Public and Private Reason

One of my unresolved problems with Foucault’s What is Enlightenment? has centered on Kant’s distinction between public and private reason— Foucault’s explanation of it, and the attempts of my own little mind just haven’t seemed adequate. This is why I haven’t been able to let it go— sometimes, texts just get stuck in my head. And I hate it when there is a part on which I choke, unable to move past that section to talk about the rest of the essay.

But then, this phenomenon has a lot in common with my aesthetic judgment of photographs. If a photograph bugs me, then it is something that I will repeat in endless variations (if it is one of mine) or stare at it for days at a time (if it is someone else’s) until I finally figure out what bugged me about that scene or form to begin with. Now I do it with texts instead.

Kant inverts the commonplace notion of private in his reply to the question What is Enlightenment? His explanation of the difference between public and private reason isn’t clear at all. I’ve now read several commentators on the topic, and I think I finally get it. Kant describes the distinction in this way:

By the public use of one’s reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him.

The public, in Kant’s definition, is small and localized. A scholar does not speak to a massive public. This seems rather elitist, and seems to exclude a mass audience. For example, more people listen to what George W. Bush has to say (who is supposedly a public servant) than Stanley Fish. However, George W. would be specifically excluded from the public use of reason. His usage of reason, in Kant’s terms, is private.

Why private? Foucault’s explanation of the distinction is that G.W. is in a circumscribed position. What he can reason is limited, not by his lack of rational faculties (though I often wonder) but by the fact that he holds an office, a position of public responsibility. See what I mean? Using the word private just doesn’t seem to make sense. Foucault elaborates it this way

What constitutes, for Kant, this private use of reason? In what area is it exercised? Man, Kant says, makes a private use of reason when he is ‘a cog in a machine’; that is, when he has a role to play in society and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a civil servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he finds himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular rules and pursue particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and foolish obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular ends in view.

Using private to denote the reason exercised by a minister or a politician is really counter intuitive. One might think that it implies a sort of skepticism over any established body—that these people act to further their own personal ends. But Kant really doesn’t go there—as Foucault observes, he isn’t arguing for blind obedience, but rather suggests that enlightenment, which in Kant’s definition means autonomy, is best served by constrained exercise of private reason and free exercise of public reason. Suggesting that a minister or politician is best when they follow the party line of their institution seems to radically contradict Kant’s championing of autonomy as a way out of stupidity. What if the institution has stupid ends in mind?

Foucault leaves this aside quickly to discuss Baudelaire, but I cannot. The reason why Foucault uses it as an example is that it demonstrates the eighteenth century concern over the legitimate use of reason, but I wanted to look at this strange antimony more closely. Why does Kant call the social use of reason private, and the relatively cloistered reason of scholars public?

I have come to believe it is best explained by the way Kant deals with sensus communis— sense common to all— in “The Analytic of the Sublime.” According to Kant, in matters of aesthetic judgment, we can only compare our judgments with the judgments of others. Rather than suggesting that aesthetic judgment is forged by democratic means, Kant proposes three fundamental maxims:

1. to think for oneself
2. to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else (emphasis mine)
3. always to think consistently

The first maxim is that of autonomy—the same as his definition of enlightenment—but Kant calls it that of unprejudiced thought. Prejudice, in his discussion, is the result of passivity and superstition. In this analytic, offers a somewhat different definition of enlightenment—freedom from superstition. It is this blindness that gives us an obligation to follow others, which makes our reason passive.

The second maxim is called the maxim of enlarged thought:

It indicates a man of enlarged thought if he disregards the subjective private conditions of his own judgment, by which so many are confined, and reflects upon it from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself in the standpoint of others).

Leaving aside the third maxim of the consecutive, the whole public/private thing began to make more sense.

Private reason was apparently, to Kant, subjective in two senses of the word. First, if a person does not think outside themselves, that is—by definition—private. Secondly, if a person is constrained by the needs of a society, they are its subjects—and hence limited in the way that they might think outside it. The body politic, in this case, is indeed a body thinks primarily privately with its own interests in mind.

So public reason, then, is an individual able to think outside the confines of themselves or their society in order to reason more effectively, and make better judgments!

It took me a long time to figure this riddle out. I figured it would be best to write it down somewhere, lest I forget!