What does Kant mean by the public and private use of reason?

Question

What does Kant mean by the public and private use of reason?

Answer 1

"The man who . . . closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant . . . .

"Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

"The motive of all the attacks on man’s rational faculty—from any quarter, in any of the endless variations, under the verbal dust of all the murky volumes—is a single, hidden premise: the desire to exempt consciousness from the law of identity. The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses identity, that it is a faculty of a specific nature, functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after another, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard identity as the disqualifying element of consciousness.

"No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.

"If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as pragmatism, logical positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant." annotized from Ayn Rand

My site: Thank you very much for looking at it. http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Answer 2

The majority is always wrong.

Public reason - is when people follow a thinker rather than thinking for themselves.

Private reason - is when one man works it out for himself.