CHAPTER EIGHT SKEPTICISM AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM: THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF KANT'S POLITICS OF PUBLICITY

Immanuel Kant's politics of publicity is fundamentally the politics of a response to the tradition of philosophical skepticism. His calls for "public" enlightenment and "publicity" make up, in modern terms, a politics of intellectual freedom. This politics is deeply grounded in Kant's philosophy, and especially in his modus vivendi with skepticism. This chapter is a contribution towards establishing its philosophical foundations and revealing its genealogy in Kant's philosophical development. The conventional interpretation of Kant's politics derives it largely from his ethics. A problem with this interpretation is that some features of his politics are not derived or explained at any length in those terms by Kant, and thus that we do not have a satisfactory account of their philosophical foundations. Without denying that Kant's purposes are ultimately ethical, this chapter reorients atten• tion away from the deontological Kant of the ethics and towards another aspect of Kant's philosopy that emerges as the foundation of elements of his politics. The principal argument for this reinterp- retation is a reading of Kant's politics against the background of his early philosophical development. A brief review of Kant's politics of publicity begins with "What is Enlightenment?" of 1784, where Kant placed his hopes for pro• gressive enlightenment and better government in a free press and the right of every educated man to criticize the government in print. By the time he wrote The Conflict of the Faculties in the 1790s he was forced to narrow this vision in the face of harsher censorship, but he still defended the intellectual freedom of the philosophical faculty as a necessary condition of better politics. In Toward Perpetual Peace of 1795 he elevated "publicity", including freedom of the press, into a transcendental principle forjudging government policy and international relations. In the following chapter attention is drawn to the political context and strategy of Kant's use of this vocabulary, showing that it is an important part of his political 194 SKEPTICISM AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM rhetoric. Its philosophical foundations are explored here. Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and his Critique of Practical Reason expound his ethics with no direct reference and very little indirect reference to publicity, so there is no clear connection to his politics of publicity here. The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, which was his most technical exposition of his views on government, refers to publicity in the definition of public law but does not elaborate on its philosophical foundation.1 Toward Perpetual Peace derives the transcendental principle of publicity in one sentence from the concept of public law (8:381),2 which in turn may be derived from Kant's ethics. This is enough to make the case that Kant's politics of publicity is rooted in his ethics, but if that were all there is to the matter we could say little more than the bare fact that he asserts that it is derived from his ethics and his notion of legality. But it turns out that there is a much richer lode of Kantian reflection on public debate and publicity which is not in his strictly ethical writings but in another part of his philosophy. The driving philosophical force behind Kant's interest in publicity, it will be argued here, was the skeptical tradition. A reading of Kant's early notes and lectures reveals that a confrontation with epistemological skepticism in several forms posed Kant's problems. But the skeptical tradition also prescribed its own solution to these problems: the skeptical method, which called for ongoing invest• igation in the face of uncertainty. Kant adopted that solution, and called for intellectual freedom as a propaedeutic to such ongoing investigations. To the extent that he takes over the problems and solutions of skeptics, Kant is obviously within the skeptical tradition. It will be argued below that important elements of Kant's philosophy belong

1 Kant, Kants gesammelte Schrifien (ed. by Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and later Academies, Berlin, 1900- ), vol. 8, p. 311. Hereafter, citations to Kant appear in parentheses in the text, with the volume number of the standard Academy edition followed by a colon and the page number. See the bibliography for information about the translations which have been used. 2 A surprising number of studies of Kant's political and legal philosophy make virtually no mention at all of what Kant called the "transcendental principle of public law", i.e. publicity. A recent example is Wolfgang Kersting's Wohl• geordnete Freiheit: Immanuel Kants Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie, which mentions it only in footnotes (pp. 294n, 321n).