Genuine Antagonisms and the Right Use of Reason: Conditions to Genuine Democracy in Kant

This paper explores the difference between realizing democracy and learning democracy to explain the disparity between the political experience of the people and the political system that governs them. It introduces the idea that genuine democracy is realized only through the indispensable dialectic between a developed enlightened reason that recognizes human value and individual liberty, and the moral obligation against social injustices that violate human dignity as a moral imperative. First, it argues that reason is a natural predisposition which needs to be developed. Thus human reason has been used from its crude forms to conditions of genuine freedom from instinct. Kant insists that the development in the use of reason is brought about by the unsociable sociability of the human person as a natural social condition. Second, political systems develop relative to the development of reason among the species. Thus it suggests that democracy is a fruit of a later development in the use of reason. And third, this paper concludes therefore that Philippine democracy does not accord the people with the benefits of its liberal principles because the people lack the proper reason to understand it, and the strength of moral will to establish it.