantian public reason is principally a literary practice echoes Kant’s notion of ‘unsocial sociability’, though I cannot explore any explicit connections here.

29 This point begins to introduce a layer of complexity that I am only preparing to address here, namely, that the boundary between the roles of Gelehrter and Leser is somewhat fluid, because properly occupying the Leser role involves responding and thereby occupying a writing role as well. Because my primary aim here is to account for how a normative, communicative structure to Kantian public reason emerges from the aim of promoting one’s enlightenment as a Gelehrter, I cannot justly treat the more fluid, reciprocal dimension of Kantian public reason that emerges from examination of the Leser role. However, the cooperative conception of public reason’s normative, communicative structure I am arguing for here from the Gelehrter side should accord with and at least cursorily illuminate this reciprocity. Moreover, my emphasis on the Gelehrter role keeps somewhat closer to the letter of the text (see Kant’s description of public reason in WE), although a more thoroughly reciprocal conception of public reason, I happily concede, is ultimately closer to the spirit of the text.

30 Translation modified. It serves to note, against the concern of vicious circularity, that the ‘resolution and courage’ to think for oneself is not full-blown enlightenment for Kant (cf. section 2), but enlightenment’s volitional germ, necessary for ‘the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’ (Kant 1998b, 17/ WE 8:35; translation modified). As Neiman might put it, we cannot become free of spirit, or enlightened, without exercising our freedom in the first place, even if the freedom to simply think for ourselves pales in comparison to freedom of spirit or enlightenment proper (1994, 201). By acting on the courageous resolution to think for oneself, one can begin to become enlightened, such that enlightenment involves not simply a courageous resolution, but, as Merritt nicely puts it, ‘a cultivated disposition’ (2009, 988).

31 For a view similar to O’Neill’s, see Pasternack (2014, 86).

32 This idea prefigures a tension between what Kant calls ‘thoroughness’ and ‘popularity’ regarding enlightenment, discussed in section 6.

33 There may be resources in Kant for a similar normative account of reading, but I will not address that issue here.

34 Cf. Neiman (1994, 201).

35 Thanks to Ana Vieyra for discussing this issue with me.

36 This point indicates that Kant holds that acting as a public intellectual and engaging in interdisciplinary inquiry is not only beneficial for the public and for disciplines, but also for ourselves as thinkers with specialised knowledge. However, I cannot justly explore particular issues regarding public intellectual activity, public philosophy, or interdisciplinarity here.

37 Cf. Beiser’s gloss on the Popularphilosophie movement (1987, 165–169). This begins to bring Kant’s account toward addressing concerns about enlightenment recently raised in Millgram (2015), though I can’t pursue this line of thought here.

38 Cf. Grice’s Cooperative Principle, which is coincidentally modeled after Kant’s table of categories (1989, 22–40).