German Journeys Part 24: Enlightenment, Habermas, and the European Union
Last in the series! German Journeys is based on a true story. Featuring as persona Alec in this series, the author writes about their cultural exploration of Germany as a narrative based on true events
by Peter Morris
03-03-2024 13:00
in Short story Sunday
Image credit: hyotographics/Shutterstock.com
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23
03-03-2024 13:00
in Short story Sunday
Image credit: hyotographics/Shutterstock.com
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23
Berlin December 1784
“Enlightenment,” wrote the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in that month’s edition of the Berlin Monthly “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.
“This immaturity,” he continued, “is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore ‘Sapere aude!’ Have the courage to use your own understanding!”
Alec, of course, was not in Berlin to read Kant’s famous essay when it appeared. The dateline at the top of this final Part in the German Journeys series is not a mistake but the date of publication of Kant’s winning entry in a competition in the magazine to define enlightenment. Runner up was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of Felix.
It was in the summer of 2018 that Alec studied Kant’s essay at Berlin Free University as part of a course on “German Philosophy: Kant to Habermas,” already discussed in Part 22 in relation to the philosopher Hegel.
The more Alec reads and re-reads Kant’s essay, the more relevant it becomes to modern life. Laziness and cowardice, says the philosopher, are the reasons why so many people remain immature for life and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians, guiding their thoughts and actions. People in authority like government ministers, military officers and priests train ordinary citizens as if they were domestic animals, afraid to act or think on their own initiative.
Today’s guardians still include ministers and politicians, but now include mass and social media, celebrities, and so-called influencers as well. It’s so much easier, Kant argued, to be lulled into conforming to the views of such people than to think independently. The only way out of this immature dependence on others, he says, is for people to make public use of their reason.
While he conceded that people must follow lawful instructions at work, and pay their taxes, he argued that as private citizens they should challenge rather than conform. It is clear from his essay that he would have been in favour of peaceful protests.
Ultimately, Kant was an optimist: “Once the germ on which nature has lavished most care – man’s inclination and vocation to think freely – has developed within this hard shell [the discipline necessary for a secure society] it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people, who thus gradually become increasingly able to act for themselves. Eventually it even influences the principles of governments, which find that they can themselves profit by treating man, who is more than a machine, in a manner appropriate to his dignity.”
Alec found himself in sympathy with Kant’s definition of enlightenment as the courage to think for oneself and encouraged that in western countries at least there are many people who are willing to protest and campaign.
But looking around Britain and the world he was far from certain that in more than 200 years since Kant’s famous essay humanity at large had freed itself from those who set themselves up as its guardians, particularly in the mainstream and social media, and especially doubtful that governments in many nations had advanced much, if at all towards treating their people with dignity.
“Enlightenment,” wrote the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in that month’s edition of the Berlin Monthly “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.
“This immaturity,” he continued, “is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore ‘Sapere aude!’ Have the courage to use your own understanding!”
Alec, of course, was not in Berlin to read Kant’s famous essay when it appeared. The dateline at the top of this final Part in the German Journeys series is not a mistake but the date of publication of Kant’s winning entry in a competition in the magazine to define enlightenment. Runner up was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of Felix.
It was in the summer of 2018 that Alec studied Kant’s essay at Berlin Free University as part of a course on “German Philosophy: Kant to Habermas,” already discussed in Part 22 in relation to the philosopher Hegel.
The more Alec reads and re-reads Kant’s essay, the more relevant it becomes to modern life. Laziness and cowardice, says the philosopher, are the reasons why so many people remain immature for life and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians, guiding their thoughts and actions. People in authority like government ministers, military officers and priests train ordinary citizens as if they were domestic animals, afraid to act or think on their own initiative.
Today’s guardians still include ministers and politicians, but now include mass and social media, celebrities, and so-called influencers as well. It’s so much easier, Kant argued, to be lulled into conforming to the views of such people than to think independently. The only way out of this immature dependence on others, he says, is for people to make public use of their reason.
While he conceded that people must follow lawful instructions at work, and pay their taxes, he argued that as private citizens they should challenge rather than conform. It is clear from his essay that he would have been in favour of peaceful protests.
