REMEMBERING KANT ABOUT SHEEP-LIKE PEOPLE | By: Ernesto Rodríguez

Ernesto Rodriguez ([e-mail])

The notable German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) harshly criticized people who lack personality and are incapable of having their own independent criteria. In other words, he criticized people with a sheep mentality who only know how to applaud and follow the leader of the herd. He expressed this in his extraordinary essay entitled: ‘What is the Enlightenment?’ (1784). But before seeing fragments of this essay, it will be necessary to remember in broad strokes what the Enlightenment was.

The so-called ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Illuminism’, or ‘Age of Reason’, was the intellectual movement that took shape in the late 17th and 18th centuries and emphasized the power of Reason to achieve human progress. This Age of Reason rebelled once morest the irrational and absurd beliefs of the Middle Ages, that is, superstitions, and proposed critical reason represented by modern science. In effect, the Enlightenment was characterized by respect for the dignity of the human being, secularism, and distrust of all types of unjustified authority.

Kant, in his aforementioned essay on the Enlightenment, insists that man must free himself from the tutelage he imposes on himself, a tutelage by which other people think for him and decide for him. Let us look at Kant’s words: “The Enlightenment is the liberation of man from the tutelage he has imposed on himself. Tutelage is the inability to use one’s natural powers without direction from another person. This tutelage is called “self-imposed” because its cause is not an absence of rational capacity but simply a lack of courage and resolution to use one’s own reason without being directed by others. Sapere aude! (Dare to use your reason). Have the courage to use your own mind – That is the motto of the Enlightenment.”

Laziness and cowardice explain why so many people (…) remain for a large part of their lives under a guardianship and why it is so easy for some people to set themselves up as guardians for everyone else (…) If I have a religious pastor who has a conscience already prepared for me, if I have a doctor who decides my diet, then I need not exert myself. If I am willing to pay, I need not think. Others will do it for me (…) People are beginning to free themselves from self-imposed guardianship and are learning to freely analyze religious and other matters (…) Regarding civil liberties, there should be room for each person to stretch out to express his full capacities. As the use of reason gradually spreads and develops, it will first have an effect on character, so that people will be able to manage their freedom. Eventually it will have an effect on the principles of government, because rulers will realize that it is to their advantage to treat people according to the dignity they have as rational creatures.”

After seeing these accurate assessments of Kant, we can make some considerations. First of all, people who try to be autonomous, authentic, critical and independent of authority and established customs, can pay a price that can be very high, because this attitude bothers sheepish people. One of the authors who has insisted most on this aspect was the notable French writer Stendhal (1783-1842). Thus, in his great novel “The Red and the Black” (1830) the protagonist Julien Sorel enters the Seminary and earns the antipathy of the other seminarians because for them Sorel: “He was guilty of an enormous vice “he thought, he judged for himself”, instead of blindly following “authority” and example” (Book One, Chapter XXVI). Likewise in his extraordinary novel “The Charterhouse of Parma” (1839), in one part of the novel the Italian protagonist Fabrizio del Dongo tries to join a group of French soldiers, but they are uncomfortable with him because: “They found him very different from them, and this bothered them” (Book I, Chapter 4).

Secondly, the phenomenon of the sheep-like personality is most evident in governments led by despotic, authoritarian and messianic leaders. In Germany during the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) from 1933 to 1945, propaganda became stupefying, as the German citizen was told: “Do not think because the Führer thinks for you” (1).

NOTE: (1) Page 40 in Gilbert Badia (1972) “Introduction to National Socialist Ideology”. Editorial Ayuso. Madrid.