Happy Birthday, Kant!

Immanuel Kant turns 300 this week, and those of us in higher education should take a moment to salute this grand old man of modern philosophy. My salute won’t be on account of his door-stopping Critique of Pure Reason, which explained how we could somehow preserve our religious faith while committing ourselves to progress in the sciences. Nor will I be cheering for his two other Critiques, one showing the coherence of moral reasoning and the other of aesthetic experience. No, as a college president and teacher, I will be celebrating Kant’s idea of the modern student: someone in the process of learning to think for oneself in the company of others.

In his 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant answered his title’s question by defining enlightenment as “freedom from self-imposed immaturity.” That has become the core notion of what it means to be a student — someone who grows up, leaving childish dependence behind. Enlightenment is, for Kant, the process of learning, and that process aims at liberating one from “tutelage” — being a kid. Enlightenment allows one to leave behind the “inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” This idea was new, underscoring that students are to use their own understanding rather than depend on authorities to guide them. Just as we mature physically, crawling and then walking on our own, we mature mentally and become capable of thinking on our own. Or at least we should.

Of course, the cultural movement of the Enlightenment was about more than students; it was a process through which many societies strove to liberate themselves from a dependence on tradition and use rational thinking to reduce suffering. Science and technology were becoming more useful to a broader sector of the population, and those people required schooling. As a result, more and more families in the 18th century were becoming familiar with the idea of the student. Theories of education were hotly debated, and over time those debates came to have less to do with faith and salvation, focusing instead on preparing independent thinkers who could also be free citizens. Of course, notions of enlightenment were not immune from prejudice — sexism, racism, and the like were the (usually unacknowledged) barriers to the expansion of freedom. But it would be a mistake for us to let the hypocrisies of the 18th century blind us to legitimate aspirations and our own failures to live up to them.

Debates about education grew only more complex in the 19th century, as formal schooling became widespread in the West. Were schools truly helping students think for themselves, or were they only indoctrinating them into the latest conventions? Would advanced learning lead to scientific gains that benefited society, or would it only create self-serving justifications for the inequalities associated with the increased pace of industrialization? If everyone was learning the same thing, how could one speak about learning to think for oneself?

Kant himself was the child of a master harness maker, and he went to school in Königsberg (then in Prussia, now in Russia). In the early grades of such schools, a sole teacher would give instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, and Christianity; more rigorous training would follow. As a university student, Kant studied Latin every semester, and he also learned Greek, Hebrew, and French. Science and mathematics entered the curriculum later, with philosophy introduced in the semesters before graduation. Kant’s early schooling was Pietistic, which meant that students were expected to experience strong religious emotions, although Kant himself is said to have preferred the study of classical texts to the expression of spiritual enthusiasm. In 18th-century Europe much of education still entailed memorization, learning to recite texts or copy them. Learning was largely regurgitation. The notion of education articulated in “What Is Enlightenment?” was aspirational — and a reaction against the author’s own experience as a student. Later in life, Kant acknowledged that he would be overcome by “terror and apprehension” whenever he thought back on “the slavery” of his school years.

Kant argued that an enlightened education should subject conventional wisdom to what today would be called “critical thinking.” Those authorities who claim that they should not have to submit to questioning “excite a just suspicion against themselves and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.” Free and public examination and the courage to use one’s own reason would, Kant thought, lead inevitably to progress. As people grew accustomed to thinking for themselves and discussing their concerns in public, they would become more reasonable, more prudent: “For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom,” Kant wrote. “And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all — freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” When the public becomes collectively able to think for itself, revolution is avoided, and deliberative change is possible. With freedom we can be students, and as students we expand the realm of freedom.

Many today are wondering whether colleges and universities are places of indoctrination rather than freedom. That is a legitimate concern: Indoctrination is another way of keeping people immature, to prevent them from thinking for themselves. But contemporary complainers about higher ed often just sound like older folks put off by the energies of the young, especially when those energies are directed against ideas and institutions valued by prior generations. Instead, we should stand with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his radicalization of Kant’s idea. Emerson thought education should provoke people away from conformity. Higher education should ignite students’ spirit and intelligence with the materials from nature and the past, he wrote, not merely show them how to digest these materials.

“Colleges,” Emerson insisted, “can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth aflame.” Freedom, for Emerson, was not just an intellectual matter. It was bound up with living with an intensity opposed to convention.

One can hear Kant’s pursuit of critique in Emerson and in a host of critical thinkers who have followed. Kant took the decisive step in recognizing that learning — enlightenment — was the contributor to and beneficiary of freedom. Fear, he believed, held many back, which is why he linked enlightenment to daring: “Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason’ — that is the motto of enlightenment,” he wrote. It’s an idea we must not lose sight of. Thank you, Immanuel, and happy birthday!