2023 Vol. 42. №2

In its 2018 publication, Come On! the Club of Rome advocates the need for a New Enlightenment. It associates Kant with an Old Enlightenment that favours (i) individualism, (ii) rationalism and in general (iii) a lack of balance between different elements such as reason and feelings. In this discussion note, I argue — based on Kant’s theoretical as well as practical philosophies — that the charges are not properly levelled at Kant. (i) In finding truth as well as what is morally right, Kant advocates abstracting from private ends and testing one’s views against the views of others. (ii) Kant also points out the limits of what we can know rationally; (iii) and in theoretical as well as practical cognition, he emphasises that we need both: reason and sensibility.

The modern popularity of the Kantian definition of enlightenment often leads to a distorted notion that his understanding of enlightenment was dominant already during his lifetime, expressing the quintessence of all-European Enlightenment. This turns our attention away from entire layers of philosophical thought, since the Kantian definition of enlightenment in the late eighteenth century was neither the only one nor the preeminent one. The study of alternatives represented in the German philosophy of that period gives a deeper insight into the originality of the Kantian approach with regard to both its merits and demerits. The presentation of the Kantian definition of enlightenment as the standard turns out to be a rather late historical phenomenon. Even Kant’s closest followers did not turn to his interpretation of enlightenment and, indeed, were sharply critical of the phenomenon as a banal and superficial one, opposed to faith. Further transformation of the views on the Enlightenment led to the emergence of the inauthentic terms of “Enlightenment” and Lumières applied post factum to the eighteenth-century philosophy in Europe. As a result, the essence of the enlightenment was defined not so much by the eighteenth-century Enlighteners as by historians and philosophers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who constructed a model notion of enlightenment against which philosophical figures were then compared. This approach ignored, first, the authentic definition of enlightenment (in Germany and Russia in the eighteenth century there were authentic terms “Aufklärung” and “prosveshcheniye”, and in France the proto-term “eclairé”) and, second, important national differences in the interpretation of the phenomenon. The emasculate Kantian definition of enlightenment used to legitimise the proposed approach. A closer look at the authentic view of eighteenth-century philosophers and a comparison of the Kantian approach to enlightenment with its alternatives that existed at the time might perhaps demonstrate that the philosophical and heuristic potential of the allegedly overcome and discredited Enlightenment is far from exhausted and is still relevant today.

The relation between Kant’s philosophy and the “philosophy of balance” as it is described in the report Come on! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet, delivered to the Club of Rome in 2018, requires some analysis. The authors of the report consider Kant to be a philosopher of European Enlightenment which laid the foundations of the modern world, but also proved to be the source of global problems. The report characterises the philosophy of the Enlightenment as lop-sided rationalism which dismisses everything that does not possess desirable properties. In exchange, the authors offer a philosophy of balance, described in several points as the balance between conflicting values. The overarching problem of the philosophy of balance is the restraining of egoism. For this reason I first examine the relationship between duty and human inclinations in Kant’s ethics. I then demonstrate that the topic of political forecasts and the recommendations which Kant prescribes both in his philosophy of history and in his reflections on politics, right and justice, essentially boils down to three points of the philosophy of balance: the balance between development and justice (Kantian republicanism), between the speed and stability of development (external policy, the Kantian peace project), and between the short-term and long-term perspectives (reform policy). I then touch upon the problem of the implementation of Kantian principles in politics in the light of the reception of Kant in the modern theories of social conflicts, the communication theory of J. Habermas and the justice theory of J. Rawls. The overall conclusion is that Kant’s philosophy is not a philosophy of exclusion, capitalist values and utilitarianism and is not their ideological basis.

In the Club of Rome report Come on! Capitalism, Short-Termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet (2018) Kant, along with other “old” Enlighteners, is presented as the father of a world-view which led to the destabilisation of the environment in which humanity exists. The authors of the report argue that the “old Enlightenment” with its individualism, faith in the market and a consumerist attitude to nature should be scrapped. I maintain that this assessment of Kant’s philosophy is groundless and that his ideas allow us both to conduct a more profound diagnosis of the crisis and to propose a more solidly founded strategy of overcoming it. First, I sum up the position of the authors concerning the loss of sustainability of development which they attribute to the philosophy of Enlightenment. Next, I outline the history and content of the notion of “sustainable development” and offer an analysis of the sources of progressivist commitment to the conquest of nature which lie outside Modern Times in the idea of the “cultural mandate”. Then I present the Kantian diagnosis of the causes of the crisis which attributes it to humankind’s failure to “mature”. I compare the idea of “the full world” formulated by the authors of the report with the idea of the “the world come of age” and their diagnosis of “capitalism — short-termism — depletion of resources” with the Kantian assessment of the attempts to escape from the predicaments of the present into the past or the future. I draw attention to Kant’s solutions to some of the specific problems indicated in the report. Instead of the strategy of “return of the cultural mandate”, proposed at this time by the authors of the report, the Kant­ian answer to the crisis is a “Copernican turn” and re-direction of the cultivating effort to the inner moral development of the human being.

According to several passages in the available sources, Kant developed some ideas about the difference between being persuaded and being convinced which have antecedents in the German tradition, but with regard to which he developed ideas of his own. It is my intention to examine precisely some of these passages. I will explain how the philosopher understood this difference, what its relevance is and why the figure of the other is necessary to determine it. For this purpose, texts published in the critical period and students’ lecture notes from the same period are considered. Furthermore, I will compare the treatment of the subject in these sources and in the textbooks used by Kant in his courses. In the conclusions, the link between this issue and Kantian arguments in defending freedom of thought and expression is also suggested. In order to do so, I first explain the notion of holding to be true and its difference from the notion of being true. Secondly, I examine what it means to be convinced and what it means to be persuaded. Finally, I analyse the relevance of alterity for the identification of this difference and consider the importance of freedom of expression.

The authors of the idea of a “new Enlightenment”, Ernst von Weizsäcker and Anders Wijkman, in their 2018 report to the Club of Rome analyse the causes of the explosive development of science and technology in the Modern period and come to the conclusion that their triumph and existential threats stem in many ways from the ideals of Enlightenment, so that the future of humankind depends crucially on an ideological rethinking of man’s status in the world. They stress the need to enhance the responsibility of the individual so that each individual becomes conscious of sharing the destiny of the whole of mankind and the world. I argue that in the framework of Enlightenment 2.0 the Kantian concept of social development, which is closely linked with the moral ideal — the kingdom of ends — may form the basis of the concept of society in which individual freedom and social development are interconnected and the mutually determining elements of the human being in whom freedom can be exercised only if it contributes to social good. The Kantian interpretation of social development as the human being forming the sphere of free being can be the basis of a critical assessment of the content of video games in terms of their media impact on the shaping of the ideology of modern society. I show that the boundaries of the exercise of freedom in a video game, supported by artificial intelligence, influence the way an individual perceives society and his/her place in it. I come to the conclusion that video games, which express a certain idea about society, can contribute to or impede the formation of a new ideological foundation of society whose aim, according to Enlightenment 2.0, should be overcoming the antagonism between the individual and the collective.