There is little doubt that one of the legacies to us of the Enlightenment is the idea of thinking for oneself. The rallying cry of the era’s great philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was: “Have the courage to think for yourself!” It is pleasant, because so much easier, he noted, to let others do our thinking for us: priests, politicians, social commentators and the like. It is much more difficult to think for oneself. Kant insisted that the necessary condition for such free thought was freedom – freedom to argue, to disagree, to refuse.
Yes, it is easy to point out that there is no such one intellectual movement as ‘the Enlightenment’: those thinkers, writers, poets, essayists and so on whom we think of as making up the Enlightenment actually argued for many very different views: liberal, conservative, religious, atheist and so on. Nonetheless, out of the confusion of intellectual currents that we call the Enlightenment, we can perhaps isolate some the key ideas that have remained with us.
To Kant’s idea of thinking for ourselves we may add our belief in equal rights and, what goes along with this, tolerance. There may be others, but these are among the central ideas in question. And we tend to see the whole package of ideas as a victory over superstition and myth, congratulating ourselves therefore at the same time for being rational.
Some 75 years or so after Kant’s essay, the great English liberal John Stuart Mill (1806-73) wrote his noble work On Liberty in which he argued for the right of any individual to think and act as he pleases on condition that he not harm anyone else. I call the work ‘noble’, and it is, because Mill demonstrates an intense respect for his fellow human beings in the work, and a belief in moral, social and political progress if you set human beings free. But his noble attitude concealed what is surely a form of naïveté. Mill thought that free individuals would naturally gravitate towards that which he took to be high culture: poetry, philosophy, literature and the like. It did not occur to him that they might naturally want that which is cheap, shallow and vulgar.
That was pretty much all Nietzsche (1844-1900) saw in liberal ideas of freedom of thought and action. We have become, he thought, ‘herd animals’, more or less totally incapable of thinking for ourselves. Dostoyevsky (1821-81) had already suggested that human beings tell themselves that they want freedom but do not really want it, because it makes life too complicated: better the easy life of falling in with what everyone else is doing.
Countless thinkers have echoed and developed the kind of philosophical and cultural critique developed by Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, one of the latest being that of the Italian linguist and cultural critic Raffaele Simone (1944- ) who, drawing on Tocqueville (1805-59), has argued that we have abdicated serious engagement in political life and turned ourselves over to being dominated by what he calls ‘the gentle monster’: our political masters and their cronies keep us acquiescent by turning the public space into an arena of spectacle, fun and entertainment, and, because we enjoy this mindless slavery, we are complicit in the whole thing.
Issue 36, 14th September 2015
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