Wisdom is easily dispensed and sometimes bitterly believed. No matter our education level, others may disagree vehemently with our conclusions on many a topic. For Michel Foucault, an attitude of enlightenment requires us to adopt a stance of bravery in the face of external opposition and internal beliefs. These latter may have worn themselves so deeply into our being that they now appear as self-evident. Certainty academia requires critical thinking.
Foucault decided that enlightened reasoning is when one can “dare to know” by utilizing enlightenment as an epistemic attitude, a way of knowing rather than a summation of our acquired knowledge (online). Enlightenment, for Foucault, is an action verb rather than a passive noun.
Part of this daring is simply being open-minded; remember, beliefs and facts only hurt people who are uncomfortable with themselves. For instance, a brick-and-mortar sociology of crime course I attended was flummoxed when key urban myths about gun ownership were muddied and debunked by the textbook. An example in present day is how, instead of guns being more of a risk to their owners, gun possession was found to deter perhaps 40% of possible break-ins. This, according to a study of criminals in custody: “40 percent of them had decided not to commit a crime because they ‘knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun.’” (online). Packin’ heat, bro. A tough pill to swallow, though, for students wedded to pacific beliefs about the dangers of an Americanization of self-defence. Why not just put up a security camera, an enlightened interlocutor asked? Facts are about adding knowledge; nothing is absolute in society, all is flux. Being brave in the face of this flow is key to what Foucault described as an enlightened life stance.
Students daily find themselves in a quandary where what the textbook states does not match their lived reality. For instance, in sociology, a lot of truths about race and gender are dispensed that may not jive with one’s hillbilly, er, rural realm. Years ago, I cheerfully described some garden variety feminism at my fire pit. Pallets were piled nine high, the brews were a-flowin’ and empties piling up, and class was (so to speak) in session. I described Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex concept that under patriarchy women become passive, consumable, objects of subjective masculine desire while men, no matter how filthy or uneducated of underwhlemingly-hung they were (this last bit received guffaws from the peanut gallery), feel empowered to dominate in their roles. Ol’ Simone didn’t go over so well with the attending ladies at this redneck gathering; these huntin’ and fishin’ dames felt plenty empowered precisely because they were obsessed over and generally desired by the menfolk. They wanted to be adored, by men, and that adoration gave them power to choose among assorted life options. Why be chaste when you can be chased? And sometimes, as one put it, “to just be ravaged” was just what they wanted. Laws of the jungle where everybody wins, it seems.
Cultural studies hit home in moments of real discourse with real people, far removed from the predictable confines of a college classroom. What seems enlightened within brick-and-mortar settings, like de Beauvoir’s feminist view on reality, can appear positively preposterous when we apply our reasoning out in the field (no pun intended). Enlightenment is about accepting opposition rather than being stubborn, being brave enough to accept differences and to tolerate notions we’re uncomfortable with. Do we want the facts, or do we want to be politically correct? Theory meets truth (sic) when we apply it personally.
In fact, who doesn’t want to be looked at and maybe even, just sometimes of course, treated exclusively as an object of desire? Clearly, this business of favouring active subjects versus receptive objects is more complex than one theory can account for. Foucault noted that this intersection of power and privilege and desire is something that enlightenment can only usefully dissect when it takes into account a divergence of realities each inhabiting particular (rather than universal) individual sensibilites and historical epochs. “For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it” (online). Liberty and enlightenment appear precisely within ambivalence, not as an outgrowth of final answer certainty.
Education adds to our selves and our social reality but it also teaches us to respect that all beliefs are valid because society is myriad in form. Gathering data and drawing conclusions in the social sciences doesn’t preclude multiple points of view, it simple allows us to make statements of probability. Provisional truth requires bravery because it incites opposition; you think but you don’t know for sure, someone can always say. And plus, people don’t much like to be pigeonholed.
But as we accrete evidence, we do learn things that can, personally and in practice, provide opportunities for us to be truly enlightened. On the other hand, to share our learning must include an acceptance of oppositions. As soon as we march into a social setting and announce that we’ve some reforms of mind and practice that we’d like to have adopted by others, as soon as possible given these reforms (to us) moral necessity, we’ve already taken our enlightenment to the proverbial outhouse in the eyes of others. Like or lump it, enlightenment (as Foucault implies) is problematic precisely because it’s changeable. Alteration and change is core to enlightenment’s ethic and it takes bravery to accept that we won’t know for certain things that we’d previously held for keeps. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why our diploma is so much more than just a sheet of paper.
