This piece was written originally in purpose to pass an online course in Coursera: The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 1)
According to Kant, Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity, which he further explained as the inability to use one’s own understanding without guidance from another. Quoting Horace, he believed that people are supposed to “dare to know”, having courage to use our own minds mainly to develop the knowledge of science and arts.
This thinking of his might have stemmed from the situation he faced and had observed in its relation to the so-called Dark Age. Through Enlightenment, people can pursue progress in civilization and responsible liberty, which is in contrast from the Dark Age. Back in the Dark Age, people were dictated by the rigid biblical interpretation and Church authority that hampered them from progressing in science and arts. Moreover, the segregation between the aristocrats and peasants caused big socioeconomic gap that would affect many aspects of daily life including education and health.
The idea of Enlightenment that encourages people to think independently and also to learn about science and arts is the core cause that will in long term liberate peasants from their suffering by striving for prosperity and their rights and thus improve their quality of life.
The long-term purpose of Enlightenment is similar to how Marx shaped his thinking about the economic inequality; his highlight is on his critics against capitalism since the era of industrial revolution. Marx believed that in the end of the day, the working class should aim a full liberation from their condition of forced labor. Work is supposed to be about our identity, about to find ourselves through the process of working, not to be enslaved by the economic system that has reduced its meaning.
According to Marxism, when someone works, the work itself should be for themselves, giving results and bringing meaning for them. However, the capitalism has made it that our labor is no longer about us, but it is for the rich. In this situation, people have lost their meaning of life that has turned into mere working. We can see how today number of depression at work is very high that some of them have caused suicide cases. People are no longer happy when they work because they cannot find themselves in it.
Through revolution in the notion of Marxism, people can attain equal prosperity and better quality of life. However, the proletariats cannot be aware of their oppressed situation because their daily lives are full of struggle merely to earn income to fulfill their daily needs. They no longer have time to think about what freedom is, what life is, and most of all who they are and what they love to do; let alone they would think at all about progressing civilization through science and arts. In fact, science and arts have become an instrument that aggravates the situation.
Hence, as Marx argued, it is the middle class who would be the agent of change. The middle class would be the ones who “enlighten” the proletariats and the ones who bargain to the authority or the aristocrats for more equal rights of the working class. The very reason why it has to be the middle class is because they are the ones who would have enough time to educate themselves about equality and they’re not in the position that is benefitted from the existence of forced labor, so they will be able to realize the injustice happening in our society.
Marx’s view, however it has similar long-term goal with Kant’s idea of Enlightenment, is still different in details. Kant believed that although Enlightenment and freedom is necessary, the way how we should achieve it would be gradually, not through revolution. Kant still gave a sense of security to the aristocrats that their position in society would stand still because the Enlightenment would be implemented gradually. In Kant’s way, the aristocrats were encouraged to help the peasants to have access to education because it was going to benefit the aristocrats themselves.
Marx chose a rather hard stance that in his idealism, the existence of socioeconomic gap between people should be eradicated at all, thus revolution. In his scenario, class segregation cannot be justified at all because it will only trap the working class people in a circle that their lives lose meaning and are only about working. This is what boldly distinguishes between the idea of Marxism and the Enlightenment proposed by Kant.
In conclusion, the very goal of Enlightenment and Marxism is similar in how they want to achieve equality and liberty for people although Kant and Marx had different perspectives on how the goal should be achieved. This can reason enough to state that Marx is indeed an enlightenment figure as well as Kant, even though through different approaches.
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