Kant. . .describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own
reason to use, without subjecting itself to authority; now, it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped.13
French philosopher, Michel Foucault, expands on the notions and possibilities of moral progress by reinvigorating the modern critical tradition that has its genealog- ical roots in Immanuel Kant. This is most clearly exhibited in his chapter “What is Enlightenment?” which is a direct allusion to Kant’s earlier work of the same title. I find Foucault’s essay on Kant useful for the way it provides an alternate characterization of modernity, one that is particularly useful to me in my desire to change the conversation.
I have privileged Foucault’s inquiry into the notion of Enlightenment because he is roughly our contemporary and, therefore, has the advantage of having the benefit of a couple of hundred years of social, cultural, political, and military history.
Where Kant is trying to understand how something novel could change the way we experience the world, Foucault is trying to understand how something that was supposed to be new never really materialized. If Kant is asking “What difference does today make with respect to yesterday?” Foucault is asking “Why is today no different from yesterday?” Both theorists were seeking to understand progressive change, but from a different place of enunciation and with different hopes. Kant hoped that he could be the impetus of progress by exhorting the masses to move ahead. Foucault hoped that we could better reconcile our espoused ideals with our own histories. Kant’s perspective was that of a philosopher or theologian, Foucault’s was that of a historian.
The question “What is Enlightenment?” and the question “What is Moral Pro- gress?” are two sides of the same coin. I will be suggesting that moral progress is served by the tension between two perspectives on Enlightenment: the “speculative”
of Kant and the “historical” of Foucault.14The challenge of identifying and analyz- ing our own moral problems – of “problematizing” the present, to use Foucault’s jargon – is simply our attempt to represent the overlapping portions of these two perspectives. So, in the mode of classic dialectics, I am claiming that when it comes to moral progress, the struggle is the thing. Critique, then, is the theoretical offspring of this process.15
In his interpretation of Kant’s essay on Enlightenment, Foucault makes three insights into the relationship between social thought and morality: Enlightenment is an activity, enlightenment requires courage, and enlightenment is experimental. It is important to note that these insights could easily be attributed to Kant himself. I will be calling them Foucault’s because it is through his work that these organizational tropes in Kant’s text became clear to me. In the remainder of this section, then, I will describe each of these tropes in turn and then provide a larger reflection on the effect they have on the theory of moral progress expounded by Rorty.
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 69
Enlightenment is an Activity
Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we might not think of the age of modernity as an attitude rather than as a period of history. And by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. No doubt, a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos.16
In this passage, Foucault is trying to account not only for the energy that infused Enlightenment thinkers and their systematic forays but also the healthy self-doubt that many of them had toward their own thought (Kant was no exception). If it was David Hume that Kant credits for shaking him out of his dogmatic slumber, it was surely Kant whose literary bolt of lightning functioned to wake up a populace, a region, a nation, and an idea called the “West.” When reading through his corpus, one can tell that Kant was dissatisfied with the philosophical tradition and with the general malaise that he perceived to be covering his cultural contemporaries.
Unlike other philosophers, though, Kant had grown impatient with mere expression of dissatisfaction and, therefore, made his theoretical consideration of the notion of the Enlightenment a strong critique of its benefactors.
Consider the following passage from Kant’s essay:
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), neverthe- less gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me. . .. Thus it is difficult for each separate individual to work his way out of the immaturity which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown fond of it and is really incapable for the time being of using his own understanding, because he was never allowed to make the attempt. Dogmas and formulas, those mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of his permanent immaturity. And if anyone did throw them off, he would still be uncertain about jumping over even the narrowest of trenches, for he would be unaccustomed to free movement of this kind. Thus only a few, by cultivating their own minds, have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity and in continuing boldly on their way.17
Here we find the modern philosopher in his most Socratic voice. Kant is clearly lamenting a lack of cultural leadership and political vision. He is also explaining how the new creature comforts available to the newly expanding middle class have had the effect of satisfying their simple daily needs by simultaneously snuffing out any desire for additional improvement in their notions of what it means to be hu- man, and to express humanity. For Kant, and eventually Foucault, the problem with dissatisfaction is that, under certain material conditions, people can be convinced to live with it and even to prefer it. This is the peculiar problematic of business ethics, which is more about the success and the excesses of capitalism rather than its perceived failings.
70 P.T. Harper Foucault interprets Kant’s expression of dissatisfaction with his contemporaries as the Enlightenment attitude. The Enlightenment attitude is one where a person, in this case Kant, becomes dissatisfied with the mere expression of dissatisfaction concerning their political and cultural institutions. The dissatisfaction must manifest itself in some sort of action or attempt at action to be of virtue in this schema.18 This is a reframing of the narrative of modern philosophy because it does not follow either the victory of Reason in the realm of culture or find comfort in an overly pessimistic description of the failure of modernity.
Kant is charting a middle path, one that sees the undeniable success of modern technology and free market economic institutions as the philosophical problem of the Enlightenment.19Foucault, in contrast, is trying to reconcile the espoused ideals of the Enlightenment with 200 years of European Imperial history, a history where he finds the Jewish Holocaust, the rise of totalitarianism around the world, Christian justifications for the continued enslavement and then lynching of blacks in America, violent homophobia, Hiroshima and nuclear proliferation, capital punishment and torture by democratic governments, African Apartheid, etc. . .Both philosophers see the Enlightenment as a problem but they “problematize” the Enlightenment differ- ently. If one way to characterize the Enlightenment is as an attitude, scholars must not assume that the attitude expressed by different people in different places and at different times is the same. Further, as a motivation for critique, Foucault is not seeking an end to the dissatisfactions of modernity because he recognizes that it could be the wellspring of moral action if understood. In this way, he is like Kant in that he sees bourgeois satisfaction as the enemy of moral progress.
