Solus Secedo and Sapere Aude: Cartesian Meditation as Kantian Enlightenment

• Published in: Con-textos kantianos Vol. 1; no. 2; pp. 261 - 279
• Main Author: Rajiva, Suma
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ediciones Complutense (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) 01.11.2015
• Subjects: Critical; Descartes; Enlightenment; Individual; Kant; Meditations; Reason; Space; Subject; Subject, Individual, Critical, Space, Reason, What is Enlightenment; What is Enlightenment
• ISSN: 2386-7655; 2386-7655
• DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.33976

Recently Samuel Fleischacker has developed Kant’s model of enlightenment as a “minimalist enlightenment” in the tradition of a relatively thin proceduralism focused on the form of public debate and interaction. I want to discuss the possibility that such a minimalism, endorsed by Fleischacker, Habermas, Rawls, and others, benefits from a metaphysics of critical individual subjectivity as a prerequisite for the social proceduralism of the minimalist enlightenment. I argue that Kant’s enlightenment, metaphysically thicker than much contemporary proceduralism, constitutes a recovery and transformation of a subjective interiority deeply Cartesian in spirit and central to the reciprocity of the community of subjects in What is Enlightenment. This opens a space for a site of resistance to the social. Descartes’ solus secedo describes the analogical space of such a resistance for Kant’s sapere aude. The Meditations thus point forward implicitly to how a rational subject might achieve critical distance from tradition in its various forms, epistemic, ethical, moral, and political.