Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture: Adaptation Strategies and Technologies, Apuntes de Idioma Francés

¡Descarga Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture: Adaptation Strategies and Technologies y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Francés solo en Docsity! Edited by Norman Geras and Robert Wokler The Enlightenment and Modernity THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND MODERNITY First published in Great Britain 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–71650–7 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22385–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The enlightenment and modernity / edited by Norman Geras and Robert Wokler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22385–4 1. Enlightenment Congresses. 2. Philosophy, Modern—20th century Congresses. I. Geras, Norman, 1943– . II. Wokler, Robert, 1942– . B802.E545 1999 190—dc21 99–25944 CIP Selection and editorial matter © Norman Geras and Robert Wokler 2000 Introduction and Chapter 9 © Robert Wokler 2000 Chapter 8 © Norman Geras 2000 Chapters 1–7, 10, 11 © Macmillan Press Ltd 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents Notes on Contributors vii Editors’ Preface ix Introduction x Robert Wokler PART I INTERPRETING ENLIGHTENMENT PRINCIPLES 1 The Sceptical Enlightenment: Philosopher Travellers Look Back at Europe 1 Ursula Vogel 2 Education Can Do All 25 Geraint Parry 3 Kant: the Arch-enlightener 50 Andrea T. Baumeister 4 Kant, Property and the General Will 66 Hillel Steiner 5 Can Enlightenment Morality be Justified Teleologically? 80 Ian Carter 6 Ganging A’gley 100 Alistair Edwards PART II ASSESSING THE ENLIGHTENMENT ROOTS OF MODERNITY 7 English Conservatism and Enlightenment Rationalism 117 Ian Holliday 8 Four Assumptions About Human Nature 135 Norman Geras 9 The Enlightenment, the Nation-state and the Primal Patricide of Modernity 161 Robert Wokler v 10 Critique and Enlightenment: Michel Foucault on ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ 184 Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves 11 The Enlightenment, Contractualism and the Moral Polity 204 Vittorio Bufacchi Index 225 Contentsvi Editors’ Preface Most of the papers collected in this volume were presented to a workshop seminar held in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester during the 1994–5 academic session. They are all the work of scholars either currently or recently connected with this department. The aim of the seminar, which was proposed and organized by Norman Geras, was to explore how the Enlightenment and its legacy were per- ceived by the several contributors to relate to their own current areas of research and, through our discussions, to view this central theme in the light which our different interests and approaches might cast upon it. The volume we have assembled is the outcome of that collective enterprise. Norman Geras Robert Wokler ix Introduction Virtually everyone who holds opinions about the most central issues of contemporary ethics or political theory, or indeed about the crises of our civilization as a whole, has thereby felt licensed to pronounce upon the nature of the Enlightenment Project. Whatever principles it might embrace are presumed, by persons who reflect upon such matters, to form the essential core or guiding thread of modernity itself. The Enlightenment Project is the ghost in our machine. Students of eighteenth-century thought across a variety of disciplines may be forgiven their frustration when con- fronting such global judgements about the subjects of their research, not only because shorthand truth always makes detailed scholarship redun- dant, but also because it portrays their excursions into what they imagine to be the uncharted past as circumnavigations of the present locked within familiar waters. Why should they set out with their scalpels to clear away the frontiers of knowledge when if they stay at home with sledgehammers they can dispose of the Enlightenment at a stroke? Never mind that the Enlightenment is an invention of the late nineteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment a fabrication of the early twentieth century, the Enlight- enment Project, of more recent pedigree than the Manhattan Project, just a scheme largely devised in the past two decades. What possible bearing can genuine scholarship have upon claims about the conceptual roots of modernity which are writ large and on stilts? Scholars of Enlightenment thought almost invariably have at least a dual identity. After assembling at symposia and conferences addressed to eighteenth-century themes, they return to their departments of English, French or German language and literature, or of philosophy, music or art. If they are specialists in political thought with academic appointments in the English-speaking world, they may feel not so much schizophrenic as shorn of any identity at all, on account of the great gulf that has arisen in their discipline over the past thirty years since the predominance of politi- cal theorists at the University of Chicago, on the one hand, and at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, on the other, has been transformed into the hegemony of Harvard, with respect to political philosophy, and Cambridge, in the history of political thought. That sharp division of labour does not lend itself well, either to the contextual study of Enlightenment political thought or to the conceptual analysis of modernity in terms of its putative Enlightenment roots. The wedge now deemed to separate the history from the philosophy of political argument x only obscures the interdisciplinary character of eighteenth-century thought, across boundaries which did not come to be demarcated until after the end of the age of Enlightenment itself. In the discourses of modernity that figure in the philosophical histories of Voltaire, d’Alembert or Gibbon are embedded frameworks for the understanding of contemporary civilization along lines that lead in our day to the perspectives of Reinhart Koselleck, Jürgen Habermas or Michel Foucault, but which have scant purchase for those who only study political concepts either analytically or alternatively with respect to the initial circumstances of their use. Above all, perhaps, the current gulf between political philosophy and the history of political thought masks the sense in which so many leading eighteenth-century thinkers sought not only to interpret the world but, through their interpretations, to change it. If such moral endeavour may be described as their Enlightenment Project, our manner of fragmenting it by way of our methodological approaches to the study of political thought betrays its most fundamental ideals. This collection comprises a modest attempt – perhaps even an unwitting effort on the part of some contributors – to repair that breach. No subject in the human sciences offers a more dramatic illustration of the ties that join philosophy and history than the Enlightenment and its legacy. Some of the central questions of psychology and epistemology today still turn around claims regarding the nature of human perception and knowledge first artic- ulated by Descartes, Locke, Berkeley or Hume. In linguistics, Enlight- enment doctrines of universal grammar or the origin of languages have been embraced by researchers determined to map the future of their disci- pline no less than by those who have sought to retrace its past. By way of Kant in particular, modern ethics is seen by most of its current interpreters to have embarked upon a wholly fresh path, disencumbered of the author- ity of classical or religious dogmas. In economics and other social sciences, Smith and Montesquieu are deemed to have cast our current disci- plines in the forms in which they are still studied. Every school child comes to learn that contemporary society was first shaped by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, and that the modern nation-state is an invention of the French Revolution, generated in turn by an Enlightenment spirit of commercialism and republican ideals of self-rule. A close connec- tion between the theory and practice of the modern state, as advocated in the eighteenth century by writers of all denominations, has also been identi- fied by later critics of totalitarianism who have uncovered its philosophical roots in the doctrines of Rousseau. Still other commentators have attributed the patriarchal character of modernity ultimately to the exclusion of women from the French Revolutionary declaration of the rights of man. Introduction xi promote those ideals. Alistair Edwards subjects to close critical scrutiny the contention of Friedrich von Hayek, drawn from the Cardinal de Retz by way of Adam Ferguson, to the effect that the social order is an unin- tended product of individual actions. Hayek’s contrast between what he sees as this essentially Scottish approach to social scientific enquiry, on the one hand, and the rational constructivism of Continental thinkers like Rousseau, on the other, is found to be overdrawn, while the strength of unintended consequence explanations of how social institutions operate, Edwards argues, is due less to any hidden hand of spontaneous order than to the inescapability of mistaken knowledge and ignorance. In our second section, which deals with the conceptual history of modernity, we address a variety of questions about the Enlightenment’s putative influence, or lack of influence, in shaping our political thought and culture. Ian Holliday re-examines the English conservative critique of Enlightenment rationalism associated above all with Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, and he argues that the plausibility of the conservative case is as much a matter of sociological understanding as of philosophical principle. Not only did English conservatism offer the first major response to the universalist, empiricist or utilitarian strains of eighteenth-century philosophy as a whole, he observes; in engaging with Enlightenment ratio- nalism over the whole course of its history, it established the traditions which underpin its own identity by way of the different voices it adopted in that conversation. Taking a work of Ralph Miliband as his point of departure, Norman Geras considers some implications of the assumptions that human nature is intrinsically evil, or intrinsically good or vacuous, and he concludes that the only warrantable assumption for socialists is that it is intrinsically mixed. Optimistic psychological claims drawn from the Enlightenment are often upheld by socialists, but particularly on the evi- dence of the brutalities of our century they are difficult to sustain, he observes, while allowing that modest hopes for the establishment of toler- ably contented human existence may be more solidly grounded on realist and pessimistic premises. Robert Wokler challenges both the proposition that the Enlightenment loved the thing it killed, in substituting a secular religion for Christian absolutism, and the contention that the main philosophical and political principles of modernity since the French Revolution stem from the Enlightenment. If the notion of an Enlightenment Project means anything at all, he argues, it must embrace a commitment to pluralism and religious toleration, while the nation-state that was invented in the course of the French Revolution betrayed not only the cosmopolitan ideals of the repub- lic of letters but also the Roussseauist principles of popular sovereignty Introductionxiv from which it appeared to have sprung. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves interprets an essay drafted by Foucault on Kant in commemoration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung?, and he compares its argument closely with two earlier texts which Foucault had completed on the same subject. In investigating Foucault’s diverse readings of the tendencies of Enlightenment thought, he suggests that the apparent tensions between them may be reconciled, particularly in the light of the Nietzschean character of his critical onto- logy, whose fundamental hostility to the age of Enlightenment Foucault never abandoned. Vittorio Bufacchi examines the normative implications of two main traditions of Enlightenment social contract theory, one deriving from Hobbes and based on a notion of mutual advantage, the other inspired principally by Kant and founded on an idea of social cooperation. In stressing the benefits of cooperation, David Gauthier has adopted the Hobbesian perspective, he argues, while John Rawls, in emphasizing that cooperation must be based on fair terms, has instead followed in the foot- steps of Kant, there being no way to reconcile these differences in the manner attempted by Rawls, since they recapitulate the tensions in an Enlightenment Project that never had, nor ever can have, logical coher- ence. Whatever might be the coherence, or indeed the identity, of that Project, these essays bear testimony to the persistence and significance of claims about its nature, and to the strength of its images and ideals within the edifice of modernity that we inhabit. For better or worse, whether enacted or betrayed, the so-called Enlightenment Project has cast Western civilization under its long shadow over the past two hundred years. Even if it brings modernity to its close, the second coming of Christ, due soon after the publication of this book, may by contrast seem little more than an apocalyptic anti-climax. Robert Wokler Introduction xv Part I Interpreting Enlightenment Principles diverse forms and concrete contexts, betrays a fundamental misunder- standing. It has had the effect of filtering out, and rendering all but invisi- ble, the distinctive scientific aspirations and the intellectual and practical energies which shaped the Enlightenment’s encounter with the world out- side Europe. In large part the misunderstanding is due to the neglect of many of the key texts and some of the most characteristic genres of Enlightenment literature. Whether, to name but a few of those texts, we turn to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality or Condorcet’s construction of a universal history of the human mind, we can easily see how much moral and political argu- ment in this period owed to empirical knowledge about non-European peoples, especially primitive (‘savage’) societies at the periphery of the known world: ‘No reputable philosophe would theorize on the nature of man without producing some well-chosen references to the American Indian, the Chinese, the African negro or the Hottentot.’5 The same outward-going interest in distant lands and their inhabitants can be observed in the immense popularity of all kinds of travel literature – from the merely entertaining, titillating presentation of ‘the exotic’ to the serious work of fiction and the scholarly tract – among the reading publics of the eigteenth century.6 In short, any attempt to engage with the legacies of the Enlightenment Project must take account of the dynamic of its Weltoffenheit. Given that neither the certainties of religious faith nor the a priori constructions of metaphysical systems could any longer provide reliable guidance, philo- sophical inquiry had to turn to the world given in experience. Openness towards the world expressed itself in restless curiosity as the motivational drive behind the pursuit of knowledge and, on a different plane, in the epistemological imperative that questions about the nature of man and society could only be answered by observing human existence in all its diverse manifestations. ‘It was my intention,’ wrote Georg Forster (traveller and philosophe who from 1772 to 1775 took part in Cook’s second voyage around the world), ‘to consider the nature of man from as many perspectives as possible’.7 Even Kant, usually the key witness in the case brought against the Enlightenment’s abstract universalism, advised the moral philosopher of the need to travel, at least in the form of conscientiously following the available travel reports.8 No other genre of Enlightenment literature expressed these aspirations more faithfully than the ‘philosophical’ travel account. A distinctive form of narrative interspersed with general reflections on what the traveller had seen and experienced, this genre emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century in response to the great voyages of discovery that had The Enlightenment and Modernity4 enlarged the world known to Europeans by the immense terrains of the Pacific Ocean. As a result especially of James Cook’s expeditions it could be said that the world as the habitat of human beings had become one, in the sense that all its parts were – in principle – accessible to knowledge and could be connected and integrated in a global perspective on the human species. The philosophical travel account captured the meanings and implications of this historic moment. Its author might be a traveller himself, like Bougainville and Georg Forster. Or, in the manner of Montesquieu, Diderot and Kant, he might be an ‘armchair traveller’, who used the observations brought back by the voyagers as raw material and inspiration for setting the frame to his philosophical or literary enterprise. The philosophical travel account was indebted to the spirit of scientific investigation in that it aimed to convey exact and comprehensive informa- tion about a hitherto unfamiliar region of the earth (about its geography, climate, flora and fauna as much as about the physiognomy, behaviour and customs of its native populations). But it moved beyond the boundaries of empirical, factual