metonymy4u

I’ve always loved this simple statement by Immanuel Kant, age 60 at the time, penned shortly after he had written his most important work, The Critique of Pure Reason:

Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.

Enlightenment is our emergence from our self-incurred voicelessness.

The final phrase is highly significant, and cannot be fully captured in English. The word selbstverschuldeten is a compound of the reflexive with a word which implies indebtedness, as if something has been voluntarily wagered, risked or mortgaged. The last word Unmündigkeit is a noun which literally translates as “mouthlessness” but which in German refers to an absence of developmental or legal maturity. I think there is a subtle irony (melancholy? compassion?) in saying that the immaturity is self incurred, since it would seem call into question the very nature of a self that, though green and untested, yet assumed this mysterious debt. What I think Kant means to suggest is that humanity finds itself apprehended in a Faustian bargain that traps us and keeps us—immature, incapable, voiceless, disenfranchised. In the context of the first critique, I think he is proposing that we have mistakenly acquiesced our reason to an algorithm of certainty, fate, and God, to the detriment of our ability to live, negotiate, and mature.

How well Nietzsche understood the old man!