What is Enlightenment?

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!” – that is the motto of enlightenment.

Kant, Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784), Ak. 8:35, transl. L. W. Beck

Every word here is load-bearing. Enlightenment, for Kant, is not a state or a possession but an exit, a release — a movement each person has to make for themselves. And the obstacle is not out there; it is in us:

1. 1
   Immaturity (tutelage)

   Immature is whoever cannot use their own understanding without someone else's guidance — like a child, with others deciding on their behalf. The capacity to think is not missing; it simply goes unused.

2. 2
   Self-incurred

   That is exactly why this immaturity is self-incurred: its cause is not a “lack of reason” but a lack of resolution and courage to use one's reason. If you could think for yourself but let others do it, the responsibility is yours.

3. 3
   Laziness and cowardice

   “Laziness and cowardice” are Kant's blunt diagnosis of why so many people gladly remain immature for life — and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. Being immature is comfortable: a book that understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet — and the irksome work of thinking is taken care of.

4. 4
   Sapere aude!

   The motto of enlightenment is therefore an appeal to courage, not to intelligence: “Have courage to use your own reason!” Enlightenment does not begin with more knowledge but with the decision to judge for oneself.

Sources: Wikipedia: Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? · Full text of the essay on Wikisource

Sources: Kant, What Is Enlightenment?, Ak. 8:37 (officer, citizen; German original) · Ak. 8:38 (clergyman)

How does a whole society leave immaturity behind without collapsing into chaos? Kant's answer lies in a famous distinction: “the public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment.” The private use, by contrast, may often be narrowly restricted. Only the labels are confusing: “public” use is what someone does as a scholar addressing the reading public; “private” use is the use of reason precisely in a public post, where the holder of an office in state or church is bound by instructions.

Public use

Speaking and writing as a scholar before the reading public — free, critical, addressed to the world at large. This use “must always be free”.

Private use

Acting as the holder of an office or post — here obedience is required so that the commonwealth can function.

The officer

On duty he must not argue about the expediency or usefulness of an order; he must obey. But as a scholar he may publicly analyse the errors of the military service and submit them to his public's judgment.

The citizen

Taxes that fall due must be paid; refusing the obligation is not an option. But publicly, as a scholar, the same citizen may voice his thoughts on the fairness of such levies.

The clergyman

To his congregation and his catechism pupils he teaches according to the creed — the “symbol” — of the church he serves; that is what he was engaged for. But as a scholar he has complete freedom, indeed the calling, to communicate to the public his carefully examined thoughts on what is erroneous in that creed.

The point: criticism and obedience do not exclude each other — they simply have different places. One and the same person can function loyally in office and, as a writing mind, question the whole system. Reform runs through the public sphere, not through refusing one's duties.

Sources: Wikipedia: Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? · Full text on Wikisource (examples: officer, citizen, clergyman)

Curiously, Kant was not even first: the September 1784 issue of the same journal had already carried an answer by the Berlin philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the essay “On the question: what does 'to enlighten' mean?”. Kant had not yet read Mendelssohn's text while writing — in a note at the end he explains that he learned of it only on 30 September 1784, from an announcement; otherwise he would have held his own essay back. Luckily for the history of philosophy the essay stands all the same: we possess two independent answers to the same question.

Two hundred years later Michel Foucault took the question up again: in 1984 he published an essay under the same title. He largely reversed Kant's line of argument — and still concluded that enlightenment continues to demand work on our own limits: an attitude, not a finished project.

A brief look ahead: ten years later, in 1794 and once more in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, he published “The End of All Things” (Das Ende aller Dinge). Kant treated the pious theme of the passage from time into eternity with palpable irony, distinguishing a natural end in keeping with the moral order, a mystical end beyond our comprehension, and a perverted end that we bring about ourselves by misunderstanding the final purpose — a piece that he announced to his editor as one that would read “partly lamentable, partly droll” (letter of 10 April 1794).

Sources: Wikipedia: Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? · Wikipedia (German): Das Ende aller Dinge · Wikipedia (German): Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (Mendelssohn, Foucault)