description in the endeavour to bring the new knowl- edge about the differences and variations among the peoples of the world to bear upon philosophical inquiry into the nature and moral constitution of man as a species being. It is in this context that the observed contrast between primitive and civilized societies became the catalyst of a ‘painful’ enlightenment9 – of a critical self-reflection on Europe’s own identity. None of the explorations of the ‘New World’ of the Pacific islands proved as significant in this respect, alluring and unsettling at the same time, as the discovery of Tahiti. In the main part of the paper I shall use accounts of Tahiti as a kind of case study to consider the constitution of a sceptical Enlightenment. For reasons of space I shall confine myself to two main examples – Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (written in 1772, but not published before 1796) and Georg Forster’s Voyage around the World (1774 in its original English version; 1778 in German). Although the Supplement is the work of an armchair traveller, while Forster’s 1,000-page volume is based on first-hand experience, the two texts share a number of critical perspectives: in both, savage Tahiti casts radical doubt upon the self-confidence of enlightened Europe, revealing the corruption at the heart of its political systems, its refined morality and civilized forms of sociability. Both envisage the disastrous consequences that the contact with Europe will inflict upon the integrity of Tahiti’s native culture. But while Diderot implicated enlightenment itself in the process of irreversible destruction, Forster’s critique of civilization salvaged those of its achievements which might in future work to the benefit of all peoples on the globe. The Sceptical Enlightenment 5 THE GREAT MAP OF MANKIND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The eighteenth century’s perception of the world evolved out of long- standing and varied traditions of thought which recorded the successive stages of Europe’s encounter with foreign lands and alien cultures.10 With its roots in the discourses of Hellenic barbarism, on the one hand, and in the confrontations of Christianity with Islam in the Middle Ages, on the other, Europe’s understanding of the geographical and cultural boundaries of the world and of its own central place within it was first radically altered as a consequence of Columbus’s discovery of the New World and of the waves of overseas expansion which followed in its wake. The voyages of the Renaissance period transformed the closed, hierarchically ordered cosmos of the Christian transnational community into a spatial universe of as yet uncertain extent.11 Not only did this epoch witness the most extensive enlargement of the known world in terms of physical space which, as Alexander von Humboldt put it, ‘doubled the works of the Creation’ for the inhabitants of Europe.12 It brought the latter face to face with terrains and peoples for which neither the Bible nor the classical authors of Greek and Roman antiquity would provide authoritative guid- ance. To the extent that first-hand knowledge about the indigenous popula- tions of Asia, Africa and the Americas continued to reach European readers in the form mainly of missionary reports, the understanding of primitive peoples remained until the end of the seventeenth century bounded by concerns central to Christian faith and salvation. Yet, as the travellers and scholars of the eighteenth century were to acknowl- edge, the expeditions of the Renaissance already laid the foundations of that systematic secular interest in the shape and history of the earth which was to become the hallmark of the scientific endeavours of the Enlightenment period: ‘For the first time man knew the globe that he inhabited.’13 Voyages around the world in the eighteenth century heralded a second momentous phase in the history of European overseas discoveries. The exploration of the Pacific Ocean by Bougainville, Cook and many others, and the discovery of Australia, New Zealand and the South Sea islands brought one-third of the earth’s surface into the orbit of the known world. After Cook’s second voyage (1772–5) had laid to rest the long-held belief in the existence of a vast land mass in the southern hemisphere (the terra australis incognita) there remained no new continents to be discov- ered. Much was still left to future explorations, especially as regards the inland regions of Africa, the Americas and Australia. But the cartography The Enlightenment and Modernity6 beings with all they needed without exacting the tribute of arduous labour. This favourable impression was matched by the physical beauty of the islanders: their well-built, healthy bodies, their nakedness borne with- out shame and artificial reserve, their attractive bronze skin colour and melodious language. These physical attributes alone set the Tahitian apart from other savages whom the travellers encountered in the Pacific region, comparing them favourably with the forbidding ugliness of the natives of New Zealand and New Caledonia, who displayed stark similarities with the negroes of West Africa and the Caribbean islands. Above all, the visitors were attracted by the behaviour that the inhabitants of Tahiti showed towards them. The same scene of arrival is replayed in all descrip- tions: The ships of the Europeans, anchoring at some distance from the shore, would soon be surrounded by countless canoes and cries of ‘Tayo’ (friend). The uncanny friendliness, childlike trust and innocent curiosity of these savages would become further evident in their willingness to barter the much-needed fresh foodstuffs for iron nails and trinkets of fake jewellery, and to share their meals, huts and – if we are to believe Bougainville and Diderot – their women with the strangers. In short, in the Tahitian islander eighteenth-century Europeans met their bon sauvage (whom the previous century had identified with the North American Indian). Here was a ‘variation’ of the human species sufficiently different to be endowed with all the charms of the exotic and yet, unlike other savage tribes, still similar enough to be adopted by the European as an image of himself. Tahiti, then, seemed to offer a glimpse of what the human condition of man ‘close to the origins of the world’21 and as yet unspoilt by the trappings of civilizatory progress must have been like. It might be said, of course, that it was the European traveller weary of Europe’s decadence who invented the Tahitian as his other and turned his island into a place of ecstatic imagination. However, as we shall see in the following two sec- tions, the most pertinent insights of Diderot’s and Forster’s accounts and the distinctive features of their sceptical Enlightenment are owed to the fact that Tahiti was a real place. Both understood that Tahiti’s discovery and first contact with Europe marked the beginning of an inexorable process that would draw its people into the world determined by the superior power of European civilization. In Diderot these insights took the form of resignation in the face of irremediable loss. Forster was led to a position where he altogether abandoned the presumption that ques- tions about the nature of man and about the future of the human species could ever be answered by reference to a state of primitive simplicity and happiness. The Sceptical Enlightenment 9 BOUGAINVILLE AND DIDEROT: THE MYTH OF TAHITI The magic spell that a first encounter with the island of Tahiti could cast even over an experienced traveller of foreign lands is particularly evident in the case of Bougainville. Louis Antoine Bougainville (1729–1811) – aristocrat, soldier, philosophe and naval explorer – was the perfect embodiment of the Enlightenment’s explorative spirit, ‘balancing a treatise of integral and differential calculus on one side, with a voyage round the world on the other.’22 Much of his account is given to technical problems of navigation and to the detailed recording of the dangers, hardships and ravaging diseases that the seafarer is likely to encounter in remote parts of the world. The same endeavour to supply an extensive array of useful facts is applied to the description of indigenous populations and of the economic and political strategies of the colonial powers. The imperative of factual veracity leads him into frequent attacks upon the then fashionable genres of merely entertaining travel literature and, with no less indignation, on the distortions of experience that are owed to the speculations of the closet philosophers at home: ‘Geography is an exact science and not to be fashioned in the spirit of system without falling prey to fatal errors.’23 Yet, it was Bougainville who ‘really launched the legend’ when he named Tahiti La Nouvelle Cythère, after the mythical Greek island of erotic pleasure.24 His observations may be of interest to us mainly because they supplied the factual material from which Diderot was to fashion the philosophical tale of civilized man’s alienation from his natural state. But they are also interesting in their own right in that they highlight the manifold difficulties and misunderstandings that enveloped the trav- eller as he attempted to give a faithful description of native attitudes and practices which in many instances would appear wholly unintelligible to the eyes of European observers. (Such difficulties were compounded in Bougainville’s case by a brief stay on the island of only ten days and, above all, by his ignorance of the native language.) ‘We did not trust our eyes’: Time and again Bougainville voices the inadequacy of previous experience to establish the meaning of what he sees.25 Nothing, it seems, has prepared the European traveller for the spectacle of beautiful native women unashamedly displaying their naked bodies and willing, indeed positively encouraged by their menfolk, to grant sexual favours to strangers. Familiar codes of sexual propriety which back home bind sexual desire into the narrow confines of the monogamous marriage are thrown into disarray in the face of the freedom and ease with which the Tahitians follow the promptings of their natural impulses. The Enlightenment and Modernity10 What comparisons and analogies were available to the foreigner to incorporate these unfamiliar sights into his own language and modes of thinking? As an educated Frenchman well-versed in classical literature, Bougainville spontaneously recalls names and images that belong to the mythology of ancient Greece. He compares the event of a Tahitian woman stepping on board the Boudeuse to the goddess Venus appearing to the phrygian shepherds; he invokes anacreontic songs and dances to capture the graciousness and innocence of the public display of erotic desire. Although further observations would lead him in some instances to correct those first rapturous impressions,26 the alluring image of a Tahiti situated in the ‘elysian fields’ remains unaffected. With these references to the cradle of European civilization Bougainville’s ‘Tahiti’ is set in a discursive tradition and pattern of assimilation which for centuries had played a dominant role in the European traveller’s explo- ration of primitive societies.27 The gap of cultural difference is bridged and the incomprehensibility of non-European peoples overcome by moving the latter into one’s own distant past, be it actual or imagined. Mediated through the imagery that pertains to that past, a relationship between them and us is created. They – the savages at the periphery of the world – represent an earlier and perhaps happier stage of mankind’s development which once was ours too. Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage construes this relation- ship in an altogether different manner. Tahiti reminds us not of the ancient Greece of our known history, but of a much earlier stage ‘close to the origins of the world’. Although the title seems to suggest that the work would merely add to Bougainville’s observations and although these can be seen to have provided a minimal frame of factual information, the Supplement bears little resemblance to the original travel account. Bougainville’s description of events, adventures and curiosities is trans- formed into a philosophical satire on the morality of civilized society.28 As in other works, Diderot uses the literary form of the dialogue (here, in fact, of a double dialogue) as the most suitable vehicle to consider a philosophical question from multiple standpoints and to indicate the incompleteness and ambivalence of any one of them.29 The work consists of four parts, each of which develops a different perspective upon the moral implications and practical consequences of the encounter between Europe and ‘Tahiti’ – between civilized and natural man. An initial con- versation between two philosophers, A and B (Diderot’s alter ego), about Bougainville’s explorations and their contribution to the expanding knowl- edge of nature and man, is followed by the ‘old man’s farewell’ which carries Diderot’s impassioned indictment of the devastating abuses which The Sceptical Enlightenment 11 savage tribe in the South Sea, the Tahitians of Diderot’s fable are in an important way like us. They are, that is, what we would be had we been fortunate enough not to be drawn into the turmoils of progressive histori- cal change. Conversely, there is the danger that they will one day be forced to be what we now are. It is from this latter perspective that Diderot addresses the real relation- ship between Europe and the newly discovered world of primitive nations. The universalist principle of a common humanity and of the common des- tiny of the human race which, as we have just seen, impedes the under- standing of primitive cultures in their own terms of reference is used to defend their identity in terms of their entitlement to their freedom, to their soil and their own ways of life. In the ‘old man’s farewell’ Diderot launches a devastating attack not only on the political practices of European colonialism but also on the illegitimate intrusion entailed in the restless dynamic of discovery and expansion.38 Occupation of land, plun- der and the transmission of venereal diseases have laid a trail of destruc- tion which will eventually lead to the subjugation and enslavement of the indigenous populations. Commercial relations, economic improvement and, in the last instance, the advance of knowledge have left an equally fatal legacy that is bound to subvert the self-sufficiency and moral integrity of the native culture: ‘We have no wish to exchange what you call ignorance for your useless knowledge. Everything that we need and is good for us we already possess. … Do not fill our heads with your facti- tous needs and illusory virtues’.39 Enlightenment seems to turn on itself as Diderot questions the very expectations and hopes which he had once invested in the project of the Encyclopédie: ‘to assemble knowledge … so that our descendants, in becoming better informed, may at the same time become more virtuous and content’.40 GEORG FORSTER: THE REAL TAHITI The traveller who makes his way around all four continents will nowhere find that charming tribe that dreamers promised him in every forest and every wilderness.41 At the time when Diderot worked on the review of Bougainville’s book, Georg Forster was sailing towards Tahiti on board Cook’s ship the Resolution. In many respects his account of the South Sea island reads like a ‘Supplement to Cook’s voyage’, betraying the same fascination with ‘the uncorrupted children of nature’ and the same mood of disenchantment The Enlightenment and Modernity14 towards the corrupt world left behind in Europe. Unlike Diderot, however, Forster had actually seen Tahiti with his own eyes and, in contrast with Bougainville’s short stay on the island, he had had the opportunity of more extensive and repeated observation. He thus arrived at a sharper per- ception of the particular features of Tahitian society; and this appreciation was further enhanced by his familiarity with other primitive peoples in the Pacific region. Confronted by the considerable differences of physical appearance, language and forms of sociability that set the Tahitian apart from the native of New Zealand and New Caledonia,42 Forster sought the explanation in different degrees of civilization. The need to place Tahiti – and any other savage society – in a context of historical development led him to abandon the divide between natural and civilized man as an erroneous assumption that could not serve the philosopher’s interest in the nature of man. In many ways Forster was the Enlightenment’s philosopher traveller par excellence. He combined wide-ranging scholarly interests in both the sciences and the arts with the public commitment and ability of the man of letters to communicate knowledge in a lucid and accessible form. A scholar of considerable reputation – botany was his favourite discipline – he hailed the voyages of his time as pioneering expeditions into the still unknown terrains of nature and ‘the history of man’.43 Extensive travelling in Europe when still in his teens and the trained eye of the natural historian enabled him to study the social and cultural practices of primitive peoples in the same spirit of scientific curiosity and with the same attention to detail that he applied to the plants, minerals and geological formations of their natural environment. The truth of what travellers reported from foreign countries, he insisted, could only be guaranteed by the scrupulous honesty of an observer willing to let factual evidence prevail over established