Kant’s ‘What Is Enlightenment?’: Dare to Know

In December 1783, a Berlin clergyman named Johann Friedrich Zöllner published an essay arguing that couples should be married in church, and dropped into a footnote a question he plainly thought rhetorical: “What is enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as what is truth, should indeed be answered before one begins to enlighten! And yet I have never found it answered anywhere.” A year later, an obscure professor in the remote Prussian city of Königsberg answered it in a few thousand words. The essay Immanuel Kant sent to the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784 is shorter than a magazine article, contains no technical apparatus, and has outlived almost everything else written in that decade of pamphlets. It is the rare piece of philosophy that a person can read in twenty minutes and argue about for a lifetime.

The thesis arrives in the first sentence, and Kant never softens it. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Every word in that definition is doing work, and the essay is essentially an unfolding of what each one costs us to accept.

The crime is not ignorance but cowardice

Notice what Kant does not say. He does not define enlightenment as the accumulation of knowledge, the spread of science, or the defeat of superstition—the things we lazily file under “the Enlightenment” as a historical period. He defines it as a change in the relation a person has to his own mind. Unmündigkeit, the word translated as “immaturity,” is a legal term: it describes a minor, a ward, someone who cannot act on his own authority and must have a guardian sign for him. Kant’s startling move is to call most adults minors. They have the legal age but not the nerve.

And the immaturity is self-incurred—selbstverschuldet, self-indebted, the fault lying with the person and not with his faculties. “Immaturity is self-incurred if its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another.” The problem is never that we cannot think. It is that we will not. Kant’s diagnosis is moral before it is intellectual: the failure is one of Mut, courage, and of Faulheit und Feigheit, laziness and cowardice, which he names without euphemism. It is so comfortable to be a minor. “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.” The guardians, meanwhile, have an interest in keeping their flock docile, and have done a thorough job of persuading us that thinking for ourselves is dangerous.

Hence the motto, which Kant lifts from Horace and which becomes the slogan of the entire age: Sapere aude. Dare to know. Or more literally, dare to be wise—the verb is about the will, not the intellect. “Have courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.” It is an imperative, an order issued to a reader presumed to be hiding.

Freedom, and the strange thing Kant means by it

If the disease is self-incurred, the cure cannot simply be handed down by decree. Kant is explicit and a little melancholy about this: an individual can hardly work free of his immaturity alone, because he has grown fond of the chains. A revolution may topple a despot, but “a revolution may well bring about a falling off of personal despotism and of avaricious or tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform in ways of thinking.” New prejudices simply replace the old ones, serving the same crowd that cannot think for itself.

What enlightenment requires is freedom—but of a peculiar and carefully bounded kind, and here the essay does its most original work. Kant distinguishes the public use of reason from the private use, and he means almost the opposite of what those words now suggest to us. The public use of reason is what a man does “as a scholar before the entire reading public”—addressing the world, in print, as a rational being among rational beings. This must be free, completely and without exception. The private use is the use he makes of reason “in a particular civil post or office entrusted to him.” This may be restricted, because a functionary acting in his official capacity must do his job.

The examples are deliberately provocative. An officer who receives a command must obey it; he may not argue with his superior on the parade ground. But as a scholar, writing to the public, he is perfectly free to criticize the conduct of the military. A taxpayer must pay the tax levied on him; to refuse, while pretending to think, would be a scandal. But he may publicly write against the injustice of such levies. Most pointedly, a clergyman is bound to teach his congregation the doctrine of the church he serves, “for he was employed by it on that condition.” Yet “as a scholar he has complete freedom, indeed even the calling, to communicate to the public all his carefully tested and well-meaning thoughts” about defects in that very doctrine. Kant is carving out a protected space in which a man may, on his own authority and signing his own name, say to the world what he is forbidden to say from his pulpit. The pulpit belongs to the institution; the page belongs to him.

Living in an age of enlightenment, not an enlightened age

Near the end, Kant pauses on a question he poses to himself: “Do we presently live in an enlightened age?” His answer is a model of intellectual honesty. “The answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” The work is not done; men are not yet, on the whole, in a position to use their own understanding confidently in religious matters. But the obstacles are clearing, and the signs are unmistakable. The barrier is falling. We are, he says, on the road.

There is a sly political flattery in the closing pages—Kant names the age “the century of Frederick,” and praises the Prussian king for declining to dictate to his subjects in matters of conscience. But the flattery has a barb. Frederick’s greatness, Kant argues, lies precisely in his having understood the paradoxical formula at the heart of the essay: “Argue as much as you will and about whatever you will, but obey!” A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insurmountable barriers; a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom room to spread to its full capacity. The state that permits open argument, Kant suggests, ultimately finds that a people grown capable of thinking is one it can govern according to their dignity rather than against their will. It is a wager: free the page, and the rest will follow.

Whether that wager has paid off is a question every generation re-opens. What is undeniable is that no later defense of free inquiry—not Mill’s, not the American First Amendment tradition—improves on Kant’s central insight, that the enemy of an open mind is rarely the censor and usually the comfort of the censored. We outsource our judgment because judgment is exhausting and being wrong is humiliating, and the guardians are only too happy to relieve us of both. The essay’s enduring sting is that it refuses to let us blame anyone else.

Frequently asked questions

Is “What Is Enlightenment?” hard to read?

No—and that is part of its importance. Kant’s reputation rests on the forbidding architecture of the Critique of Pure Reason, a book that has defeated generations of readers. This essay is the opposite: brief, direct, free of jargon, written for the educated public of a monthly magazine rather than for specialists. It is the best possible introduction to Kant’s moral seriousness without the machinery, and one of the few major works of philosophy that asks nothing of the reader except attention and a willingness to be implicated.

What does “Sapere aude” actually mean?

The phrase comes from Horace’s Epistles, where it appears in a homely fable about a fool waiting for a river to stop flowing before he crosses. Literally it means “dare to be wise,” though Kant glosses it as “have courage to use your own understanding.” The point of the Latin tag is that it predates the Enlightenment by eighteen centuries: Kant is insisting that the obligation to think for oneself is not a modern invention but an ancient demand that humanity has spent most of its history evading.

How does this connect to the rest of Kant’s philosophy?

Autonomy—literally “self-legislation,” giving oneself one’s own law—is the keystone of Kant’s entire ethics. The essay applies that principle to the public sphere: the same capacity that, in the moral philosophy, makes a person the author of the moral law makes him, here, capable of being the author of his own beliefs rather than the borrower of others’. Reading this short piece first gives you the human stakes of the more technical works.

The Erato Press edition presents Kant’s essay in a clear, faithful translation, framed by an introduction that situates the 1784 text in its quarrel with Zöllner and the Berlin Enlightenment, and annotates the legal and Horatian resonances a modern reader is likely to miss. For a work this compact, context is everything—and we have built the edition to give you the argument whole, with the scaffolding that lets its every word land.

Read the Erato Press edition →