Kant bristles at the demand that he claims to hear “on all sides”: ” Don’t argue !” Officers tell us to obey, tax-officials to pay, clergy to pray in a certain way. But Kant wants to argue.
Or does he? Maybe not: “in some affairs which affect the interests of the commonwealth, we require a certain mechanism whereby some members of the commonwealth must behave purely passively, so that they may, by an artificial common agreement, be employed by the government for public ends (or at least be deterred from vitiating them). It is, of course, impermissible to argue in such cases; obedience is imperative.” An officer cannot quibble and argue when he receives an order from a superior: “He must simply obey.” Dittos with taxes: “The citizen cannot refuse to pay the taxes imposed upon him.”
Which is it? Argue? Or obey? Universal argument destroys social order; obedience is an offense against freedom. Kant wants it both ways, and solves the problem with a distinction between public and private.
Freedom, he says, is the freedom of the ” public use of man’s reason,” which must “always be free” and which “alone can bring about enlightenment among men.” On the other hand, “the private use of reason may quite often be very narrowly restricted . . . without undue hindrance to the progress of enlightenment.” Public use of reason means “that use which anyone may make of [reason] as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public .” Private uses of reason are those “which a person may make of it in a particular civil post of office with which he is entrusted.”
Thus, the officer who obeys the order from his superior has every right to publicize his criticisms of the military and subject them to the reading public for judgment; the tax-burdened citizen is free to voice “his thoughts on the impropriety or even injustice of such fiscal measures.”
This way of resolving the issue has several consequences. First, it reduces the public to a public of minds, or at best of books and readers. Freedom is freedom to express one’s mind in public. As soon as one tries to enact his thoughts, obedience kicks in. No doubt the opportunity to criticize with free impunity was a heady experience in the eighteenth century, but this enthusiasm made Kant miss the dangers implicit in his celebration of Frederick the Great’s enlightened policy: ” Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey !”
Second, Kant’s unexamined distinction between public and private splits citizens in two. “Privately,” the officer carries out orders that he may abhor, and may even castigate publicly. But he still carries them out. “Privately,” the clergyman teaches the catechism, and must do so, because he is “employed” by the church to do that. He must obey. But when he has a free evening, he has the liberty to challenge those very same teachings: “He will say: Our church teaches this or that, and these are the arguments it uses. He then extracts as much practical value as possible for his congregation from precepts to which he would not himself subscribe with full conviction.”
Third, Kant’s distinction cleverly confines the church to the “private” realm. The church is not a public. And Kant focuses his criticism quite self-consciously on the dangers that the church poses to enlightenment: “I have portrayed matters of religion as the focal point of enlightenment, i.e. of man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. This is firstly because our rulers have no interest in assuming the role of guardians over their subjects so far as the arts and sciences are concerned, and secondly, because religious immaturity is the most pernicious and dishonorable variety of all.”
Enlightened politics means tolerant politics, a politics that leaves “subjects to do whatever they find necessary for this salvation ( Seelenheil ), which is none of [the monarch’s] business.” So long as “he sees to it that all true or imagined improvements are compatible with the civil order,” of course. And, so long as he stops “anyone from forcibly hindering others from working as best they can to define and promote their salvation.” Clergy in particular are perfectly fine as guardians of their flocks; that is perfectly compatible with a free public space. But clergy have no business exercising any kind of public guardianship. They are not shepherds of the public, which has only one shepherd, the king. And the king himself must take care that he doesn’t use his power to “support the spiritual despotism of a few tyrants within his state against the rest of his subjects.”