Kant and the Digital World: From the Public of Use of Reason to the Digitalization of the Public Sphere

The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the repercussions the digitalization of the public sphere is having on politics, and particularly on democracy and citizenship from a Kantian perspective. The Kantian thesis of the right use of Reason as its public use becomes the point of intersection between epistemology and political theory insofar as the presupposition of the realization of Reason is the institutional realm of the public sphere pertaining to a polity that enforces the freedom of expression. According to Kant, depriving people of their freedom to communicate their thoughts to their fellow subjects, i.e. a publicum, is tantamount to depriving them of their freedom of thought. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant refers to sensus communis as the normative measure of assessing the validity of our judgments when compared with those of others. While truth or objectivity are the criteria of assessing a cognitive or scientific proposition, a judgment is right if it bears the test of publicity. The main question the paper will set and attempt to answer concerns the extent to which the revolutionary character of the new digital media does succeed in meeting the normative requirements of the public use of Reason. Admittedly, the novelty of the platform character of the new media consists in allowing all potential users to become not only equal participants in a global discourse crossing with unprecedented speed temporal and spatial boundaries but also entitled authors who make their own spontaneous contributions as soon as they get digitally networked and exchange their views. That unregulated character of inclusion, however, points to a rather irresponsible egalitarianism which highlights the major difference between the new digital media and the Kantian account of the public use of Reason. The platformization of a public sphere freely accessible to all to make interventions which are not checked by anyone distorts the Enlightenment idea of the public use of Reason into what Habermas calls “the plebiscite of ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ clicks.” Moreover, it gives birth to the “fake news” which are the material the so-called “post-truth” regime is made of, and degenerates the democratic spirit of modernity’s public sphere into a grotesque amalgam of “fake news”, “conspiracy theories,” irrational cries and animosity as the obverse of the fully emancipated user and reminiscent of Arendt’s analyses of totalitarianism as the loss of judgment, truth, and, hence, our “common world.”