Ultimately, Kant was an optimist: “Once the germ on which nature has lavished most care – man’s inclination and vocation to think freely – has developed within this hard shell [the discipline necessary for a secure society] it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people, who thus gradually become increasingly able to act for themselves. Eventually it even influences the principles of governments, which find that they can themselves profit by treating man, who is more than a machine, in a manner appropriate to his dignity.”
Alec found himself in sympathy with Kant’s definition of enlightenment as the courage to think for oneself and encouraged that in western countries at least there are many people who are willing to protest and campaign.
But looking around Britain and the world he was far from certain that in more than 200 years since Kant’s famous essay humanity at large had freed itself from those who set themselves up as its guardians, particularly in the mainstream and social media, and especially doubtful that governments in many nations had advanced much, if at all towards treating their people with dignity.
Habermas and the European Union
2010
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas brings this series of 24 reminiscences of travels and studies in Germany full circle with a discussion of the subject with which it started: the European Union (EU). The series started as a contribution to efforts to persuade the British Government to make it easier for school exchanges with Europe to take place. Such exchanges can have lifelong educational, cultural, and horizon-broadening benefits, as Alec hopes his own experiences have demonstrated. But exchanges have fallen off drastically since Brexit.
Habermas (born 1929) is perhaps Europe’s foremost public intellectual, applying philosophy to public policy. He is an opponent of populism and nationalism and a critical friend of the EU. But as he explained in a book published in at the time of the world financial crisis 2010, “The Crisis of the European Union: A Response” *, he wants to go much further than a more closely integrated and more democratic EU. He wants world government, but of a specific and limited type.
The United Nations, he believes, should be reorganised as a politically constituted community of states and (original emphasis) citizens, restricted to the core tasks of peacekeeping and the global implementation of human rights, with the necessary institutional means to fulfil these two tasks effectively and even-handedly.
For what he calls the pressing problems of a future global domestic (author’s emphasis) politics – the environment and climate change, the worldwide risks of large-scale technology, regulating financial market-driven capitalism, and especially the distributional problems that arise in the trade, labour, health, and transportation regimes of a highly stratified world society – there is the need for a negotiation system normatively integrated into the world community.
The EU, he believes, could fit seamlessly into such a world society. The EU must realise its democratic potential, according to the book cover, by evolving from an international into a cosmopolitan community. Under the right conditions, the chain of legitimacy could extend without interruption from national states via regional regimes such as the EU to the world organisation.
“These are fateful times,” wrote Habermas (in 2010, don’t forget, at the time of the euro crisis and before Brexit was heard of). “Our lame political elites, who prefer to read the tabloid headlines, must not use as an excuse that their populations are the obstacle to a deeper European unification. With a little political backbone, the crisis of the single currency can bring about what some once hoped for from a common European foreign policy, namely a cross border awareness of a shared European destiny.”
Conclusion
Looking back on Habermas’s ambitions for Europe and the world back in 2010, and all that has happened since, not least Brexit, Alec’s first thought was that they were Utopian. In particular, he thought, the UN could never be reformed in the way Habermas wanted. Russia and China, with their vetoes on the Security Council, would never allow it. And the EU, under the increasing influence of right-wing, populist, and nationalist parties, is struggling to co-operate in tackling problems like the influx of refugees.
But then again, Alec thought, change had to start somewhere, and why not at the next UK general election. Could Keir Starmer’s Labour Party not be persuaded to be a little bolder, a little less lame, and put flesh on the bones of its vague aspirations for a closer relationship with the EU. That at least would be a step, if a tiny one, that the UK could take on the road to the peaceful, human-rights-based, cosmopolitan world that Habermas has argued for.
On a personal level, Alec hoped that his own experiences of one EU country, Germany, recounted in this series, would make people appreciate that there are educational and cultural pleasures and benefits to be gained from continental travel if they can. Travel, he was taught as a child growing up in Sunderland, broadens the mind.
Meanwhile, there is something all readers can do as well, if they wish: Sign the Parliamentary petition calling on the Government to make it easier for schools to organise European trips.
*Translated by Ciarin Cronin. Published by Polity.
Peter Morris
I am a semi-retired journalist with experience in North East newspapers dating back to 1964. I have worked on Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside, specialising in regional politics and local government before moving into newsdesk management. I have also worked in media relations for the government. Since retiring I have studied at university, gaining successively a BA (humanities with art history, MA (European Union studies) and PhD (economic geography).
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