Meeting 5: What is Enlightenment?
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Kant argues that enlightenment involves humans emerging from self-imposed immaturity through courageously using their own understanding rather than relying on external guidance. He claims most people remain willingly immature due to laziness and find it easier to let others think for them through books, pastors, physicians, etc. Guardians have ensured the public sees maturity as dangerous by making them dependent on authority. True enlightenment only requires freedom of public reason and debate on all matters, which advances progress, while private reason may be restricted to maintain order. The 18th century represents an age of enlightenment, not complete enlightenment, as obstacles to independent thought are gradually diminishing.
![IMMANUEL KANT, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784)
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from
another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of
understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance
from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own
understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men,
long after nature has released them from external guidance, nonetheless
gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish
themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to
serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to
determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not
think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/lecture5-whatisenlightenment-130803072208-phpapp02/85/Meeting-5-What-is-Enlightenment-2-320.jpg)
Meeting 5: What is Enlightenment?
- 1. HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: 1648 TO PRESENT LECTURE 5: WAS IST AUFKLARUNG?
- 2. IMMANUEL KANT, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from external guidance, nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.
- 3. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts. Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.
- 4. What do you think Kant would say about the state of education in the 21st -century United States?
- 5. Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. But on all sides I hear: "Do not argue!" The officer says, "Do not argue, drill!" The tax man says, "Do not argue, pay!" The pastor says, "Do not argue, believe!” Only one ruler in the World says, "Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!” In this we have examples of pervasive restrictions on freedom. But which restriction hinders enlightenment and which does not, but instead actually advances it? I reply: The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind; the private use of reason may, however, often be very narrowly restricted, without otherwise hindering the progress of enlightenment. By the public use of one's own reason I understand the use that anyone as a scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world. I call the private use of reason that which a person may make in a civic post or office that has been entrusted to him. Now in many affairs conducted in the interests of a community, a certain mechanism is required by means of which some of its members must conduct themselves in an entirely passive manner so that through an artificial unanimity the government may guide them toward public ends, or at least prevent them from destroying such ends. Here one certainly must not argue, instead one must obey.
- 6. If it is now asked, "Do we presently live in an enlightened age?" the answer is, "No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment." As matters now stand, a great deal is still lacking in order for men as a whole to be, or even to put themselves into a position to be able without external guidance to apply understanding confidently to religious issues. But we do have clear indications that the way is now being opened for men to proceed freely in this direction and that the obstacles to general enlightenment--to their release from their self-imposed immaturity--are gradually diminishing. In this regard, this age is the age of enlightenment, the century of Frederick.
- 7. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the eighteenth century characterized by the idea that humans could apply their reason to the improve nature and society. Central to this was the concept of progress.
- 8. 1. Wars of Religion 2. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) • Louis XIV, absolutism, and the Huguenots 3. Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica (1687) 4. John Locke’s Treatises on Government (1689) and Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) • State of nature, natural laws, natural rights • Tabula rasa Origins of Enlightenment Thought
- 9. 1. Natural Laws / Science 2. Reason / Education / Progress 3. Superstition / Deism / Atheism 4. Despotism / Equality 5. Social Justice The “Enlightenment Project”
- 10. The Public Sphere: The Structure of Enlightenment
- 11. The Public Sphere: The Structure of Enlightenment • print and literacy • print and epistolary networks • coffeehouses and salons • trade and infrastructure • “middling sorts” • the public and political criticism
- 12. Comparing Documents When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Thomas Jefferson, et al. The United States Declaration of Independence (1776)