What is Enlightenment?: Encyclopedia - What is Enlightenment?

What is Enlightenment?

"Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?" is the title of a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. In the December 1784 edition of the Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly), Kant replied to the question posed a year earlier by the Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner, who was also an official in the Prussian government. Zöllner's question was addressed to a broad intellectual public, and a number of leading intellectuals replied with essays, of which Kant's is the most famous and has had the most impact. Kant's opening paragraph of the essay is a much-cited definition of a lack of Enlightenment as people's inability to think for themselves due not to their lack of intellect, but lack of courage.

Kant's essay also addressed the causes of a lack of enlightenment and the preconditions necessary to make it possible for people to enlighten themselves. He held it necessary that all church and state paternalism be abolished and people given the freedom to use their own intellect. Kant praised Frederick II of Prussia for creating these preconditions. Kant focussed on religious issues, saying that "our rulers" had less interest in telling citizens what to think in regard to artistic and scientific issues.

What is Enlightenment? - The text

Kant's opening paragraph of the essay is a much-cited definition of the Enlightenment:

The German word "Unmündigkeit" means not having attained the age of majority or legal adulthood. It is sometimes also translated as "tutelage" or "nonage" (the condition of "not [being] of age"). Kant, whose moral philosophy is centered around the concept of autonomy, is distinguishing here between a person who is intellectually autonomous and one who keeps him/herself in an intellectually heteronomous, i.e. dependent and immature status.

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