What Is Enlightenment?

Introduction

An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? appeared in the December 1784 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the leading journal of the Prussian Enlightenment, edited by Johann Erich Biester and Friedrich Gedike. A year earlier, in the same journal, the pastor Johann Friedrich Zöllner had remarked in a footnote that the question "What is enlightenment?" was almost as important as "What is truth?" and that no one had yet answered it. Moses Mendelssohn replied in September 1784; Kant, then sixty and three years after the Critique of Pure Reason, signed his own answer in Königsberg on 30 September, before he had seen Mendelssohn's.

His reply begins with one of the most famous definitions in the history of thought: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." Immaturity is not a lack of intelligence but a lack of courage to use one's own understanding without another's guidance; and Kant gives enlightenment its motto in the words of Horace: Sapere aude — "Dare to know." Laziness and cowardice keep most people under guardians who think for them, and an individual alone can hardly break free. But a public can enlighten itself, slowly, if only it is given freedom.

The heart of the essay is the distinction between the public and the private use of reason. In his office — as an officer, a taxpayer, a pastor — a person must obey; but as a scholar addressing the world of readers he must be free to say what he thinks, even about the faults of the institutions he serves. No generation may bind the next to an unalterable creed, for that would be a crime against human nature, whose vocation lies in progress. "Do we now live in an enlightened age? No, but in an age of enlightenment."

Short as it is, the essay has become the classic statement of what the Enlightenment meant. Its call to think for oneself, its defence of the freedom of the press and of public debate, and its view of history as the slow growth of human maturity have been taken up by generations of readers, and in the twentieth century Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas and others returned to it to ask what our own relation to enlightenment should be.

This edition gives the German text in its original form, as printed in the Berlinische Monatsschrift (vol. 4, December 1784, pp. 481–494), with the spelling of the time and Kant's own footnote; the page numbers are omitted and two misprints corrected. The translations follow the same text, paragraph by paragraph; brief notes identify the persons and quotations to which Kant refers, and the section titles have been added for this edition.