On Kant’s Concept of the Public Use of Reason:

Roberta Pasquarè

doi:10.36311/2318-0501.2020.v8n1.08.p101

Abstract

With this paper I intend to rehabilitate the status of orality as medium of the public use of reason in the normative Kantian sense. As a first step, I reconstruct the reasons why Kant rejects the spoken word and designates the written word as the sole medium of public reasoning. As a second step, I argue for the possibility of employing the spoken word as medium of public reasoning while remaining within the normative framework of Kant’s concept of the public use of reason.  Recebido / Received: 20 de abril de 2020; / 20 April 2020Aceito / Accepted: 6 de maio de 2020 / 6 May 2020

Highlights

In his 1784 An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? Kant defines the public use of reason as “that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers” (WA, AA 08: 37)2
With this paper I intend (a) to reconstruct the reasons why Kant rejects the spoken word as medium of the public use of reason and (b) at the same time justify the application of Kant’s concept of public reason to the spoken word
To show why Kant designates the written word as the sole medium of the public use of reason, I shall as a first step reconstruct the conditions that must obtain for reasoning to be public in the Kantian sense and as a second step show why the spoken word do not meet such conditions

Summary

Introduction

In his 1784 An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? Kant defines the public use of reason as “that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers” (WA, AA 08: 37). Kant describes the activity of communicating to the public one’s thoughts by employing expressions such as ‘speaking to the public’ or ‘delivering a speech to the public’, thereby employing a language which suggests a relation between an orator and his or her listeners This terminology should not detract from the fact that by the terms speaking (reden) and speech (Rede) Kant means the written word. Peter Niesen presents his thorough study Kants Theorie der Redefreiheit clarifying that “the expression ‘speech’ [Rede] here is not limited to oral communication but rather employed neutrally with regard to the medium [medienneutral verwendet]” (Niesen 2005: 28)4 This methodological choice is very representative of the common tendency to implicitly extend Kant’s concept of public reasoning to the spoken word without explicitly justifying this extension. In the fourth and last section, I will account for the possibility to remain within Kant’s normative framework and extend his concept of public reasoning to the spoken word

The potential of the written word

The shortcomings of the spoken word

A rehabilitation of the spoken word