cer- tainties. Yet while his explorations were thus to be driven by the quest for the most extensive information, the philosophical traveller had at the same time to search for the connecting threads that would bind the separate facts into an integrated picture of the whole: ‘It was my intention to consider the nature of man from as many perspectives as possible and to find a standpoint which would allow for a comprehensive view.’44 Forster – and in this he but represents the distinctive aspirations of the Enlightenment scientist and philosophe – was in no doubt that the endeavour to study ‘human nature in all its given forms’45 required a supportive framework of universalist dispositions. The first was a kind of moral obligation – to safeguard the inclusiveness of observation and the impartiality of judgement in the face of unexpected and, at first impact, disquieting deviations from the familiar forms of human existence: ‘All The Sceptical Enlightenment 15 peoples of the world have the same claim on my good will.’46 This impar- tiality, however, depended in the last instance upon a sentiment of universal benevolence: upon the sympathetic dispositions of a ‘friend of humanity’.47 The first arrival at the shores of Tahiti – narrated in one of the finest pieces of German eighteenth-century prose – echoes Bougainville’s enrap- tured impressions: ‘We found that Monsieur Bougainville had not gone too far when he described this country as an earthly paradise.’48 In Forster’s description, too, the beauty of the island combines with the abundant generosity of nature under a felicitous climate and with the attractive appearance and amiable behaviour of the inhabitants to evoke all the charms of the exotic which for the European readers of this time made the South Sea a place of yearning. This first picture of the Tahitians conveys the happy simplicity of a life without want and worry: In the youthful health and serene comportment of an old man Forster finds proof that here people grow old, free from the burdens of misfortune and pain that are the predicament of old age in civilized nations;49 women’s much longer period of fertility similarly points to a life that knows of no deprivation and sorrow;50 the observer is as struck by the undistorted expression of feelings of joy and grief in these ‘uncorrupted children of nature’ as by their acts of friendship and noble magnanimity towards strangers. Although his response to the manifestations of Bougainville’s paradise of sexual love is visibly more reserved (as one might expect from a Protestant German’s more austere notions of propriety and distrust of sensuous pleasure), he notes approvingly that ‘these good people follow the impulse of nature without inhibition’.51 On Tahiti the procreative impulse is not fettered by the adverse conditions of poverty, deprivation and anxiety which weigh on the state of marriage in civilized countries.52 Even the unseemly lascivious behaviour that the women of the lower classes display towards the European sailors and which reminds him of the ubiquitous presence of vice in Europe’s big cities must count as innocent among the Tahitians, given the naive simplicity of their moral notions and a habit of dressing that tends to emphasize the naked body rather than disguise it.53 As these examples show, Forster’s understanding of the customs of this savage people draws on the contrast with Europe; and more often than not the comparison works to the disadvantage of the latter. But unlike Diderot (and Rousseau), he does not allow his judgement to take the side of natural simplicity and innocence against the flawed conditions of life in civilized society. Rather, the comparison serves him to establish the contextual meanings of human behaviour for both Europe and Tahiti. The destabilization of certainty which the traveller experiences in the The Enlightenment and Modernity16 Forster learns in the course of his journey that the European’s percep- tion of primitive cultures has to free itself from two constricting precon- ceptions. The first, and in his eyes far more damaging one, centres in the presupposition that the present political systems of Europe and its social and religious institutions could serve as the universal norm by which to judge non-developed societies. As things are, nothing entitles the European to a sense of moral superiority. Europeans will condemn the savage who eats human flesh as a monster while they themselves let thou- sands of human beings be slaughtered on the battle-field at the whim of a tyrannical ruler or the caprice of his mistress.63 (Only a few years after the publication of the Voyage Forster would translate his radical critique of the ancien régime into a lasting commitment to the cause of revolutionary republicanism.) Secondly, however, in order to understand the institutions and practices of primitive peoples as they have evolved and changed over time we also have to abandon the myth of the ‘charming tribe in the wilderness’ and, with it, the idea that the process of civilization entails the denaturation of man. This second emphasis enabled Forster to distinguish between the genuine benefits of civilization and the abuses to which it had given rise. The destructive effects of Europe’s colonialist policies upon native peoples clearly belonged in the latter category. The advances in the sciences and arts, the development of manufacture, commerce and sociability, by contrast, could count as benefits of potentially universal value. In thus comparing and ordering the ‘variations’ of the human species by their different degrees of civilization Forster’s observations remained Eurocentric and informed by the values of the Enlightenment. He would find evidence of an ascending line of development among primitive peoples in the enhanced skills of overcoming the adversities of their natural environment, in the evolution of agriculture, in peaceful social association and – the most frequently cited proof – in the dynamic driving towards greater equality between the sexes. One can, on the other hand, argue that goods of this kind are valuable not only within limited cultural contexts. The tangible improvement of the human condition that Enlightenment thinkers associated with the idea of civilization – and the real benefits that newly discovered peoples might derive from the contact with Europe – are recounted in Forster’s concluding comments on the achievements of his voyage: From this perspective our recent voyage was important … even if had had no other merit than that we left behind goats on Tahiti, dogs on the Friendship Islands and the New Hebrides, and pigs in New Zealand and The Sceptical Enlightenment 19 New Caledonia. It is certainly much to be wished that voyages of discovery of this kind, given to benevolent and truly useful purposes, should be continued in future.64 CONCLUSION: UNIVERSALISM AND THE RECOGNITION OF DIFFERENCE This chapter has looked at eighteenth-century voyages of discovery and their reflection in the accounts given by ‘philosopher travellers’. The exploration of the South Sea islands, and the encounter with Tahiti in particular, has served as an example to show how the Enlightenment responded to the experience of cultural difference. Two centuries later, these responses are in many ways no longer adequate to the demand of conceptualizing transcultural relationships in an era of globalization. But to acknowledge this is not the same as to accuse the Enlightenment for having failed to face the reality of a multi-cultural world. As we have seen in the example of the philosopher travellers, the opposite was the case: arguments about human nature, controversies about the distinctive char- acter of modern civilization, about Europe’s past and future role in the world, were profoundly shaped by an outward-going interest in the diversity and variability of human existence. It is true that universalist presumptions and the Eurocentric bias inher- ent in them prevented Enlightenment thinkers from fully coming to terms with the identity of foreign cultures at the periphery of the civilized world: to consider all peoples on the globe as but so many variations of a homogenous human species or as all part of a single story of civilization would often result in seeking the distinctive character of savage societies only in those features in which they were similar to or different from us (the Europeans). From this perspective, one would miss out on the uniquely local contexts of primitive customs, languages and religious tradi- tions which bore no resemblance to anything Europeans were familiar with. We should, on the other hand, not use ‘universalism’ and ‘Eurocen- trism’ as self-explanatory categories of judgement on the Enlightenment’s engagement with other cultures. Neither the assumption of a common human nature nor the understanding of Europe’s special place in the world had the status of unquestionable certainties. Rather, in the course of a voyage around the world the question of what is natural, i.e. given in the constitution of a human being, met with ever new challenges and the con- tinuous need for boundary revision. Thus, observation of the sexual customs on Tahiti led Diderot and Forster to understand that shame and The Enlightenment and Modernity20 guilt were not, as assumed in the moral codes of civilized nations, universally inscribed in human nature, but were the product of social con- ventions. Conversely, when Forster witnessed the distressing incident of cannibalism among the Maoris of New Zealand he had to contend with the widely-held belief that such abhorrent practices cast the savage out of the domain of a common humanity. Considering the circumstances which might force primitive men into cannibalism and comparing the examples reported from various parts of the world, he came to the conclusion that it was, as such, not unnatural – and not a sign of a subhuman species – to eat human flesh. We have also seen that the contact with primitive societies and the reflection on what made them different from civilized Europe acted as a catalyst of self-doubt that might even extend to the central hope which sustained the project of enlightenment, namely that the increase in knowl- edge would lead to greater virtue and happiness. If, as we see it today, it is one of the conditions of successful transcultural communication to be able to relativize one’s own cultural identity, then the legacies of the sceptical Enlightenment would seem to point in just that direction. The same applies to the political commitments in which Enlightenment universalism expressed itself. They base themselves, first, on the recogni- tion of the irreversibility of historical processes which have brought all parts of the world into a system of interdependence and communication. Secondly, they take account of Europe’s special role in making the world one – through discovery, conquest, enslavement and exploitation of non- European peoples. From the self-critical stance compelled by the knowl- edge of past legacies derives the notion of Europe’s special responsibility for the future of global relationships. This future is conceived – by Diderot, Condorcet and Forster – in the form of a benevolent trusteeship which makes it incumbent on an enlightened Europe, as the most devel- oped and most fortunate region, to promote the conditions of social progress in other parts of the world. It is a vision which clearly falls short of present conceptions of transcultural dialogue. The Enlightenment was not able to see all nations, each from its own centre of identity, as equal partners in a world-wide system of mutual interdependence. (Although we have to consider here that the differences that separated ‘civilized’ from ‘savage’ societies in the eighteenth century were much greater than those by which we today distinguish ‘developed’ from ‘developing’ countries.) Finally, the political resources of Enlightenment universalism in relation to non-European peoples depended crucially upon a sentiment of universal sympathy. When Diderot and Condorcet described the project of peaceful colonization in terms of mutual friendship, or when Forster demanded that The Sceptical Enlightenment 21 31. For Condorcet, see Progress of the Human Mind, pp. 27–8; for Forster: Reise um die Welt, pp. 753, 772, 779ff, 812, 852, 862; for Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment: Jane Rendall, ‘Virtue and Commerce: Women in the Making of Adam Smith’s Political Economy’, in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds), Women in Western Political Philosophy (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1987), pp. 44–77; Silvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlight- enment Debate on Women’, History Workshop, 20 (1985), pp. 147–9. 32. Diderot, Supplement, p. 44. 33. Ibid. 34. Diderot, Supplement, p. 70. 35. Bougainville, Voyage, in Wuthenow, Erfahrene Welt, p. 221. 36. Diderot, Supplement, p. 66. 37. Diderot, Supplement, p. 41. 38. See Diderot, Supplement, pp. 41–5. 39. Diderot, Supplement, p. 43. 40. Diderot, ‘Encyclopédie’, in ‘Articles from the Encyclopédie’, Hope Mason and Wokler, Diderot, pp. 21ff. 41. Georg Forster, ‘Cook, der Entdecker’, in Forster, Werke, vol. 2, p. 181. 42. See Forster, Reise um die Welt, pp. 189–221, 688–702. 43. Forster, Reise um die Welt, pp. 11ff; ‘Cook, der Entdecker’, pp. 189–224. 44. Forster, Reise um die Welt, p. 17. 45. Ibid., p. 923. 46. Ibid., p. 18. 47. Ibid., p.12. 48. Ibid., p. 254. 49. Ibid., pp. 265ff. 50. Ibid., p. 310. 51. Ibid., p. 587. 52. Ibid., p. 329. 53. Ibid., p. 307. 54. Ibid., pp. 275ff. 55. Ibid., p. 265. 56. Ibid., p. 276. 57. Ibid., pp. 617ff. 58. Ibid., pp. 307ff. 59. Ibid., p. 281. 60. Ibid., p. 332. 61. Forster, ‘Cook, der Entdecker’, p. 181. 62. Forster, Reise um die Welt, pp. 923ff. 63. Ibid., pp. 447ff. 64. Ibid., p. 21. The Enlightenment and Modernity24 2 Education Can Do All Geraint Parry ‘Education can do all’ (l’éducation peut tout) is one of the most celebrated phrases in the history of educational thought. It comes from the title of chapter I of section X of Helvétius’ De l’homme, de ses facultés intel- lectuelles et de son éducation (1772; citations are from the 1773 edition). The remark seems to encapsulate the transformative ambitions of Enlightenment thought. Education could be seen as a means of imprinting truth and virtue on the minds of the rising generation and extirpating prejudice at its roots. The potential of education had been expressed by Helvétius in an earlier passage in the book: If I can demonstrate that man is, in fact, nothing more than the product of his education, I shall doubtless reveal an important truth to the nations. They will learn that they have in their hands the instrument of their great- ness and their felicity, and that to be happy and powerful, it is only a matter of perfecting the science of education. (Helvétius 1773: I, 3) This excitement at the possibilities afforded by education permeates eigh- teenth-century writings on the subject and is one of the Enlightenment’s most important legacies. The Age of Enlightenment was also an Age of Pedagogy. The very term ‘enlightenment’ implies an educative task of enlightening, and Kant’s celebrated definition of it as an exodus from a condition of immaturity or tutelage to one of autonomy points to a process whereby mankind is led or leads itself to a new understanding of the world. However, the same confidence that education could ‘do all’ also gave rise to programmes, based on novel techniques of teaching, designed to achieve the re-socialization of populations so that they would find their own happiness in the pursuit of the interests of the state. As the remark of Helvétius appears to imply, education could be the means whereby peo- ples might be mobilized in the pursuit of the typical goals of modernity – progress, power and prosperity. It is therefore not surprising that the onslaught in recent times on what critics of the Enlightenment term the ‘Enlightenment Project’ should have included education amongst its targets. As one recent study of postmod- ernism and education puts it: Education is very much the dutiful child of the Enlightenment and, as such, tends to uncritically accept a set of assumptions deriving from 25 Enlightenment thought. Indeed it is possible to see education as the vehicle by which the Enlightenment ideas of critical reason, humanistic individual freedom and benevolent progress are substantiated and realised. (Usher and Edwards 1994: 24) Following the Enlightenment, the task of education has been widely per- ceived as assisting rational human beings to realize their potential, to exer- cise moral agency, to become autonomous. However, virtually every one of these terms of educational thought has become, in a favourite word of postmodernism, ‘problematized’. Usher and Edwards go on to cite another commentator as stating that the postmodern critique ‘stabs at the heart of the most cherished ideals of Western culture [particularly that of personal autonomy] as an educational goal’ (Lovlie 1992: 121, cited in Usher and Edwards 1994: 25). Hence Enlightenment education is complicit in the various alleged fail- ures of the whole Enlightenment Project. These failings are many. Whilst the Enlightenment, it is said, presented itself as emancipating human beings from prejudice and uncovering natural man, in reality this new sub- ject was a construct of which education was an artificer. To produce this subject required discipline in certain modes of thinking and behaviour which were to become norms. Amongst the objectives of such education was to empower those who conformed to those norms in