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RGS1811 • yesterday at 4:52 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

The public/private distinction Kant introduces is interesting, but it's not what I'm getting at here.

To draw a broad strokes historical parallel you could say this: in pre-Enlightenment Europe, responsibility for reasoning was signed away to various authorities (the church, the prince, etc.), "liberating" common people from the need to reason or ask questions or make self-directed use of their intellectual faculties. The vision of enlightenment Kant puts forward gives us an alternative ideal: maturity and freedom come from the self-directed use of one's intellectual faculties, the choice to take on responsibility for one's beliefs oneself, even if the freedom to think and discuss is constrained within the confines of public law. The ideal is inquiry, questioning, the desire to understand things from first principles and the refusal to accept the dictates of external authorities as given without being able to participate in the reasoning that justifies their claims.

If Huang, Altman, etc., are offering us all a future in which nobody is indepdendent minded enough to be able to perform arithmetic or even know their own address, what they're offering is "liberation" backwards into the world of intellectual immaturity, into a kind of serfdom disguised as leisure or carelessness. Maybe some people want that, and maybe they can even argue that it's good, but it's worth being clear about the fact that "liberation" from the need or desire to know or reason about the basic facts of one's life is not empowering, and does not yield greater personal independence or maturity. It is, in Kant's terms, anti-Enlightenment.