I revisit Kant’s ‘What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?’ (1786) – being a foundation for (and making explicit) the modernist-progressivist account of education. Kant’s text discusses how to ‘orient’ reason, i.e. how to find careful guidance when speculating and making claims about trans-empirical phenomena, mainly God, but also the future of our world and the goals of education (uplifting humankind from a fallen nature). We need a compass, to be found solely within the confines of reason itself, insofar it responds to its own ‘internal urge’, viz. when reason lays down its own rules and affirms its own freedom. Surprisingly, to illustrate the need for ‘orientation’, Kant uses two remarkably concrete examples of finding one’s way in the dark to show that empirical data alone won’t suffice. We also need a subjective criterium, viz. a lived body with a right and a left side. All things considered, this is not a transcendental argument, but precisely an illustration of William James’ radical empiricist approach (1976): an immediate givenness of relations within a plane of experience, preceding any clear subject-object distinction. Moreover Kant identifies the orientation of speculative reason as a matter of faith. Interestingly, James’ position is basically about faith too: trusting possible connections with the world, to intensify our experiences as worldly creatures, and to render possible new connections and unforeseen directions of making world (Lapoujade 2019). Both, however, also radically diverge, as for Kant reasonable faith consists of safeguarding reason’s autonomy by a priori limiting possibilities and closing off history (futurity). In James, faith is the opposite: it is about giving up freedom (as self-limitation) in view of the indeterminacy of the future. And so, by reading Kant with James, I argue that we need to (re)conceptualize ‘orientation’, albeit in a radically empirical and historical way. This is (1) not in terms of curtailing future possibilities, but by taking an attitude of faith in an indeterminate future, which (2) (re)connects to and resonates with an experiential plane in which connections with the world can be tried out and constituted. Otherwise put: exposing oneself to the world and being inspired by its possibilities. This, I argue further, is a thoroughly educational endeavor, as it can be further defined as studying the world out of love for this world so as to keep its future open. Then, education, after the demise of progress, retrieves orientation again.

James, W. (1976). Essays in Radical Empiricism. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Kant, I. (1786). Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientiren? Berlinische Monatschrift Oktober 1786, 304-330 Lapoujade, D. (2019). William James. Empiricism and Pragmatism (Trans. Thomas Lamarre). Durham (NC): Duke University Press