This Day in Philosophy — 17 August: the death of Frederick the Great

Frederick II of Prussia — Frederick the Great — died on 17 August 1786 at the palace of Sanssouci, near Potsdam. He had been on the throne since 1740.

Why should the death of a monarch enter the philosophical calendar? Because the most contested concept of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment — enlightened despotism — took shape largely around him.

Kant's essay#

In 1784 Immanuel Kant published a short piece in the Berlinische Monatsschrift under the title “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”. Its opening is one of the most quoted sentences in philosophy:

“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”

The criterion Kant proposes is no less famous: Sapere aude — “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding.”

The less familiar side of the essay is that it refers to Frederick directly. Kant describes his own age not as “an enlightened age” but as “an age of enlightenment”, and ties that description to Frederick's rule.

An odd formula#

The distinction Kant draws here is a fine one, and it is still disputed.

The public use of reason — a scholar, a writer, a citizen addressing a reading public — should, on his account, acknowledge no limit at all. The private use of reason, meaning the work a person does while holding a particular office, may be restricted so that order is maintained. The officer carries out his orders without argument; the same man, writing as an author, may criticise the military order.

Kant ties this to the formula in which he sums up Frederick's position: “Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, only obey.”

The sentence can be read in two directions. On one reading it describes a real space opened up for freedom of thought at a moment when censorship was being relaxed. On the other, because it makes political obedience a condition, it looks like a compromise that leaves the freedom on paper.

Voltaire and the court#

Frederick was a monarch who wrote in French, played the flute and composed philosophical texts. He kept up a long correspondence with Voltaire, who lived for a time at Potsdam. The friendship ended disagreeably — the mutual vanity of two clever men played its part, and so did the inequality between a sovereign and a philosopher.

That rupture sums up a tension within the Enlightenment itself: where does the philosopher stand between counselling power and ornamenting it?

The question that remains#

The argument over enlightened despotism is not finished. Governments that reform from above, technically competent but answerable to no one, are still defended and still attacked.

Kant's text is still treated as the measure in that argument — because it shows the possibility and the limit on the same page.