order that they might master nature in the name of progress. In the pursuit of these goals, however, the Enlightenment, and those educated in its wake, are accused of having ignored plurality and diversity, of having propounded an abstract individualism which neglects the manner in which people are embedded in communities and cultures and, worst of all, of having been the source of a utopian conception of technological control over the social order which culminated in the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. The upshot of these attacks (admittedly an amalgam of different critiques) is, according to Peter McLaren, a leading figure in contemporary ‘critical pedagogy’, that: The Faustian dream of imposing master codes of Enlightenment rea- soning (in the guise of a Western hyper-rationalism) on the indetermi- nacy of social and cultural life has become a nightmare … (McLaren 1995: 17) Amongst the most plausible of these identifications of an Enlightenment Project is that presented by Michel Foucault. Unlike many other accounts of the Enlightenment in this literature, Foucault’s work is based on some genuine research into the practices and mentalities of the period (Foucault The Enlightenment and Modernity26 ENLIGHTENMENT EDUCATION AND DISCIPLINE This essay will take the more overtly disciplinary story first and then the emancipatory. For both it is necessary to start with John Locke, since the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Of the Conduct of the Under- standing and Some Thoughts Concerning Education together formed the foundation works of eighteenth-century educational theory. Some Thoughts Concerning Education of 1693 was in its fifth edition by 1705 and was reprinted some twenty times during the century, apart from its inclusion in Locke’s collected works. Pierre Coste’s French translation appeared in 1695 and went through repeated printings. The Italian version came out in 1735 and was in its sixth edition by 1792, and German, Dutch and Swedish translations were also rapidly made available. Although in itself an occasional work, indebted to Montaigne and Comenius, the prestige of Some Thoughts was, of course, due to its coming from the pen of the author of the Essay. Moreover the Essay is itself replete with illustrative examples drawn from the learning processes of children. The positive role of education (and the kernel of a disciplinary interpre- tation of the educational project) is stated in the opening paragraph of Some Thoughts – a paragraph cited repeatedly in educational treatises throughout the century: of all the Men we meet with, Nine Parts out of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by their Education. (Locke 1989: para. 1) It is education which makes the great difference amongst mankind. Consistently with the tabula rasa doctrine of the Essay the educator is able to consider the child ‘only as white Paper, or Wax, to be moulded or fash- ioned as one pleases’ (Locke 1989: para. 217). The meaning which Locke gave to the ancient tabula rasa metaphor was that at birth the child possesses virtually no ideas of the world and none concerning logical or moral principles (Locke 1979: 2.1.2). The mind acquires ideas from experience which comes, initially, from external objects whose features are conveyed to us through the senses and, sec- ondly, from reflection on the internal operations of the mind. The child’s experience in the womb may result in its gaining certain ideas of hunger, thirst and warmth (Locke 1979: 1.2.4) but otherwise the newborn child’s understanding is formed as a result of its gradual coming to familiarity with the qualities of external objects. Children are additionally equipped with a capacity to experience pleasure and pain. The great variety of exter- nal factors which surround the child ensure that a ‘variety of Ideas, whether care be taken about it or no, are imprinted on the Minds of Education Can Do All 29 Children’ (Locke 1979: 2.1.6). At first these ideas are like ‘floating Visions’ and ‘t’is pretty late’ before children get ideas of their own minds and begin to reflect and put order and constancy into their thoughts (Locke 1979: 2.1.8). This brief résumé is perhaps enough to suggest three profound implications for education – egalitarianism, malleability and control, and developmentalism. The egalitarian implication is that differences between human achieve- ments are nine-tenths due to the different opportunities persons have of experiencing a variety of external stimuli. What differentiates the country gentleman (for whom Locke wrote his educational thoughts) from the day- labourer is not any natural gifts but the greater opportunities to employ them. The vast bulk of the poor lack the leisure to cultivate their minds and are condemned ‘by the natural and unalterable State of Things in this World and the Constitution of humane Affairs’ to labour to fill their stom- achs (Locke 1979: 4.20.2; also Reasonableness of Christianity, Works VII: 157–8). Even amongst the gentry, those most exposed to the variety of affairs are more knowledgeable than those who confine themselves to hunting and drinking claret. This also implies that differences between people are attributable to the extent to which they employ or neglect their understandings. One task of education will be to develop the practice of the mental faculties in constructing complex and abstract ideas. The second implication follows from the first and can be summed up in the title of John Passmore’s famous paper as ‘the malleability of man’ (Passmore 1965; see also Passmore 1970: 149–89). The careful manage- ment of the child’s experiences could shape its understanding in the direc- tions desired by parents, tutors and the society at large. The extent of such management might, in principle, be almost unlimited since all experiences are educative. When Enlightenment theorists write of the power of educa- tion they refer to the total effect of the environment in shaping the mind. In stricter terms, however, it would imply the control of a more specific environment – the choice of teacher or school, of playmates and friends, of reading, travel and all exposure to example or what nowadays would be called ‘role models’. All of these matters are considered by Locke and his successors. The third implication is that such management must take heed of the stages in the mental development of the child. It does not develop reflection for some time. The child is living in a foreign country and needs a guide who will gently steer its natural curiosity (Locke 1989: para. 120). Children have to learn gradually to apply themselves. It is counter- productive to teach them beyond their capacities. What moves children, The Enlightenment and Modernity30 and adults, is pleasure and pain. The tutor should seek to make learning gentle and pleasurable. Hence Locke’s influential, if not entirely original, advocacy of play as a means of education. Learning should not be a burden to the child. It should be ‘cozened’ into it (Locke 1989: para. 149). This itself can be regarded as a form of discipline. Thus Bourdieu and Passeron argue that to overwhelm one’s pupils with affection … is to gain possession of that subtle instrument of repression, the withdrawal of affection, a pedagogi- cal technique which is no less arbitrary … than corporal punishment or disgrace. (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: 17) It is as the child grows older, Locke argues, that more formal learning becomes possible and that it can be increasingly treated as an adult agent. The essential element in education is not, however, the acquisition of knowledge but the inculcation of habits. These are habits of study, habits of behaviour and habits of virtue in general. Habits have to be learned but cannot be acquired by rote. The objective is to make certain behaviour second nature. The prime way of developing such habits is through repeated practice, whether of study or of moral conduct (Locke 1989: para. 64). It is just like dancing on a rope – a matter of hard work. In some cases the same fault must be overcome in study as in morality, such as the tendency to inattention or ‘sauntering’. But what is the measure of mastery in any field? For the most part it is the good opinion of society. In morality the ultimate test of the good is to be found in the law of nature. This should guide all human conduct. It can- not be identified with any human consensus on proper behaviour, since Locke always reminded his readers of examples of societies which seemed to ignore the instructions of natural law. Nevertheless, Locke asserted that the terms ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ are in all societies those used to describe con- duct which is considered praiseworthy or blameworthy. They are employed according to the ‘Law of Opinion or Reputation’ (Locke 1979: 2.28.7–12). In Some Thoughts Locke states that ‘though it be not the true Principle and Measure of Vertue … yet it is that which comes nearest to it’ (Locke 1989: para. 61). In the Essay opinion and reputation are described as a process which ‘by a secret and tacit consent’ sets up the standards of behaviour in soci- eties. People may hope to reconcile themselves with God for their crimes or may expect to avoid the civil law, but no one escapes ‘the Punishment of their Censure and Dislike, who offends against the Fashion and Opinion of the Company he keeps’. The condemnation of his club or his society is Education Can Do All 31 system of national education based on the ‘inalienable and imprescriptible right’ of every nation to instruct its members. The ‘children of the state’ should be taught only by citizens of the state and from state-approved text- books (La Chalotais 1932: 53). Philipon De La Madelaine declared that ‘children belong more to the republic than to their parents’ (Philipon De La Madelaine 1782: 12). The most extreme, totalizing implications of such theories were to be drawn in the French Revolutionary era by Michel Le Pelletier in his Plan d’Education Nationale with its proposals for compul- sory state boarding schools for all children. They would be received ‘from the hands of nature’ at the age of five and given back ‘to society’ at twelve, having been taught in conditions of absolute equality and austerity the rudiments of learning and the basics of morality. Away from its parents, the child’s existence belongs to society, and ‘the material … never leaves its mould’ (Le Pelletier 1793: 8–10; 22). The object was a complete regeneration and the creation of a ‘new people’. The as yet unfulfilled potential of education was deplored by Helvétius: Man is too often unknown to him who governs him. However to direct the motions of the human puppet it is necessary to know the strings by which he is moved. Deprived of this knowledge it is not to be wondered that his motions are often so contrary to those the legislator requires. (Helvétius 1773: I, 4) The parallel movement in ideas in Britain was to draw some different policy conclusions from this shared confidence about the power of educa- tion. Distinctive to British educational philosophy was its employment of the doctrine of the association of ideas which David Hartley had derived from Locke (whilst giving it a rather different turn). According to Hartley sensa- tions are the result of vibrations in the brain transmitted through the ether. Ideas are the product of repeated sensations which leave traces in the brain. Certain powerful and repeated sensations are associated together, and any one of these will trigger off corresponding ideas. Sensations may be pleasur- able or painful. Consequently there will be regular associations of ideas such as those of fire, heat and pain. Children come to learn these. The acquisition of language to designate ideas results in associations of ideas with words. If it were possible for persons to be exposed to precisely the same impressions and experiences the differences between them would disap- pear. Alternatively, if it were possible to work backwards from the affec- tions and passions through to the associations which lay behind them we could, Hartley suggests, learn how to cherish and improve good ones, check and root out such as are mischievous and immoral, and how to suit our manner of life, in some The Enlightenment and Modernity34 tolerable measure, to our intellectual and religious wants. And as this holds, in respect of persons of all ages, so it is particularly true, and worthy of consideration, in respect of children and youth. (Hartley 1749: 52) The young could be deconstructed and reconstructed to experience those sensations and produce those ideas consistent with virtue. Hartley offered educationalists an exciting technology to effect mental and moral transformation. Catharine Macaulay justified adding to the many writings on education on the grounds that they could now be founded on the discoveries of modern philosophy of the mind. Without this the tutor could not manage the mental faculties so as to ‘invariably produce volitions agreeable to the laws of virtue and prudence’ (Macaulay 1790: ii). Joseph Priestley argued in the same vein that political knowl- edge is based upon the knowledge of human nature derived from ‘Mr Hobbes, Mr Locke, and, above all, Dr Hartley’ (Priestley 1780: 27). Their discoveries had established that the differences in moral values between individuals and societies are the consequence of habituation since childhood. Hence the end of education, Priestley says, is to inculcate such principles and lead to such habits, as will enable men to pass with integrity, and real honour through life, and to be inflexibly just, benevolent and good … (Priestley 1780: xiii) This is achieved by what he terms ‘artificial education’ which communi- cates knowledge more rapidly and consistently than ‘natural education’, i.e. the experience of ordinary life. The repetition of sensations and associ- ations should commence early in childhood because later ideas have to fight against those already implanted. Here Priestley is led in a direction strongly opposed by Locke (and by Rousseau). It is not the case (as Locke had claimed) that one cannot teach a child ideas until it has reached a con- dition when it is capable of understanding them. Children see things and hear words before grasping their significance. This can be used to prepare them for a fuller understanding. So, accustoming the child to such outward forms as kneeling in church gradually imposes on its mind that some form of reverence is due to divine power. Similarly, bonfires on the Fifth of November in Britain accustom the child to an ‘abhorrence of arbitrary power’ before it can understand the period and circumstances the festivities commemorate (Priestley 1780: 87–9). Priestley admits without qualms that in this method, we take an unfair advantage of the imbecility of the rational faculties, and inculcate truth by such a kind of mechanical prej- udice as would enforce the belief of any thing … (Priestley 1780: 90) Education Can Do All 35 To this implied objection Priestley responds that all education of children involves ‘prejudicing them in favour of our own opinions and practices’ (Priestley 1780: 90). The first stage in education must be to habituate children to authority, rewarding positively evaluated conduct and penaliz- ing that which is condemned by right-thinking society. Once again the pleasure–pain calculus is consulted by the educator to ensure support for what Priestley terms ‘competent authority’. Developments in the German-speaking countries were the outcome of a confluence of a number of more varied streams of ideas. They added up to perhaps the most formidable instance of the disciplinary perception of education. Locke’s educational writings were but one of the influences which went to make up, along with Rousseau and La Chalotais, the eclec- tic amalgam which constituted German progressive education, best repre- sented by Johann Bernhard Basedow. He was an educational entrepreneur, founder of an advanced school in Dessau admired by Kant, and author of a vast range of treatises, including what would nowadays probably be described as an ‘integrated learning package’ of textbooks with illustrated supplements and manuals for teachers and parents (as well as a text on the education of princes – which could be construed as a ‘niche market’ in eighteenth-century Germany). Basedow was in many respects a typical Aufklärung figure of the sec- ond or third rank – totally unoriginal but absorbing and reproducing many of its mildly liberal, vaguely progressive outlooks (albeit too progressive for his conservative critics). Although a fervent cosmopolitan, he was able to accommodate this with support for state supervision (Staatsaufsicht) of education, as an aspect of the nation’s general responsibility for morality. He proposed a state council which would have the function of advising on the upbringing, in the widest sense, of subjects (Basedow 1771: 384–422). Civic virtue and happiness, he argued, depended on education which could not be left in the hands of churches which are partial associations within the state. Included in the council’s educational remit are not only schools but almshouses, orphanages and theatres – every institution capable of influencing morality. In Rousseauian spirit the council should establish annual festivals of the fatherland for which schools should prepare the children with patriotic stories and songs and at which prizes should be awarded to deserving children. The council should also be responsible for approving the textbooks to be used in the nation’s schools. Basedow’s