Work · German Idealism & Its Heirs
An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding.
Introduction
A short essay that appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in December 1784. A year earlier the Berlin pastor Johann Friedrich Zöllner had asked in a footnote in the same journal what enlightenment actually is; Moses Mendelssohn also answered, a few months before Kant. Kant defines enlightenment as the human being’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity, the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. He distinguishes the public use of reason, as a scholar addressing readers, which must be free, from its private use in an office, where obedience may be required. We do not yet live in an enlightened age, he writes, but in an age of enlightenment.
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Connections
Taken up in
- The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere1962 · Jürgen Habermas
Answered in
- What Is Enlightenment?1984 · Michel Foucault
Criticized in
- Dialectic of Enlightenment1944 · Theodor W. Adorno
More works by Immanuel Kant
- 1795Perpetual Peace
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