The entire frame is bogus. Starting with Socrates, westerners like Kant believe that cognition (computation) is a solitary endeavor. Thus humans are "vulnerable" to group-think and it's up to the philosopher to "break free" from the illusions of common society. But this is of course the "very persistent illusion." The reality is humans are group think machines, carefully evolved to carry out distributed cognition (language, consciousness -- which is always of others).
Kant is fundamentally wrong when he suggests that a single person is unenlightened if he only accepts such truths from others because any rational and sane person in any significant group (>150 people) must accept the vast majority of their knowledge from second hand and third hand sources -- or go live alone in the forest. His command -- “Have courage to use your own understanding!” -- must be directed to the society as a whole. An enlightened society would be precisely that which had freely investigated and shared all of its knowledge as widely as possible.
>But this is of course the "very persistent illusion." The reality is humans are group think machines, carefully evolved to carry out distributed cognition (language, consciousness -- which is always of others).
First, this presupposes ("of course") what it should prove.
Second, even if humans are indeed "group think machines, carefully evolved to carry out distributed cognition" that doesn't mean they arrive at a more accurate description of reality via that method -- just that this way of "group thinking" is evolutionary more advantageous.
A view that is accurate and one that has evolutionary fitness are not necessarily the same thing.
In fact, they can be the very opposite. E.g. an animal that inaccurately considers all instances of another group as one and the same based on limited prior experience (e.g. as enemies) will be more likely to survive that one that tries to accurately gauge what the intentions of each new member of the other group it meets actually are.
To quote Nietchze:
"Where has logic originated in men’s heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally have been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. The dominant tendency however, to treat as equal that which is merely similar - an illogical tendency for there is nothing equal - is what first created the whole basis for logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived; the beings not seeing correctly had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux" In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right had been cultivated with extra ordinary assiduity. The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and un just; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us."
Kant is fundamentally wrong when he suggests that a single person is unenlightened if he only accepts such truths from others because any rational and sane person in any significant group (>150 people) must accept the vast majority of their knowledge from second hand and third hand sources -- or go live alone in the forest. His command -- “Have courage to use your own understanding!” -- must be directed to the society as a whole. An enlightened society would be precisely that which had freely investigated and shared all of its knowledge as widely as possible.