teaching books provided the appropriate moral grounding (as well as an encyclopaedic introduction to most of the curriculum). Games offer opportunities for lessons in good conduct – with some sample ‘scripts’ suggesting, in total contrast to the spontaneity wished for by The Enlightenment and Modernity36 Education will instruct new subjects how they will find happiness by con- duct which society honours. An educational apparatus which stretches from political catechisms in schools to public parks and monuments will tie knots which will bind the subjects to the state and replace coercion by con- sent. Once shown this route, the citizens will rush to find their happiness in the state and it will no longer be necessary to ‘employ against them force and violence, torture and the gallows’ (Le Mercier de la Rivière 1775: 42). The evidence that education was seen as an apparatus of discipline and surveillance in the period of the Enlightenment appears formidable. Pedagogy seems concerned with refining the technology whereby mal- leable subjects can be persuaded to discover their happiness by conform- ing, with an appearance of consent and autonomy, either to the standards of public opinion or to those propounded by the absolutist state. The disci- pline of the state might appear the more concentrated and overt, but that of opinion will be the more pervasive and perhaps the more absolute. Is this, therefore, the Enlightenment Project? Before reaching that conclusion it is necessary to look back at other dimensions of Enlightenment pedagogy, even sometimes to other passages from the same authors. ENLIGHTENMENT EDUCATION AND EMANCIPATION Locke is again at the source. Earlier, emphasis was laid on those texts in which Locke wrote of habituating the child to conform to the standards of conduct upheld by opinion and reputation. But other passages in Some Thoughts, the Essay and the fervently expressed Conduct of the Under- standing offer a different impression. Here we find a powerful onslaught against received opinion, particularly in intellectual matters but also in politics. Locke explicitly rejects education of students which ‘amounts to no more, but making them imbibe their teachers’ notions and tenets by an implicit faith’ (Locke 1890: section 41). Pupils must examine whether any association of ideas arises from agreement in the ideas themselves or only from habit and custom. Teachers are often reluctant to encourage this. Would it not be an insufferable thing for a learned Professor, … to have his Authority of forty years standing wrought out of hard Rock Greek and Latin, with no small expense of Time and Candle, and confirmed by general Tradition, and a reverend Beard, in an instant overturned by an upstart Novelist? (Locke 1979: 4.20.12) This is just like parties which cram tenets down men’s throats and will not permit them to search for truth (Locke 1979: 4.3.20). Truth cannot be Education Can Do All 39 settled by parties or by the votes of the majority (Locke 1979: 4.20.17). This is to neglect one’s own understanding. On this reading the connecting link in Locke’s work is ‘assent’ or, in the political writings, ‘consent’. The Essay is concerned with the grounds upon which assent may be given to propositions about the world; the Second Treatise with the conditions in which rational persons would con- sent to place themselves under government. The educational writings are directed to the ways to prepare the child’s mind so that it can properly grant or withhold assent to statements about nature, morality, religion and politics which it will encounter as an adult. Locke’s political thought is predicated on the existence of moral agents who have attained to maturity and passed from the command of their parents. In morality and politics we are concerned therefore with ‘persons’ – intelligent ‘Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery’ (Locke 1979: 2.27.26). They have liberty, which consists in the power to suspend the execution of their desires and to pause for deliberation before acting (Locke 1979: 2.21.8). They can ‘look about’ and examine the good and evil of conduct (Locke 1979: 2.21.67). Not only is this a capacity, there is an obligation to employ it. Someone who neglects this liberty and acts hastily is responsible for any subsequent errors (Locke 1979: 2.21.56). In The Conduct Locke repeatedly returns to the need to avoid the character flaws which are likely to lead to failures of deliberation. The task of edu- cation is to teach the child to use its human capacity for liberty. This entails cultivating habits of deliberation. Parental power over children, Locke says in the Second Treatise, is a ‘Discipline necessary to their Education’ (Locke 1960: II, para. 65) arising from their ‘nonage’. This puts a different complexion on Locke’s discussion of habit (for an excellent treatment see Schouls 1992). Locke is facing up to the conun- drum of liberal education of how to ‘produce’ an autonomous agent (Locke 1989: para. 46; compare Kant 1899: para. 29). Autonomy cannot be achieved either by a completely libertarian education or by compulsion. The child has to learn a discipline – that of suspending its desires and using its liberty to deliberate. This will not occur unless the very young child is required at first to acquire the habit of yielding its desires to the authority of adults, which it does initially in response to the manipulation of esteem (Locke 1989: para. 112). As the child becomes older and more capable of reflection it should be given reasoned explanations for the restraint on its desires, until eventually the habit becomes a practice of denying oneself and following one’s own reason, which is the ‘great Principle and Foundation of all Vertue and Worth’ (Locke 1989: para. 33). The transition from habit to practice can be effected in various ways, such The Enlightenment and Modernity40 as the child being brought into adult conversation, asked for advice, its reasons listened to and discussed (Locke 1989: para. 98). The passage cited above, in which Locke describes reputation as the proper guide of children, ends with the highly significant qualification, ‘till they grow able to judge for themselves, and to find what is right, by their own reason’ (Locke 1989: para. 61). From this point onward, as Locke makes clear again and again in Book IV of the Essay, in The Conduct and elsewhere, opinion, reputation, tradition, the interests of religion, of scholars or of parties should count for virtually nothing against the individual’s assessment of the probabilities of the truth of propositions. It remains true that Locke is educating children to a particular mode of reasoning about the world, but it is one which struggles against the constantly threatening straitjacket of orthodoxy. On this reading, which is how many in the Enlightenment and amongst their eighteenth-century critics viewed Locke, it was an education of empower- ment (Schouls 1992: 213–17 and passim). The business of a child’s educa- tion was not, Locke said, so much knowledge as such, but to give his mind that freedom, that disposition, and those habits that may enable him to attain any part of knowledge he shall apply himself to, or stand in need of, in the future course of his life. (Locke 1890: section 12) Turning to Locke’s successors in the line of ‘positive’ education, we have again to qualify in part the apparent emphasis on the methods of dis- cipline and supervision. This is because, well in advance of their critics, the liberals of the Enlightenment feared some of the consequences of their own theoretical positions. In Continental Europe they were often seeking to emancipate education from the supervision of the church, but they did not all wish to replace this with a new form of authoritarianism. Helvétius insisted that since the form of government was the chief educative influ- ence over youth, a reform of education presupposed a reform of the political structure. His proposal for a moral catechism could only be con- templated in a free society where truth could be examined with impunity (Helvétius 1773: II, 169–70). A moral vocabulary should be the outcome of a free exchange of opinions amongst people for whom the public good was already the supreme law – persons who were able to be concerned for the general happiness because a more equal division of property had made their stake in the community more proportionate. Under despotism, opin- ion cannot be the standard of virtue because only the opinion of the despot, based on his own self-interest, counts. Large states should be bro- ken up into federations in order to prevent a ruling group undermining the Education Can Do All 41 conservatives immediately perceived the threat and recognized it in the educational writings, as everywhere else. The schoolmaster Vicesimus Knox fulminated against the speculative theories of Locke and Rousseau which had undermined classical disciplines founded on practice and experi- ence. French levity, precipitate innovation and levelling principles were threatening existing establishments (Knox 1781). The German Burkean Ernst Brandes attributed the collapse in social hierarchy and, especially, in patriarchal authority in large part to the Rousseauian-Basedowian revolu- tion in pedagogy symbolized by the introduction at Basedow’s school in Dessau of the familiar version of ‘you’, Du, instead of the respectful Sie in relations between parents and children. From there it had permeated family life (Brandes 1809: 38, 49, 80). Was this critical human being indeed an artificial construct, as critics of the Enlightenment have always asserted? There must be force in this claim, even when seen from the perspective of the Enlightenment itself. Despite their appeals to ‘nature’, the artificiality of civilized man was recognized by his defenders. The very point of education was to print on the mind of the child the manners and modes of thought of polite society. The extreme case of man as a construct was to be found in Helvétius. It was, of course, too extreme for Diderot – a sympathetic critic and at the same time a central Enlightenment ‘projector’. Diderot’s review of De L’Homme concluded that education could do ‘a great deal’ but not ‘all’ since human beings did possess certain innate dispositions and moral orientations (Diderot 1875: 356–7). Rousseau perceived even more criti- cally the way in which positive education constructed man. It was indeed a means whereby a corrupt society moulded its future generations in its own image by a system of supervision and control. That Rousseau’s own ‘negative’ education introduced its own barely concealed disciplines raises profound issues about an education for autonomy (for a further discussion see Parry 1995). Kant, who in some respects sought to harmonize positive and negative theories of education, insisted in his educational treatise that human beings were unique in that, unlike other animals, they had to learn to be themselves – they had to learn to be human. As he puts it: Man can only become man by education. He is merely what education makes him. It is noticeable that man is only educated by man – that is, by men who have themselves been educated. (Kant 1899: 6) Just as in Locke, the first step for Kant is discipline if the lessons of humanity are to be learned. Thus one of the prime objects in sending children to school was to learn to sit still. Again, as is implicit in Locke, discipline operates in two ways. The external discipline of parents and The Enlightenment and Modernity44 school is temporary, but the acquired self-discipline needed in submitting oneself to laws is a permanent precondition for moral judgement. Is this so-called autonomous, yet constructed, agent the deracinated individual identified by conservatives since Burke? There is truth in this allegation as well, but a truth which the Enlightenment at least in part acknowledged. The projectors did seek to extract the individual from tradi- tional disciplines and communities. Some believed that human beings could still be held together as a result of natural endowments of sociability, moral sense and sympathy. For those who rejected this possibility the tie that bound the parts that otherwise might fly apart was forged by educa- tion. Some sought to achieve this through a revival of classical republican civic virtue. More common was an education which taught that, in Pope’s words, ‘true self-love and social were the same’ and that private advantage was to be found in the promotion of public good. The mechanism, as has already been indicated, was the operation of enlightened opinion on the individual’s desire for esteem (the bourgeoisification, as it were, of the aristocratic idea of honour). Such a mechanism of reputation might well threaten to produce that subtle, diffuse discipline of normalization in man- ners of behaviour and in modes of reasoning which Foucault identifies. At the same time, if this account of the importance of opinion and reputation has any validity, it points to a concern for cohesion and, perhaps, even ‘community’ in Enlightenment thought which has been neglected amongst the welter of accusations of the crime of abstract individualism. It has to be admitted that an extreme version of the process of normal- ization can be found in the German theories of Aufgeklärte Absolutismus in which Foucault’s panoptical state may readily be discerned, at least in its aspiration and mentality. The broad outlines and the minute detail of human welfare were discoverable by reason, and it was a short step to con- cluding that these could be taught to experts who, in turn, could realize these objectives through government policy and could additionally, by constant supervision and discipline, mobilize subjects to support the strat- egy. Education became an aspect of what was understood as the policing function, producing what that critic of the Enlightenment, Michael Oakeshott, saw as the realization of the state as an ‘enterprise’: Enlightened government was, then, the most comprehensive version of a state understood in terms of universitas and of government as teleo- cratic engagement to have appeared since the emergence of Europe as a manifold of states. (Oakeshott 1975: 308) It was a theory of the disciplinary society in which autonomy played a minimal role. But should this be seen as the telos or as the reductio ad Education Can Do All 45 absurdum of the Enlightenment? Kant’s anti-paternalism can be viewed as a powerful rejection of this entire project (however circumspect he might have been in his own dealings with this state in practice). How far, finally, did these processes of normalization, whether diffuse or more overt, produce a rationalist, universalist, cosmopolitan consen- sus? Once again this criticism originated amongst conservatives and pre- romantics, especially in Germany, such as Hamann, Herder and Justus Möser. And once again there is a considerable degree of truth in the allega- tion (if it should be seen as an allegation). Despite the critical and appar- ently tolerant spirit of Enlightenment thought, it appeared to endorse, and consequently to teach, only certain modes of reasoning, whilst rejecting alternative forms of thought and expression. Nevertheless, more considera- tion needs to be given to the extent of this alleged closure and to how far it was historically contingent rather than inherent in Enlightenment thought. Many of its modern as well as contemporaneous detractors have ignored the degree to which the Enlightenment displayed curiosity about the vari- eties of human culture. In accusing the Enlightenment of indifference to local communities they have, for example, neglected the constantly repeated treatments of patriotism, which many eighteenth-century thinkers believed to be compatible with cosmopolitanism. Thus Basedow, in call- ing for the singing of patriotic songs in schools, insisted that these should contain no denigratory remarks about neighbouring nations (Basedow 1771: 407). Dr Johnson’s famous comment was not an attack on patriotism but on scoundrels. Montesquieu’s analysis of cultural particularity was admired by Enlightenment projectors and critics alike. Liberals such as Helvétius, Priestley and Macaulay were sufficiently concerned about the threat to plurality in the name of identity that they opposed state control over education (even though others vehemently advocated it). It is not, then, difference as such that the Enlightenment neglected – its advocates sought to accommodate it. Perhaps, however, they neglected certain ways of thinking about and defending difference. By means of edu- cation the Enlightenment ‘created’ and then defined humanity in terms which supposed certain procedures of assessment, deliberation and judge- ment, and these procedures were indeed disciplines which ruled as imper- missible other modes of argument. Hence the effrontery, as well as the sarcasm, of Burke’s proclamation that ‘in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices we cherish them … and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are preju- dices’ (Burke 1987: 76). Hence also why Novalis had declared that Burke had written a revolutionary book against the Revolution. The Enlightenment and Modernity46 Locke, John (1989) Some Thoughts Concerning Education, eds John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke), Oxford, Oxford University Press. Lovlie, L. (1992) ‘Postmodernism and Subjectivity’, in S. Kvale, ed., Psychology and Postmodernism, London, Sage. Macaulay, Catharine [Catharine Macaulay Graham] (1790) Letters on Education, With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, London. Madelaine, Philipon de la (1783) Vues patriotiques sur l’Education du Peuple, Lyon. McLaren, Peter (1995) Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era, London, Routledge. Mehta, Uday Singh (1992) The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke’s Political Thought, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Melton, James Van Horn (1988) Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni- versity Press. Neugebauer, Wolfgang (1985) Absolutistischer Staat und Schulwirklichkeit in Brandenburg-Preussen, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter. Oakeshott, Michael (1975) On Human Conduct, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Oestreich, Gerhard (1982) Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, eds Brigitta Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Oschlies, W. (1969) Die Arbeits- und Berufspädagogik August Hermann Frankes (1663–1727), Witten, Luther-Verlag. Parry, Geraint (1963) ‘“Enlightened Government” and its Critics in Eighteenth Century Germany’, Historical Journal, IV, pp. 178–92. Parry, Geraint (1995) ‘Thinking One’s Own Thoughts: Autonomy and the Citizen’, in R. Wokler, ed., Rousseau and Liberty, Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp. 99–120. Passmore, John (1965) ‘The Malleability of Man in Eighteenth Century Thought’, in E.R. Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press. Passmore, John (1970) The Perfectibility of Man, London, Duckworth. Priestley, Joseph (1780) Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education. More especially as it respects the Conduct of the Mind. To Which is Added, An Essay on a course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life, Cork. Priestley, Joseph (1993) Essay on the First Principles of Government, in P. Miller, ed., Priestley, Political Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Raeff, Marc (1983) The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800, New Haven, Yale University Press. Schouls, Peter A. (1992) Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Sonnenfels, Joseph von (1768) Grundsätze der Polizey, Handlung und Finanzwissenschaften, 2nd edn, Vienna. Tribe, Keith (1988) Governing Economy: the Reformation of German Economic Discourse 1750–1840, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tully, James (1993) ‘Governing Conduct: Locke on the Reform of Thought and Behaviour’, in James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Usher, Robin and Edwards, Richard (1994) Postmodernism and Education, London, Routlege. Education Can Do All 49 3 Kant: the Arch-enlightener Andrea T. Baumeister In the eyes of numerous contemporary critics modern society is in the midst of a profound moral and political crisis. Although writers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel1 differ in their precise diagnosis of the nature and extent of what is commonly refered to as the ‘malaise of modernity’,2 they concur in the belief that this crisis is the product of the flaws inherent in modern liberalism, which is widely regarded as the dominant intellectual tradition of our time. To these critics the agnosticism about the good life which underpins lib- eral pluralism is symptomatic of an impoverished and distorted conception of morality. Once questions regarding the good life are seen as incapable of resolution, morality is reduced to the question of right and subse- quently becomes primarily concerned with rules. As Taylor notes, on such a conception the task of moral theory is identified as defining the content of obliga- tion rather than the nature of the good life … this excludes both what it is good to do, even though we aren’t obliged … and also what it may be good (or even obligatory) to be or love.3 For MacIntyre this prioritization of the right over the good does not only characterize the philosophy of contemporary liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, but is indicative of modernity at large. As such, it lies at the very heart of the ‘malaise of modernity’.4 According to many critics of contemporary liberalism the marginaliza- tion of the good has given rise to a distorted picture of human agency, of man as detached from his environment, and has resulted in moral fragmen- tation and disarray. Thus, Taylor argues that the emphasis modern liberals place on individual choice and self-determination has made them blind to the important role of the wider community in the development of individ- ual identity. According to Taylor, this failure to acknowledge the signifi- cance of wider moral frameworks has produced an intellectual climate in which individuals are preoccupied with their own lives at the expense of a concern with and awareness of greater religious, political and historical issues which transcend the self.5 Given the close link that is commonly held to exist between contempo- rary liberalism and the ideas of the Enlightenment, it is not surprising to 50 find that for many critics the roots of this modern malaise are to be found in the Enlightenment. MacIntyre, for example, contends that the fragmen- tation and displacement of morality can be traced to ‘the Enlightenment’s systematic attempt to discover a rational justification for morality’.6 For MacIntyre the Enlightenment is characterized by two important develop- ments: the evolution of science and philosophy led to the rejection of Aristotle’s metaphysical biology, which in Aristotle’s work provides the background for his teleological conception of ethics. Furthermore, the increasing secularization of culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century encouraged a critique of both Protestant and Catholic theology and thus undermined the established Christian understanding of man’s goal or telos. According to MacIntyre, these developments culminated in the rejection by Enlightenment thinkers of the teleological view of human nature. In place of the Aristotelian conception, the philosophers of the Enlightenment attempted to formulate a purely rational justification of morality based simply on considerations of human nature as it happens to be. However, the men of the Enlightenment had inherited a conception of human nature and a set of moral injunctions which had been developed within the context of a teleological framework. Therefore, as the prevail- ing moral injunctions had originally been intended to transform man-as- he-is to man-as-he-could-be, there was an inevitable tension between the conception of nature and moral injunctions. Consequently, the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers to establish a rational link between the exist- ing conception of human nature and the prevailing notions of morality was bound to fail. For MacIntyre this doomed attempt to construct a ‘universe empty of telos’7 quite predictably gave rise to the moral fragmentation and disarray characteristic of the ‘malaise of modernity’. In this context, MacIntyre and Sandel regard Kant very much as the arch-villain. Thus, MacIntyre claims that: In Kant’s moral writings we have reached a point at which the notion that morality is anything other than the obedience to rules has almost, if not quite, disappeared from sight.8 For Sandel it is in Kant’s philosophy that we find the roots of the distorted picture of human agency which Sandel regards as characteristic of modern deontological liberalism: The [Kantian] concept of a subject given prior to and independent of its objects offers a foundation for the moral law that, unlike merely empiri- cal foundations, awaits neither teleology nor psychology. In this way, it powerfully completes the deontological vision. As the right is prior to the good, so the subject is prior to its ends.9 Kant: the Arch-enlightener 51 fundamental maxims which in principle can be adopted by all, Kant implores us to act in such a manner as ‘not to preclude the possibility of open-ended interaction and communication’.17 For Kant universalizability is vital if we are to hold on to at least the possibility of moral community. Only if we do not exclude others at the outset does community remain possible. Once we acknowledge this concern with the possibility of rational com- munity, Kant’s distinction between the public and private use of reason can be seen to be quite consistent. What characterizes Kant’s conception of private reason is that it is based upon the acceptance of some form of external authority. Thus, the clergyman, the tax official and the officer are by virtue of their post or office committed to accepting and implementing the policies and decisions of the organization of which they are a member. However, such a use of reason will always remain partial, since it will only be accessible to those who are prepared to accept the external author- ity upon which it is based. In the absence of widespread agreement, the private use of reason can therefore be highly divisive. By relying on exter- nal authority, private reason will always exclude those who cannot accept this authority.18 Public reason, on the other hand, is, according to Kant, aimed at the ‘entire reading public’. It does not invoke any external authority and should therefore in principle be accessible to all. By advocating the free use of public reason, Kant is arguing in favour of the kind of ‘open-ended interaction and communication’ which is essential if we are to safeguard the possibility of moral community. Therefore, in encouraging us to have the ‘courage to use our own understanding’19 Kant is urging us not to allow ourselves to be led by external authority. As O’Neill notes, if there is to be genuine communication we all have to speak in our own voice, since ‘otherwise understanding and agreement will be spurious, mere echoings of what the other or the many assert’.20 This emphasis on the possibility of moral community is further highlighted by Kant’s insistence that enlightenment is not merely an individual undertaking but constitutes a public endeavour. It is only once the entire public has emerged from its self-incurred immaturity that ‘the moral community of individuals of good will’ becomes a real possibility.21 Kant is therefore keenly aware of the need for moral community. Although, for Kant, enlightenment or the ‘courage to use our own under- standing’ is clearly synonymous with autonomy, by equating enlighten- ment with autonomy he does not wish to undermine the importance of moral community. Quite the contrary. While for current advocates of autonomy, being autonomous is tantamount to the choice of personal goals The Enlightenment and Modernity54 and life-styles, for Kant autonomy implies acting in accordance with the principle of universalizability. Given the link he establishes between uni- versalizability and moral community, being autonomous in Kantian terms means acting on the basis of principles which at least do not preclude the possibility of moral community. While this clearly falls short of full moral community, once fragmentation has taken place, it may well be the best we can hope for. However, although moral community clearly plays an important role in Kant’s thought, it undoubtedly is the case that his conception of commu- nity differs from that adopted by modern communitarians such as MacIntyre. While Kant sets out deliberately to build a moral community based upon rational principles, communitarians such as MacIntyre stress the extent to which community membership is a given rather than some- thing that is deliberately constructed or chosen. We are born into commu- nities and our very identity is shaped by our interactions with others. Whereas Kant urges us to safeguard the possibility of moral community by deliberately adopting principles which are universalizable, MacIntyre argues that in a well-ordered community members execute their tasks without reflection. For MacIntyre, choices in a well-ordered community are akin to moves in a game with well-defined rules.22 While there may be disagreements in such a community, these are always limited and are con- tained within an agreed framework. However, whereas MacIntyre suggests that it is the loss of community in this unreflective sense which character- izes modernity, it is questionable whether there ever has been a form of life in which social roles structure action to such an extent that no reflec- tion is required. As Martha Nussbaum notes, although MacIntyre deeply admires the ancient Greek polis, in the Greek polis nothing seems to have happened without an argument … The speeches in Thucydides … show, whether historical or not, the sort of extended and frequently very abstract reflection that was taken to be the sort of thing political actors would say.23 For Nussbaum this lack of agreement is underlined by Aristotle’s discus- sion of eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics.24 There Aristotle argues that, although all human beings strive towards eudaimonia, there is no agreement as to what constitutes eudaimonia or the good life. Further- more, by no means all communitarians share MacIntyre’s nostalgia. On the contrary. The stress writers such as Taylor and Sandel place on the need to build new communities based on open participation, dialogue and non-discrimination, appears to echo Kant’s aim to deliberately construct a new moral community. Kant: the Arch-enlightener 55 Once Kant’s interest in the possibility of moral community is seen as a response to fragmentation, his concerns are not dissimilar to those which preoccupy contemporary critics of modernity. MacIntyre, for example, recognizes that the establishment of community requires not only an emphasis on those qualities which contribute to the realization of the com- mon good or goods, but also an awareness of which type of actions are liable to ‘destroy the bonds of community in such a way as to render the doing or achieving of good impossible in some respect at least for some time.’25 Given that these latter conditions have to be met before a viable community can be established, Kant’s emphasis on the preconditions for community is not surprising. If we no longer have a shared conception of human nature and its telos, if revealed religion and metaphysics have lost their authority, we first of all have to re-establish the conditions which make genuine communication and cooperation possible. In contemporary discourse autonomy has become synonymous with agnosticism about the good for men and as such may well undermine the possibility of moral community. Therefore, the worries of critics like MacIntyre may be well placed as far as contemporary liberalism is con- cerned. However, to equate this contemporary conception of autonomy with Kant’s notion of moral autonomy is to misconceive Kant’s project. THE ‘COURAGE TO KNOW’ AND MORAL VIRTUE Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding.26 In his reflections upon Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault suggests that Kant’s definition of enlightenment as ‘the courage to know’ indicates that for Kant enlightenment is both ‘a process in which men par- ticipate collectively and an act of courage to be accomplished person- ally’.27 In urging us to have ‘the courage to know’ Kant is asking us to develop a particular type of moral character which enables us to be inde- pendent of external authority. As I suggested earlier, for Kant, it is only under these circumstances that the kind of genuine communication vital to the possibility of moral community is feasible. Yet, the idea that enlightenment may involve the development of a par- ticular type of character may seem at first rather strange. After all, what characterizes modernity, according to critics such as MacIntyre and Taylor, is the failure to address questions of moral character or virtue. Furthermore, for many critics the root of this neglect of virtue can be found in the philosophy of Kant. For Kant morality is synonymous with obedience to moral law and this suggest a preoccupation with rules rather The Enlightenment and Modernity56 This emphasis on moral character is arguably reminiscent of an Aristotelian ethics, and indeed on Patrick Riley’s35 reading Kant retains important elements of an Aristotelian approach. While Kant clearly rejects Aristotle’s reading of nature and the Aristotelian conception of the highest good, he does agree with Aristotle that ‘there is indeed something “for whose sake everything else is” and that those who neglect final causality “eliminate the Good without knowing it”’.36 As Barbara Herman37 notes, for Kant, just as for Aristotle, the subject matter of ethics is the good and the aim of ethical inquiry is to identify the unconditional good or final end. For Kant the highest good consists in respect for persons. This provides good will with an objective end that is the source of the categorical imper- ative. Since, just like Aristotle, Kant is keen ‘to avoid an infinite regress in which nothing is more than a means’,38 he retains the Aristotelian notion of final ends. For Kant, not only is the teleological standpoint a necessary supposition with regard to nature; in relation to morality we actually know reason-ordained ends. Thus, while contemporary critics such as Sandel and MacIntyre attempt to draw a clear distinction between teleology and deontology – with Kant as the defining exemplar of the latter – Kant’s approach does not readily lend itself to such a classification. In their attempt to read Kant’s philosophy in strictly deontological terms, Sandel and MacIntyre distort his enterprise by ignoring the teleological strand in his work. Yet, as Riley quite rightly notes, this strand is a crucial part of Kantian morality: Kant says in the