Obedience
Kant: Obedience
Why it matters
Obedience is an essential feature in the character of a child, whether boy or girl.
Kant’s working definition
Adopting a particular course of action from a sense of duty means obeying the dictates of reason.
Two types of obedience
| Type | What it means | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute | Obedience without question | Prepares the child to obey laws later as a citizen, including laws they may not like |
| Voluntary | Obeying what feels good and reasonable and moral | The mature form, where the person endorses what they obey |
The context of obedience
- Compulsion in education must be reconciled with the individual’s personal freedom.
- Morality is obedience to the reason behind conduct, not to a person.
- Obedience in education is always applied in the context of enlightened reason.
- In obedience to moral law, ethics, and religion, a person finds proof of their freedom and their membership in a moral order of the world.
Few words make modern educators flinch quite like obedience. The word smells of unquestioning authority, of children silenced and adults imposing. Kant uses the word, but he uses it carefully, and what he means by it is closer to the work of mature reason than to the work of authoritarian control.
Why obedience matters
Kant says obedience is an essential feature in the character of a child, especially of a boy or girl.
The phrasing is gender-inclusive in a way that is worth noting. Kant explicitly extends obedience as a needed virtue to both boys and girls. Many educators of his time would have framed obedience as a boy’s virtue (in service of military discipline) or as a girl’s virtue (in service of household order). Kant treats it as a universal childhood requirement.
The reason is practical and developmental. A child does not yet have the reason needed to evaluate every situation on their own. They are still learning what good actions look like. Until that learning is far enough along, they need to follow the lead of those further along the path. Obedience is the practice that lets them follow that lead.
This is not blind obedience. The child obeys someone who is showing them how to think; the obedience is provisional and ends when the child can reason for themselves.
A child does not yet have the reason to evaluate every situation alone
The child is still learning what good actions look like. Until that learning is far enough along, they need to follow the lead of those further along the path. Obedience is provisional; it ends when the child can reason for themselves.
The definition: obeying reason
Kant gives a tight working definition of what obedience means in the mature sense.
Adopting a particular course of action from a sense of duty means obeying the dictates of reason.
The substitution is the whole game. Obedience is to reason, not to a person. The teacher, the parent, the law, the religious authority: none of these is the ultimate object of obedience. Each of them is, at best, the messenger of reason. Reason itself is what the person obeys.
This recasts every act of obedience as a moral act. A child who obeys a parent only because the parent is bigger has not yet obeyed reason. A child who has come to see the reasonableness of the parent’s instruction and acts on it is obeying reason. The outward behaviour can be identical; the moral substance is completely different.
For an educator, this definition is the foundation of everything else in this section. Obedience to reason is the goal. Obedience to a person is a stepping stone, useful only as long as the person is helping the child get to obedience to reason.
Obeying the dictates of reason
Obedience is to reason, not to a person. The teacher, parent, or authority is at best a messenger of reason. A child who obeys a parent only because the parent is bigger has not obeyed reason. A child who sees the reasonableness has.
Absolute obedience
Kant distinguishes two types of obedience. The first is absolute obedience: obedience without question.
This sounds bad to a modern reader. Is Kant really recommending that children obey without thinking? The careful answer is: yes, in some cases, for specific reasons.
Absolute obedience is necessary to prepare the child for the fulfilment of laws they will have to obey later, as adult citizens, even when they may not like those laws. A citizen does not get to pick which laws to obey. A road traffic law applies whether the citizen agrees with it or not. A tax law applies whether the citizen finds it fair or not. The adult citizen must have learned, at some point in childhood, the basic capacity to obey a rule they did not personally endorse.
Absolute obedience is the practice ground for this capacity. The child does what the parent or teacher says, full stop, even when they would rather not. The practice builds the muscle the adult will later need.
Two conditions matter. First, the rules being absolutely obeyed must themselves be reasonable. A child practising absolute obedience to unreasonable rules learns something else (compliance under abuse). Second, absolute obedience is a stage, not the end state. The child progresses to voluntary obedience as they mature.
Obedience without question
Necessary at a stage so the child develops the capacity to obey laws they may not personally endorse, as they will have to do as adult citizens. The rules being obeyed must themselves be reasonable; absolute obedience is a stage on the way to voluntary obedience.
Voluntary obedience
The second and more mature type is voluntary obedience: obeying what feels good and reasonable and moral.
The phrasing is careful. Feels good is not just hedonistic comfort; it is the satisfaction of acting in accord with one’s own deepest sense of what is right. Reasonable is the rational endorsement of the principle being obeyed. Moral is the alignment with universal moral law.
A person in voluntary obedience obeys because they have looked at the rule, found it reasonable, and made it their own. The outward behaviour is the same as absolute obedience. The inward state is completely different. The person is not being controlled; they are choosing.
This is the mature form Kant wants children to grow into. Absolute obedience is the scaffolding; voluntary obedience is the building. A pedagogy that leaves a person stuck in absolute obedience for life has failed in its deepest aim.
Obeying what feels good, reasonable, and moral
The mature form of obedience. The person has looked at the rule, found it reasonable, and made it their own. The outward behaviour is the same as absolute obedience; the inward state is completely different. The person is choosing, not being controlled.
The context: enlightened reason
Kant adds a critical condition on the whole topic. The principle of obedience in education is always applied in the context of enlightened reason.
This means several things. The teacher demanding obedience must be reasonable. The rules being obeyed must be reasonable. The student’s growing capacity to reason must be respected and developed, not suppressed. Obedience that operates outside this context is no longer Kantian obedience; it is something else, and something worse.
The reconciliation Kant has in mind is between two things that look opposed:
- Obedience to legal constraints and the constraints of society. A child has to learn to obey, full stop.
- The individual’s ability to make use of personal freedom. The same child must grow into a free, reasoning adult.
Kant insists these are not opposed in the long run. A child who has practised obedience to reasonable rules under reasonable adults grows into an adult who can use freedom well. A child who has either never practised obedience or has practised obedience to unreasonable rules grows into an adult who either cannot follow any rules or follows rules without thinking. Both failures are damaging.
Obedience to reasonable rules under reasonable adults builds the capacity for free, reasoning adulthood
The two look opposed but are not. A child who has practised obedience to reasonable rules grows into an adult who can use freedom well. The reconciliation requires that the rules and the adults enforcing them be reasonable.
Morality is obedience to reason
Kant closes the section with a deeper claim. Morality is obedience to the reason behind conduct.
A moral life is not random goodness. It is a life lived in obedience to reason. The person who acts well by reasoning carefully and following the reasoning is moral. The person who acts well by accident, by luck, by the absence of temptation, is not yet moral in Kant’s strict sense.
Kant adds that in obedience to moral law, ethics, and religion, a person finds proof of their own freedom and their membership in a moral order of the world. The phrasing is heavy. The point is that obeying reason is paradoxically the deepest experience of freedom a person can have. A person who follows their appetites is not free; they are pushed around by what they happen to feel. A person who obeys reason is free; they are choosing in accordance with what is universally rational.
This binds the obedience theme back to enlightenment. The enlightened person is the one who has the courage to use their own reason. The morally trained person is the one who obeys that reason. The two are the same person from two angles.
Obedience to the reason behind conduct
A moral life is not random goodness. It is a life lived in obedience to reason. The person who acts well by reasoning carefully and following the reasoning is moral. The person who acts well by luck or absence of temptation is not yet moral in Kant’s strict sense.
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