Enlightened Morality Needs Courage
From the very first paragraph, [Kant] notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus, it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself. . .What, then, is this instruction? Aude sapere:
“dare to know,” “have the courage, the audacity, to know.” Thus, Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single process.
They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.20
It is a truism to say that any age is defined by its exceptional women and men. For Kant and Foucault, though, part of what makes the person exceptional is some show of intellectual courage. Kant is reintroducing the heroic code to the West but in a new place. There is an interesting epistemological update here being executed by Kant and, subsequently, Foucault. In the first sentence of The Metaphysics, Aristotle pro- claimed, “Man by nature desires to know.” Kant and Foucault would edit Aristotle’s basic formulation by adding one significant word: “Some men by nature desire to know.” In fact, based on the swift anthropology Kant provides of his contemporaries, it is not even the average man that desires to know. It might not be an overstatement of his position to say that in modernity, the absence of thought, the ability to pay for
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 71 somebody else to think for you, had even become a symbol of an elevated status.
On this description, then, it is easy to see why Kant would include the desire for knowledge as a heroic virtue (admittedly, some ancient Greeks may have found this characterization of heroism peculiar). Where knowledge is a virtue, there thought is an achievement.
Enlightened morality does not just need courage but specifically the “courage to know.” In Kant, there is a direct relationship between knowledge and the kind of morality he would want, hence the connection between critique and moral progress.
Critique is a dialectical expression of the struggle in the mind between the achieve- ments of modernity and the attitude of countermodernity. To be clear, critique is not merely an attitude of simple irony, e.g. of taking the opposite position. Using the language of pragmatism, critique is an ironic attachment to the knowledge one has of his or her experiences and the traditions of knowledge he or she has received.
Here, the irony is complex. Critique does not claim that reality is the opposite of experience but that there could be understandings of any experience other than the
“accepted” knowledge the official promulgators would have you to believe. Moral progress begins, then, with a healthy but ironic attachment to conventional wis- dom, and also the individual courage to explore other ways of making sense of the world.21
Enlightened Morality is Experimental
Yet if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this work done on the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical.22
Enlightenment is not simply a method of doubt. For Foucault, those with the attitude of Enlightenment are as dissatisfied with doubt as they are with overconfidence.
Following Kant, critique is not just about beliefs but also about how those beliefs are transformed into action. But, it is a particular kind of action that Kant and Foucault are seeking. The action must be one of enlivening alternatives. What I mean by this is that I take Kant’s and Foucault’s arguments concerning Enlightenment to be both theoretical and practical. The theoretical insight concerns the methods and means for revising our web of beliefs in order to incorporate novel ideas and understandings.
Indeed, enlightened people have an insatiable appetite for novelty. But, Enlightened people must be the conduit by which these ideas become manifest in the world. Not because novelty is inherently good or progressive but because it is only by trying out and trying on new ideas that we can determine which ideas are worth keeping and which to toss away.
I want to augment Foucault’s notion of this experimental attitude by saying that not only must new ideas be subjected to the crucible of experience but also
72 P.T. Harper the ideas that are received or considered traditional and, therefore, assumed to be valuable. Every generation, indeed every person, must reassess received values.23 Once again, Kant is frustrated by the lack of innovation in his society due to the blind adherence of his contemporaries to custom and tradition. One solution that Foucault provides is that we need to be more focused on the limits of our knowledge.
The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limita- tions into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing over. This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value but, rather, as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?24
Foucault’s suggestion is that we apply outward pressure on the limits of our knowl- edge by reexamining what it is that we think we already know and hold as founda- tional.
I want to return to my argument that moral progress needs a particular kind of thought. Now, with the help of Foucault, I can outline the characteristics of the kind of thought that I believe helps to bring about moral progress. I will call critical those theories or philosophies that have the attributes of action, courage, and ex- perimentalism. It is critique that I think will provide, and has always provided, the material for constructive social thought even though its form is necessarily negative and, sometimes, destructive. But, morality needs social thought because ethics needs heroes.
Equipped with this understanding of Foucault, we can finally return to Rorty.
Foucault’s insights allow me to change the conversation concerning moral progress by changing its operative metaphor. For Rorty, moral progress can be represented graphically as an upward sloping curve on a two-dimensional Cartesian plane. For example, in Rorty’s theory, Aristotle is at an intellectual disadvantage to Newton because he was unlucky enough to be born before Newton on the same temporal continuum. But, for Foucault, moral progress is not about the distance we have traveled along the same curve but about the size of our moral universe. Foucault’s theory allows us to change the progressive trope from distance to volume. For Rorty, moral progress can be fully charted with (x, y) coordinates. Foucault introduces the z-coordinate. It is through the theoretical method of critique, with its attributes of action, courage, and experimentalism, which we enter into a global discourse, one that exerts pressure on the limits of what can be thought by de-centering and reeval- uating what we think we already know. It is also through the process of decentering our knowledge that we learn how to incorporate novelty and, ultimately, difference.
Business Ethics Beyond the Moral Imagination 73