Grundlegung that we ought to subordinate relative ends or purposes to respect for rational beings as objective ends; he says in the Tugendlehre that morality would be destroyed if there were no objective ends for a … ‘good will’ to will; he insists in Religion within the limits that reason ‘proposes’ objective ends (that is respect for persons) that we ‘ought to have’. And the whole Critique of Judgment is devoted to finding ‘bridges’ between the realms of Kantianism by discovering (or rather reading in) telos everywhere.39 The extent to which Kant’s philosophy contains teleological as well as deontological elements is further underlined by his approach to freedom. Thus, the concern with moral character, so apparent in Kant’s ‘Lectures on Ethics’, also informs his discussion of freedom. THE ‘FREEDOM OF PERSONALITY’ Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey! This reveals to us a strange and unexpected pattern in human affairs … Kant: the Arch-enlightener 59 A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intel- lectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent.40 Kant’s emphasis in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ on intellectual rather than civil freedom is quite typical of his neglect of civil freedom which has puzzled and at times appalled both his admirers and his critics and has led to the suggestion that there is a marked discontinuity between Kant’s criti- cal and political writings.41 However, if Kant’s conception of freedom is seen within the context of a regard for virtue, his discussion of freedom is far from inconsistent. From Socrates and Plato onwards man has been seen to be fundamen- tally affected not only by the power of what he can do, but also by the nature of what he likes to do. Thus, ‘freedom of personality’ – the self- mastery which enables an individual to make her will what she truly wishes it to be – has long been seen as a vital aspect of freedom.42 D.E. Cooper43 refers to this capacity to resist one’s own material whims and desires and to lead a life according to rational principles as ‘Promethean’ freedom. Cooper’s conception of Promethean freedom is characterized by the following three elements, all of which, I will argue, have a place in the Kantian account of freedom. Firstly, Prometheans emphasize that only desires which are directed towards our own thoughts, attitudes and the formulation of our own mind are desires which are truly under our control and cannot be thwarted by outside factors. Kant’s understanding of the free will as independent of all material grounds of determination can be seen as an expression of this notion. In line with Promethean freedom it equates freedom with inner- directedness rather than the exercise of control over material possessions. Secondly, Promethean freedom stresses the need for self-discipline in the sense of submitting ourselves to a system of order we have chosen our- selves. The emphasis here is on freedom as the mastery of our whims, caprices and passions. Furthermore, such a self-chosen system provides a structure for choice and thus gives us the means for effective and signifi- cant choices. Without such a system we would find ourselves easily disori- entated in a world of great diversity, and stranded between choices. Self-discipline is therefore the key to developing our moral character. This notion of a structure for choice finds expression in the Kantian idea of autonomy as self-imposed law. The categorical imperative furnishes us with a system and acts as a check on our immediate inclinations and desires by enabling us to reflect critically upon them. It therefore provides The Enlightenment and Modernity60 us with a basis to assess and evaluate the options available to us. Finally, Prometheans are preoccupied with the idea of acting rationally. In this context Pometheans are concerned with consistency and the absence of compulsiveness. The central role rationality plays in Kant’s conception of moral autonomy need hardly be emphasized. The categorical imperative ensures that all fundamental principles of action are internally consistent, and checks compulsive behaviour. As this Promethean characterization of Kant’s conception of freedom suggests, for Kant freedom is first and foremost a quality internal to the individual, fostered by education, culture and above all personal endeavour. Freedom here become a question of self-control and self-development. Kant’s notion of freedom focuses on how man is, his character and virtues. Consequently, on a Promethean reading Kant’s lack of interest in ques- tions of civil freedom is no longer puzzling,44 but can be perceived as the logical outcome of his conception of freedom. His emphasis in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ on intellectual rather than civil freedom reflects the Promethean preoccupation with the development of one’s character through education. Man’s virtue or moral character therefore plays a central role in Kant’s conception of morality. However, while so far I have focused exclusively on the role virtue plays in Kant’s philosophy, I do not wish to suggest that his philosophy should be regarded as pure virtue ethics. His emphasis on morality as obedience to moral law and his conception of ‘legality’ as the outward conformity of an action to the moral law suggest that rules and conformity to them play an important role in his ethics. With regard to the actions of others we will frequently be in a position where we can do no more than assess their ‘legality’ or outward conformity to moral law. However, for Kant this does not imply that as actors we have no duty to cultivate the virtues. Rather than being easily characterized in terms of either ‘virtue’ or ‘right’, Kantian ethics offers a rich and complex concep- tion of morality which allows us to question both an agent’s acts and his character. Again, this can be seen as indicative of the extent to which his philosophy draws upon both teleological and deontological elements. KANT’S ENLIGHTENMENT To many critics the dominant contemporary conception of morality, with its emphasis on the prioritization of the right and obedience to rules, is deeply impoverished. While within the confines of this paper I am not in a position to provide a systematic assessment of the strength of this Kant: the Arch-enlightener 61 23. M. Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 5, 1, 1997, p. 2. 24. M. Nussbaum, ‘Recoiling from Reason’, The New York Review of Books, 7 Dec. 1989, pp. 36–41. 25. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 151. 26. Kant, Political Writings, p. 54. 27. M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment’, in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 35. 28. R. Louden, ‘Kant’s Virtue Ethics’, Philosophy, 61, 1968. 29. O’Neill, Constructions of Reason, p. 151. 30. Ibid., p. 152. 31. Louden, ‘Kant’s Virtue Ethics’, p. 485, discusses Philippa Foot’s distinction between acts of charity based on a sense of duty and charity as something we truly want. 32. S. Mendus, ‘The Practical and the Pathological’, The Journal of Value Inquiry, 19, 1985, pp. 235–43. 33. B. Herman, ‘Integrity and Impartiality’, The Monist, 66, 2, pp. 233–48. 34. In his Lectures on Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1963) Kant also argues that if we love others from obligation we will, over time, develop a taste for it. Consequently, love from obligation can become love from incli- nation. Kant therefore appears to propose a complex two-way relationship between pathological and practical love in which the two reinforce one another. 35. P. Riley, ‘The Elements of Kant’s Practical Philosophy’, in R. Beiner and W.J. Booth, Kant and Political Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). 36. Ibid., p. 23. 37. B. Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 38. Riley, ‘Elements’, p. 23. 39. Ibid., p. 28. Riley is by no means the only Kantian scholar to suggest that the deontological/teleological distinction is not helpful in analysing Kant’s philosophy. Barbara Herman makes a similar observation in The Practice of Moral Judgement. 40. Kant, Political Writings, p. 59. 41. Classical examples of the view that there are serious discontinuities between Kant’s political and ethical writings include R. Aries, History of Political Thought in Germany 1789–1815 (London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, 1965) and M.R. Cohen, ‘A Critique of Kant’s Philosophy of Law’, in G.T. Whitney, ed., The Heritage of Kant (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962). 42. B. Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan, 1958). 43. D.E. Cooper, ‘The Free Man’, in A.P. Griffiths, ed., Of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 44. This is not to suggest that advocates of Promethean freedom are prepared to accept all possible arrangements. For example, Prometheans are not committed to condoning tyranny and despotism. Since careful reason-based reflection is central to Promethean freedom, regimes which are based on The Enlightenment and Modernity64 blind arbitrary terror are alien to a Promethean framework. Furthermore, Prometheans do not have to deny the value of a certain minimum amount of civil freedom. Given that the notion of self-improvement and self-control are central to Promethean freedom, a society which completely regulates its members’ behaviour in all spheres of life would simply not be suited to the development of such freedom. Kant: the Arch-enlightener 65 4 Kant, Property and the General Will Hillel Steiner For Kant, a particular practical judgement – ‘that I shall visit Smith, who is ill in the Manchester Royal Infirmary, on Monday evening’ – is a judge- ment which I ought to execute if it is a judgement of a kind which I will to be executed by others and by myself on other occasions. The first formulation of the Categorical Imperative (CI1) reads: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.1 The import of the word ‘can’ in this formulation is notoriously ambiguous, and its ambiguity is not diminished by Kant’s ensuing exploration of CI1’s implications. Does it refer to logical or only to psychological possibility? Kant’s discussion of suicide, beneficence, false promising and cultivating one’s talents, as practices variously proscribed or required by CI1, is couched in the coercive language of logical necessity and the avoidance of inconsistency. But the substance of his argument does not bear out his claim that, say, false promising is an instance of contradictory willing. At best, he suc- ceeds in showing only that, since promise-breaking is a practice which (as a matter of empirical fact) is unlikely to be indefinitely sustainable, anyone who counts on it as a permanent source of income would be rather unwise. And while it is certainly true that neither lack of wisdom nor lack of con- sistency is an especially desirable influence on the formation of practical judgements, it is equally clear that they constitute distinctly different kinds of deficiency. Here as elsewhere in his moral and political philosophy, we are confronted with the unedifying spectacle of Kant straining to erect a substantive principle into a necessary truth – in this case, by illicitly deriv- ing it from the purely formal criterion registered in CI1. 2 Contrary to what is maintained by many Kant scholars, this same rela- tion of non-implication also holds between CI1 and the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative (CI2). The second formulation reads: Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.3 66 populated with such possibilities of normative conflict, assigning prece- dence to a non-negatable principle, as a guide to practical and political choice, must be deemed to be something more than an arbitrary imposition of merely one amongst a number of competing principles, each clamour- ing for enforcement over the rest. Placeholders for negatable principles, when stopped in their tracks by the people from CI2, cannot so easily dis- miss their obstructors – as they can one another – with remarks like ‘Well, that’s just your value judgement which I don’t happen to share.’ For while it is true that subscription to CI2 is not logically compulsory, subscription to not-CI2 is logically impossible, which is more than can be claimed for any other principle. What, then, does CI2 tell us to do? In what circumstances would we be prudent to look out for the Kantian police? Every day, and in almost every way, we are engaged in treating others as means to our own ends. Why are we not arrested? Some people answer: ‘Because Kant is not the Director of Public Prosecutions.’ I think this is not a bad answer though, as we shall see, not perhaps the best answer to this question. For the Office of CI2 enjoins us only to refrain from treating one another merely as means to our own ends. Treating one another partly but not wholly, as such means is not an indictable offence within the terms of the statute. Now, how can we do this? How can we ensure that, in our various actions as they affect others, there is always at least some exculpating fragment which rescues our apparently otherwise unbridled pursuit of our own ends from the charge of violating CI2, good intentions being insufficient for this purpose? The answer to this question is to be found in Kant’s Universal Principle of Justice (UPJ): Every action is just [right] that in itself or in its maxim is such that the freedom of the will of each can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law.7 For this principle is logically implied by CI2. How? How does conforming our conduct to UPJ keep us from treating others merely as means to our ends? The means to our ends are clearly many and various, reflecting the multifariousness of those ends themselves. But among these diverse means, there is one which is common to all ends and a necessary condition of their achievement. This is what Kant calls ‘external’ or ‘outer freedom’ and what we call ‘negative liberty’. Individuals are necessarily debarred from achieving an end if their overt physical behaviour in pursuit of it is obstructed by others. Now it is plain that many persons, in pursuit of their ends, perform actions which have the mediate or immediate effect of obstructing others in the pursuit of their ends. Are those others supererogatorily self-denying Kant, Property and the General Will 69 if they fail to get on the phone to the Kantian police? Hobbes says ‘yes’. But Kant says ‘not necessarily’. For although the obstructors are treating the others as means – by denying them what is necessary to attain their ends in order to achieve their own ends – it is by no means clear that obstructing the obstructors will accomplish anything more than a reverse form of oppression, subordinating their ends to those of their putative vic- tims. Somewhere in between these competing ends, there is a distribution of negative liberty which permits each person to pursue at least some ends and which prohibits each person from pursuing some ends. By leaving this distribution undisturbed, an otherwise entirely self-regarding individual escapes the charge of treating others merely as means. What is this distribution? What sort of constraint on conduct is implied in the UPJ requirement that acts must be such as to allow the freedom of each to coexist with the freedom of all according to a universal law? Up to what point is obstructing others permissible, and beyond what point should obstructors be met with obstruction? The answers to these ques- tions fall within the province of the concept of justice (Recht), and are quite distinct from the concerns of virtue (Tugend) as such. For whereas the latter pertain to the content of the will – to intentions – and are thus governed by CI1, the concept of justice does not take into consideration the matter [con- tent] of the will, that is, the end that a person intends to accomplish by means of the object that he wills … Instead, in applying the concept of justice we take into consideration only the form of the relationship between the wills insofar as they are regarded as free, and whether the action of one of them can be conjoined with the freedom of the other in accordance with a universal law … For anyone can still be free even though I am quite indifferent to his freedom or even though I might wish in my heart to infringe on his freedom, as long as I do not through an external action violate his freedom.8 This condition of strict justice is also described by Kant as one permitting the ‘possibility of the conjunction of universal reciprocal coercion with the freedom of everyone’.9 Elements of these descriptions are not lacking in opacity. And it will, perhaps, save us from some painful, protracted and semi-parenthetical exegesis at this point if we simply take it as read that what UPJ prescribes is that we allow the same liberty to others as we enjoy ourselves and, thus, that any further enforced restrictions on an indi- vidual’s liberty must be ones which she has freely incurred.10 Justice enjoins equal (original) liberty and a person who engrosses more liberty than she allows to others thereby violates UPJ, and CI2 which implies it. The Enlightenment and Modernity70 So justice furnishes each will with its own private sphere, its own field of action within whose limits it may roam freely.11 Kantian police hover vigilantly around the perimeters of these fields and, should a will commit an act of trespass – an unjustly coercive act – the constabulary are autho- rized, indeed obligated, to reciprocate that coercion. How are these perimeters defined? How are they to be conceived? In what do