Kant - Twain Essay

It is very interesting to see two people from different times observing human action in society. The two assigned readings in my opinion show that Kant and Twain are not talking exactly about the same subject but that does not mean they don’t complement each other.

Kant is trying to find out what makes some one enlightened. Kant describes enlightening as "the capacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of others" this I can interpret that for him there is only one answer, and that is to think outside of the box. What I mean by thinking outside of the box is to encourage one’s self to think further than what you have been taught to think. There is definitely some value in thinking outside of the typical groups that exist in society. A person should be able to read something, critique it, and draw his or her own conclusions about it. It is more pure and more honest to do this. Most persons live in societies where people approve of what you think, read, or write, and to a certain extent that is normal. However, that makes learning and thinking more difficult and it limits the potential for humans to make progress. Kant says that even with those limits you can make some progress but it is very slow. Kant defines this inability, of making use of our own understanding, as is nonage or minority. He also describes that a great part mankind causes of remain in nonage because of laziness and cowardice. He also describes the difficulty there is for every single man to extricate himself from that nonage because it almost becomes natural for him and because it easier to live without the responsibilities of having your own understanding.

I think that it is not the easiest way but if there is an atmosphere of individual thinking in a society is much more free, because defending my freedom of thinking will automatically defend someone else’s freedom of thinking.

In my life I have experienced many situations like the ones Kant describes. I’m going to share one of them: When I was in high school the only thing that is important to me and to my classmates was to graduate, party,  get into a good university. The standard for most of us was to study in another country. The reason was because we thought international education is better, not knowing how Guatemalan universities have such high standards too. Not all of my classmates, but the majority of the students believed that the best thing to do after graduating, was studying in another country because all the cool people at my high school said so and also thought that the Guatemalan high society should attend universities abroad.  I have to admit that I at some point was thinking as some of my classmates and friends did and also I combined it with some family problems which caused me to want to go as far away as I possibly could.

I had the opportunity of going outside of Guatemala and study in another country. I chose Italy because I liked fashion design and I knew Italy was the best place to study that. I stayed in Guatemala for 8 months before leaving for Italy and in it was during that time when I really discovered what I´m passionate about. I discovered that I like to help families in extreme poverty. I am passionate about raising money for creating programs that help develop people that live in such conditions. I stopped thinking about what my friends thought of me and stopped caring when they judged me for what I liked to do and finally I started living my life instead of being what others wanted me to be. I started knowing more about whom I really was.
The work I did was in a foundation that helps people that live in extreme poverty. It was my own understanding that helped me achieve what I did, because no one had done what I did, in the way that I did it. So there was no system of how to make and manage the fundraising department. I was the first one who started working in this area in a more formal way and created projects with that goal. I think it was an incredible opportunity for myself that resulted from not continuing to care what my friends and family wanted or expected from me. I thought Political Science was the best place to learn how become a better fundraiser but I decided to come to the MPC, because it was a better way to achieve it, because this method makes me learn in a more open way without giving too much importance of other people’s approval.

Coming back to the discussion about Kant and Twain, it is safe to say that Mark Twain is not necessarily talking about enlightenment. He is talking about the limits that situations in life put on the way we think. He even talks more about the way we act, because he argues that we act but not in a very reasonable way. He says we do so because we as human beings look for the approval of others. In other words, we approve of ourselves if others approve us and that leads us to conformity. We are happy as long as we are accepted. From the superficial things like fashion, to the more profound things such as politics or spirituality, we surrender our true selves in order to gain acceptance, appreciation, honor and glory, but we may be killing the real us. Twain named these way of thinking “corn phone opinions”, which are the ones that are based on the self-approval of others in order to feel good with ourselves and safeguard our prosperity.



In this sense I have also experienced the effect of corn phone opinions, in the world of fashion design.  Some years ago in one of my fashion design lesson, I learned how the fashion is created. It starts in Europe where some designers create clothes as a way of art expression. They present their designs in many luxury fashion files, magazines, etc. This kinds of designs are very extravagant and most of the time no one can wear those types of clothes in their daily lives. However, these designs create a new tendency in the way people get dressed around the world. After these designs are presented other houses of fashion start doing their designs using the first extravagant designs as a reference. They create these tendencies but in a more commercial way. Later on, the others brands that are even more commercial, than the ones I mentioned before, and sell their designs in a way that is more accessible to the consumers.  Some examples are the gap, old navy etc.  Even further down are the massive world manufacturers, where most of the people buy their clothes and that are the last link of a tendency that started as an expression from a designer in Europe years before. These  clothes are the ones you can eventually find in public markets even here in Guatemala. When those popular markets use this type of tendency is when the cycle ends and all the brands are part of this process.

All the people in the world get dressed they way they do because of someone else´s idea. It is incredible how they all copy an initial tendency, conforming to it and sometimes using something that we didn't like but we make it seem like we did in the name of being “in fashion, which in the end means what others expect me to wear in order to be accepted. 

As I was saying at the beginning, Kant and Twain complement each other, because from different perspectives they both agree that we love to belong, but that belonging is limiting our ability to think for ourselves. I believe it takes courage to think differently and we should but we have to know that responsibility is part of that freedom of thought. That independent thought should also be used with caution because it could cause us problems. Disapproval of our ideas could be dangerous in certain situations, so one has to balance between freedom and security. One has to be wise to know when and how to express different ideas and do it in a respectful manner because we are first individuals, but we also live in a society where no one can survive on its own. A free market is not an imaginary body, it is the sum of many persons, their thoughts, and decisions, so wise choices within our freedom of thinking should be as important as independence of thought itself.