(written for the course Modernism and Postmodernism Period by Wesleyan University)
During the eighteenth century in Europe, many philosophers and thinkers dedicated their works to explain exhaustively how the Enlightenment should open people’s eyes in order to free them from a society not built to take in consideration the poor ones. Among them we have Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant.
Rosseau paradoxically defended that opening the eyes to a vicious world would lead the people to an ignorance even bigger: the lack of morality. In his first work, A Discourse on the Science and Arts, he exemplifies some of the most famous society collapsing because of the ascendency of art, such as the ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Sparta. Paraphrasing Socrates in one of his famous speech, Apology, where he addresses to the court saying that the artists and philosophers claim to have knowledge of piety, goodness, and virtue, although they do not really understand anything, Rousseau not only mentions ancient civilizations, but also China as an upbringing civilization suffering from its terrible vices. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, defends the idea that ‘man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’, once the science and the arts created by the modern society lead one’s mind to corrupt our virtues and morality. His concerns were more about the individual serving the community in order to progress, and not the opposite. He also claims that nature never deceives us, the only one responsible for that is ourselves. At the same time he implies that man must be free in order to develop, to learn, he also says that man will develop and learn progressively at his own pace, although he will eventually corrupt himself whereas nobility is hard to maintain once he struggles to live.
Kant, after reading Rousseau’s works, establishes a relation between freedom and rationality. He understands that men are born good but the civil society transforms them into a corrupted human being. Therefore, Kant agrees with Rousseau that reason offers the natural capacity of reflexive thinking to the man. He can act according to the laws and directions justifying his attitude as being correct and perfect. Enlightenment, according to Immanuel Kant, is the “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”, immaturity which was defined as being the inability of thinking without the necessity of being approved by another person. Kant defends the idea that we depend on one another and that humanity should have the courage of using our own mind, our own ideas, thinking beyond the other’s desires, having the courage to lead our words to our extents, to be wise. We must understand that he was living in the age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century when he tried to answer, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ encouraging people to read more, discuss more, reflect more, manifesting curiosity. However, we need to obey. We have to look for answers but obey what is already established.