individu- als’ rights to outer or external or negative liberty consist? For Kant, the term ‘right’ has its primary reference within the context of property, where one person’s right to an object is a limitation on the moral title of others to use that object, or an obligation on their part to refrain from using it.12 Law considered as a system of laws can be divided into natural Law, which rests on nothing but a priori principles, and positive (statutory) Law, which proceeds from the Will of a legislator … The first of these is called private Law; the second, public Law. The state of nature is not opposed and contrasted to the state of society, but to the civil society, for within a state of nature there can indeed be a society, but there can be no civil society (that guarantees property through public law). Therefore, Law in the state of nature is called private Law … jurispru- dence [is essentially concerned] to know exactly (with mathematical precision) what the property of everyone is.13 Each person’s innate right to freedom – to a freedom consistent with the same freedom for others – is a right to acquire property rights. The juridical postulate of practical reason [asserts that] it is possible to have any and every external object of my will as my property … it is an a priori assumption of practical reason that any and every object of my will be viewed and treated as something that has the objective possibil- ity of being yours or mine.14 All rights entail correlative obligations – obligations which, unlike purely ethical duties, are enforcible. That is, any right implies a restriction, not only on what persons (other than the right-holder) may permissibly do, but also on their liberty. Each person’s inherent right to freedom immediately confers upon him a right to the exclusive possession of his own person. And this exclusive possession of one’s person has somehow to be extended to objects of choice. The mere possibility of an external mine and thine is insufficient, as Gregor notes, to distinguish what is mine from what is thine. In order to apply the notion of intelligible possession to objects of experience – in order, that is to say, to acquire a right to any particular Kant, Property and the General Will 71 possession … The conception of such an original, common Possession of things is not derived from experience, nor is it dependent on condi- tions of time, as is the case with the imaginary and indemonstrable fic- tion of a primaeval Community of possession in actual history. Hence it is a practical conception of Reason.20 Original common possession of things is indeed a necessary presupposi- tion, a ‘practical conception of reason’. And it is so for precisely the reason Kant offers. My wish, that you not drive a tank across the field I am cultivating, is logically insufficient to imply an obligation on you so to forbear. Nor is this deficiency entirely made good by the premise that you in fact consented to such forbearance. For one person’s actual consent can- not of itself create a right in another nor, therefore, a correlative obligation in the first.21 You may well be subject to another obligation which, contin- gently, requires you not to forbear in this respect. For example, you may be obligated to return the tank to its owner as quickly as, and hence by the most direct route, possible: namely, across the field. In such a case, you cannot (in Kant’s phrase) ‘give your rational consent to my limitation of your freedom’. The conditions necessary and sufficient to encumber you – and every- one else – with an obligation to me not to use this field are: (i) that I wish all of you not to use it; (ii) that all of you have consented not to use it; and (iii) that, prior to your so consenting, none of you was obligated either to use it or not to use it. In short, my acquisition of the right to exclusive pos- session of the field presupposes that, prior to it, all of us were in joint pos- session of the field – possession which each of you transferred to me by consent. Anyone who did not so consent is not subject to this obligation of forbearance. And the same holds true for every other particular instance of private acquisition. But here we encounter a most profound problem. The General Will – universal consent – is a necessary presupposition of private property rights. The General Will is constitutive of the rightful spheres of action inhabited by private wills. Kantian police patrol the perimeters of these spheres, ever alert to the danger that some persons may default on their contractual undertakings and attempt a trespass. Occasionally, indeed fre- quently, an unlucky poacher is apprehended and arraigned before a Kantian magistrate who proceeds to berate him severely for his derelic- tion. In the face of this crushing chastisement, and of the utterly incontro- vertible evidence of his transgression supplied by the police, one might be inclined to think that the poacher would hardly have the effrontery to enter a plea of ‘not guilty’. Yet, shockingly, he does just that, as do many others The Enlightenment and Modernity74 in similar circumstances. And what is even more shocking is that a very large proportion of them are acquitted. Even citizens who entertain a fairly relaxed concern for the maintenance of law and order are scandalized, and demand to know how this is possible. The answer, of course, is that the miscreant (who is not entirely lacking in common sense) has the sagacity to hire the services of a Kantian lawyer in his defence. Waiving his right of cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses, allowing fact after damning fact to pile up uncontested against his client, the lawyer bides his time. Finally, when his turn comes, he astonishes the court by announcing that he intends to call only one witness to testify in behalf of the defence. And the court is still further amazed when the lawyer reveals that his sole witness is to be none other than the widely respected Mr X, who occupies the august position of Secretary to the General Will. Dispensing with all formalities and preliminary niceties, the lawyer opens his examination by requesting Mr X to outline the genealogy of the title to the property right which his client is alleged to have violated. This Mr X does, with all the proficiency and meticulousness that have come to be expected of him. And he concludes his chronicle with a statement of the precise time and date of the General Will’s decision to create the par- ticular rights from which the property title in question devolved through a series of uncoerced acts of choice. Having thus convincingly validated the violated title – and not, in any case, being overly sympathetic to his inter- rogator’s brief – the Secretary sits back in his chair, and beams. The judge beams. The police beam. Law-abiding citizens everywhere beam. Undaunted, the lawyer proceeds to his next question. He asks Mr X to present the names of those persons who participated in the making of the aforementioned decision of the General Will. The Secretary rifles through his voluminous collection of minute-books, extracts the one covering the relevant period, and begins the onerous process of reading out the names of everyone who was a member of the society at that time. When at last he has finished, the lawyer observes that his client’s name does not appear to have been mentioned. Unflappable, and scrupulously concerned that jus- tice not only be done but be seen to be done, Mr X again consults his records and even obtains permission to call his office to enquire as to the cause of the omission. But it seems that there has been no omission – a fact which is rather decisively confirmed when the lawyer points out that the General Will decision in question was made over two hundred years ago, whereas his client is a mere stripling of twenty-one. Not content with this demonstration that his client has incurred no obligation to forbear from using the property he is charged with violating, Kant, Property and the General Will 75 the lawyer decides to press his argument a bit further. (Whether, in so doing, he is motivated by an unquenchable desire for justice – or only by an acute sense of irritation with the endless succession of indictments which have no foundation in any juridical postulate of practical reason – is difficult to discern in his outward expression.) He informs the court that he wishes to refer it, and the Secretary, to The Book of Rules itself – the sacred text which sets out in a systematic form all of the most fundamental principles of the legal order, and which is otherwise entitled The Philosophy of Law by Immanuel Kant. And he particularly draws their attention to the passage (quoted above) where the author insists that the necessary presupposition of original common possession is not an histori- cal claim and is not one dependent on conditions of time.22 ‘This can only mean,’ the lawyer suggests, administering the coup de grace, ‘that the juridical validity of original common possession, not being primaeval, must be timeless. My client, and everyone else who has reached or will reach the age of legal responsibility after the then General Will made the decision which issued in the property right he is improperly alleged to have violated, can be subject to no obligation to respect it unless he and they have incurred one under the same necessary and sufficient con- ditions that applied to their predecessors’ obligations. If these conditions are satisfied, he is obligated. So long as they are not, he is not. Any partic- ular property right is not a thing, a substance, an elementary particle, which enjoys an existence independent of human will. Such a right is simply the sum of all the obligations of forbearance undertaken by others in respect of the use of the object of that right. And these obligations must be ones which are undertaken, rather than merely imposed – they must be contrac- tual – if they are to be consistent with the dictates of UPJ. Each person’s innate right to a freedom similar to that of others implies that no person is subject to any such enforcible obligation to which he has not consented. ‘The Bureau of First Occupancies, the Usucapion Commission and the Office of Testamentary Dispositions are not independent agencies empow- ered to issue licences to various acts of acquisition according to their own rules. Rather they are just so many conventionally established subdivisions within the Ministry of UPJ and are answerable to, and may be overruled by, its director. No doubt these agencies should be allowed some measure of autonomy if considerable social inefficiency is to be avoided. But social efficiency is not the chief concern of the Ministry which is vested, in the first instance, with the task of protecting each person’s right to equal free- dom. When the demands of expediency collide with those of justice, it is the Ministry’s solemn duty – and the court’s – to accord priority to the latter. To do otherwise is to risk receiving a dismissal notice from the Prime Minister’s office (Office of CI2). And that is why, in this society, many The Enlightenment and Modernity76 is compatible with, indeed forms the basis of, the demands of justice; cf. ‘Utilitarianism’, ch. V. Whether the liability of owners to be divested – when they have been possessorily inactive for a long period of time due to no fault of their own – makes ownership less uncertain or more so, is itself a purely empirical question. 19. Ibid., p. 137. On this particular bit of casuistry, it need only be remarked that it fails in its attempt to provide an a priori deducible construction of the standard practice of bequest. For if Titius acquires such a ‘special Right’, Caius is thereby disabled from altering his testamentary disposition. Cf. Steiner, ch. 7 (C). 20. Ibid., pp. 86, 88; see also pp. 69–70, 81–2, 89–90, 94–6. 21. As so many newly-landed immigrants in America discovered to their cost, when confidence tricksters ‘sold’ the Brooklyn Bridge to one after another of them at an extremely reasonable price. 22. The set of private property rights derivable from the premiss of original common possession – understood as ‘a [trans-generationally valid] practical conception of reason’ – is explored in Steiner, chs 7 and 8, where its cosmopolitan distributive implications are also displayed; see also my ‘Territorial Justice’, in National Rights, International Obligations, eds Simon Caney, David George, Peter Jones, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), and Justice Among Nations (forthcoming). 23. This essay has benefited from the comments of Katrin Flikschuh, who still disagrees with much of it. Kant, Property and the General Will 79 5 Can Enlightenment Morality be Justified Teleologically? Ian Carter In this article I aim to provide a teleological defence of some basic Enlightenment principles of political morality. More precisely, I want to show that these principles can be defended on teleological grounds in so far as teleological justifications of moral principles are valid at all. My adversary in this debate is Alasdair MacIntyre, whose well-known claim that the Enlightenment Project ‘had to fail’ is largely based on a negative answer to the question that forms my title.1 My critique of MacIntyre will make some use of textual evidence, taken, above all, from Condorcet, and to a lesser extent from Kant and Rousseau. However, my general aim is to provide a plausible analysis and reconstruction of what MacIntyre calls the ‘Enlightenment Project’, rather than an accurate historical account of it. According to MacIntyre, the rational justification of a moral position depends on the use of functional concepts, where a functional concept implicitly refers to a particular good to be aimed at. For example, a func- tional concept of a farmer tells us what a good farmer does and thus what someone who calls himself a farmer ought to aim to do. So too, a func- tional concept of man tells us what a good man does and thus what some- one who sees himself as a man ought to aim to do.2 The use of functional concepts in moral discourse is, in MacIntyre’s view, what allows thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition to treat moral claims as factual and to engage in fruitful, rational discussions about their validity. Enlightenment thinkers, who rejected the idea of man as having a specific and essential function or purpose, ruled out any rational basis for the discussion of moral precepts. They noticed that man did not always follow what they took to be the correct moral precepts, and thus that ‘man-as-he-is’ was not identical to ‘man-as-he-ought-to-be’. However, their notion of man-as-he- ought-to-be was not informed by an idea of man’s telos, as it was in the tradition from which they had inherited their moral precepts, but was sim- ply defined by the moral precepts. And so these thinkers lacked a basis on which to engage in rational discussions about the moral precepts them- selves. Only an Aristotelian-style teleological justification could supply 80 such a basis, and that was exactly what the Enlightenment thinkers had ruled out. Therefore, once such a justification was ruled out, the Enlightenment Project was doomed to failure. The argumentative strategy of this article is above all a defensive one. I aim to show that the Enlightenment Project, as MacIntyre defines it, cannot be seen to ‘fail’ any more than can its counterpart ‘Aristotelian Project’. In other words, I shall concede to MacIntyre, for the sake of argu- ment, that the rational justification of moral principles depends on appeal to a human telos or human tele, and shall argue that any objections that can be levelled in this connection against the Enlightenment can also be levelled against Aristotle. To the extent that Aristotle succeeded in just- ifying moral principles teleologically, Enlightenment philosophers too can succeed. I leave aside entirely the question of whether non-teleological justifications of Enlightened moral principles are available, and whether, if so, they are more convincing. They may well be both of these things. My aim here, however, is to show that even if they are not, then the Enlightenment philosopher winds up no worse off than the Aristotelian in terms of the possession of justificatory tools. My aim, in this sense, is to confront MacIntyre on his own territory. My point of departure will be the notions of perfectibility and progress which, crucially, MacIntyre leaves out of his account of Enlightenment thinking (section 1). I shall then go on to show how these notions can ground a broadly liberal commitment to freedom and equality (section 2). The links I shall make between perfectibility and freedom and equality will depend on a number of empirical assumptions. These assumptions are open to challenge, and I shall offer no proof here of their validity. My aim is not to provide true empirical claims as such, but simply to show that the structure of an argument among Enlightenment philosophers about the validity of moral principles can be the same as that of an argument among Aristotelian philosophers. 1 PERFECTIBILITY AND PROGRESS It cannot be denied that human perfectibility plays an important role in Enlightenment thought. The idea is central to Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind,3 as it is to Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.4 Kant does not use the term ‘perfectibility’, but he does nevertheless talk of the progres- sive ‘perfection’ of man through ‘the development of his faculties’. As Morris Ginsberg says, the ‘moralization and rationalization of man’ was Justifying Enlightenment Morality 81