Public vs. Private, and Social Media

I figured that I would write my post about the notion of public and private knowledge, relative to enlightenment, since I didn’t really understand it in Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” (1784).

Upon some closer reading, this is what I’ve come up with in terms of trying to hash out Kant’s differentiation of public vs. private:

Public: “By the public use of one’s reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public.”(2)

• Must be kept free, without restraint
• Able to (and should?) enlighten masses
• Separate from one’s social divisions – you can be a priest and critique the church when you are not acting as a priest (i.e. at home, at school, etc.)
• Q: Does Kant believe that only scholars, or those with scholarly training, are fit to do the reasoning worthy of enlightenment?

Private: “Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular post or office which is entrusted to him.” (2)

• ‘Private’ as more of a relational term rather than meaning being kept in one’s mind, away from everyone else
• Restricted reasoning insofar as it prevents chaos from happening (i.e. to relate it back to what Sana said in class, “to maintain social order”)
• Gives the example of a soldier and their officer; the soldier’s private reason would interpret an officer’s command, but if a critique were to arise out of that interpretation (“Argue about what you will…”, Kant would say to limit the vocalization of that reason (“…but obey!”; i.e. don’t make it public) until they are not scheduled to their civic duty of being a soldier (and better yet, if they were to make it public as a scholar, the critique would well-received).

As an example, we’ll consider a generic human named Jean. Jean works for a union, but does not feel that their supervisor treats them (nor anybody else) fairly. They have also seen some inequality in the membership of the union (let’s say that in order to enter the union, you have to have have worked 250 hours signed off by the union, but the only way to get these hours is if there is no one else in the union that can work, which is extremely rare). This critique arises out of using their private reason. They can’t exactly express this festering hatred for their supervisor and, overall, the union itself, so they take to Twitter (under an alias) to complain about the unfairness of the system.

Let’s also say that Jean encounters someone that interacts with their tweet. In this case, the person that interacts with Jean’s tweets says “The union system is unfair because they deny the right for union benefits to hard-working individuals who want to enter the union, but are denied because of their restrictive membership structure. In some cases, they are not allowed to work unless they are part of a union, even if the union has these restricted memberships. These people are better off working privately – at least they won’t have to pay union fees and they get to keep the money they make.”

This makes sense to Jean, and Jean searches for people who also feel the same about unions to validate their point. They encounter some opposing opinions (i.e. unions are good because they ensure fair pay and treatment among a group of workers), but in Jean’s experience, this seems to contradict what they have experienced. At work, they start to pick out more and more examples of such inequality, and they tell the Twittersphere about their observations. Though not a scholar, Jean is still now engaging in public reason.

Jean joins a larger discourse group that actively disparages unions and advocates for the private sector with little to no hierarchical structure (to avoid the inequality that could be brought about by it). Jean has taken on the label of anarcho-capitalist, and, through more discourse with those that also identify with this label, has adopted libertarian political leanings.

Could we argue that Jean was using reason to achieve enlightenment? Jean is clearly adopting facets of morality while engaging in discourse that serves to uncover the truth about whether or not unions (and company hierarchies) are good or bad for people. However, I would argue that Jean’s case is not one of enlightenment; rather, I think it’s a case of pre-enlightened thinking – something that I, as well as many others, have been susceptible to in the past. It’s easy to listen to someone give you a “truth” and accept it because it seems wholly logical, but it also means that I let others think for me instead of really understanding something for myself.

Nietzsche, in “Good and Evil, Good and Bad” of Genealogy of Morals (1887), tangentially warns his readers about the pitfalls of reason through his consideration of Christian morality. Due to the nature of Christian morality as, Nietzsche might say, a guise for repressed and projected feelings of vengeance and self-loathing, even violent acts of “self-preservation” can be justified if it does not adopt a historical and critical analysis, which arises out of the indoctrination of the notions of priestly “good and evil”.

What Jean (and I, in an earlier stage of my life*) was doing was not necessarily seeking enlightenment, but in fact seeking validation and justification for their opinions and experience without adopting a historical and/or critical analysis of both sides they encountered (aka the positive and negative accounts of unions). One could also argue that Jean was not solely pursuing reason on the basis of morality (i.e. for the good of people wanting to get into unions and to combat inequality) but rather entrenched in the act of self-validation. If we apply Booth’s theories of rhetoric, we could say that Jean was engaging in a form of Listening Rhetoric (LR)-C, or listening for the sake of outsmarting the opposition, not for genuine listening.

How does this connect to contemporary American society? I’d like to argue that this mode of ahistorical, uncritical “public reason”/”enlightenment” is something that contributed (and continues to contribute) to the growing division (and miscommunication) between American Democrats and Republicans in the age of digital technology and advancement. Arguably, each respective party has certain modes of thought that people need to subscribe to in order to identify with the party, and often are so backed by this division that no LR can be performed without it turning into dogmatic self-justification. But since this dichotomous form runs so deep in the roots of our society (man/woman, light/dark, good/evil, etc.), it also remains pervasive, stunting our ability to critique.

In her text “The Human Condition” (1958), Hannah Arendt, a 20th Century German-American philosopher, argues that modernity is the age of mass society, in which the realm of “social” arises out of public and private in search of a new form of human community. Modernity is “the age of bureaucratic administration and anonymous labour, rather than politics and action, of elite domination and manipulation of public opinion” (d’Entreves). Is this the reality of modernity and social media right now, as applied to the example? I’m not sure, but I fear that what makes social media so powerful also has the capacity to incite the insidious manipulation Arendt warns us about.

* Note: Jean’s case was not my own; my own case of pre-enlightened thinking surrounded my subscription to feminism, and, at one point, being so uncritical and ahistorical in my subscription that I excluded trans people of colour out of my discourse.

d’Entreves, Maurizio Passerin, “Hannah Arendt”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/arendt/>

Image: “Social Media” is in the Public Domain.