Of the things considered radical, which are truly ‘incommensurable’ in the sense Thomas Kuhn used the term as that which requires a sudden or all-at-once shift in understanding? It occurs to me that our cultural preoccupation with marking the difference between Gen Z and millennials, between trans and non-binary individuals, between greater and lesser knowledge about certain touchy subjects you are better off to pretend to know (trust me), that these are questions of ontological concern, having to do with the nature of man, the nature of being and existence. The preoccupation with ‘being-living’ as distinct from psychology and social behavior is identified as a thematic concern among 20th century writers in Shoukry (2018). But it seems to me that, to the extent something is accorded a greater probability to exist, yet only perceived without being encountered, there is the chance of exposure fatigue and mutually assured misrecognition. Exposure fatigue is what obtains with distanced, heavily mediated dissemination of information that purports to be vital in tandem with an absence if not denial of opportunities for real questioning and interaction. If there is a fear of persecution, this is less evident to me than an intolerance with any final, exasperated interest on my part, real or feigned, in just what is it I should know. Before resorting to conversion (Kuhn’s solution), how much of perspectival ‘incommensurability’ is merely imperious impatience with any nuanced understanding that doesn’t readily comport with mass disseminated, dumbed down talking points? The latter is the chaff that must be separated out before we would wish death on alleged dinosaurs. The risk of religiosity must be accounted for in the sense Plato cautioned against derived understandings, in which ‘derived’ is what it means to use religious law to define ‘holiness.’ Given the difficulty in tracking down and correcting for derived error (even greater than the difficulty I have in admitting my own), I feel there needs to be more discussion on this. Based on my reading of Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals section on enlightenment, there is a call for the lifting of narrow restrictions on the public use of reason to allow for public intellectuals and a concomitant call to narrow or restrict the private use of reason to avoid corruption and influence peddling. Kant writes:
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. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him.
Note that reason in the second case is still public, defined as civil. It’s possible this last specification is commonly overlooked, because it would help to explain present practice that uses mass media platforms to discredit social media as an acceptable site for the exercise of individual reason. Even though the ends of state government may be at odds with Kant’s end that is in the attainment of self-sovereignty in the exercise of reason, he goes on to make clear an “artificial unanimity” must be preserved that requires passive obedience to allow certain affairs to be conducted in the interest of the community.
I have a sudden comical image of a hat that is made ephemeral by the wind. The arrival of reason is sometimes like that. It catches by surprise; one waits for its repetition only to realize its value in its single, fleeting occurrence. Which is to say, in my reaching back to September 30, 1784, the date Kant signed off on his treatise from Konigsberg, Prussia, that his view of the end of enlightenment is most adequate to intersectionality today.