Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
"is the title of a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”
He argues that the immaturity is self-inflicted not from a lack of understanding, but from the lack of courage to use one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another.
Our fear of thinking for ourselves.
Kant, whose moral philosophy is centered around the concept of autonomy, is distinguishing here between a person who is intellectually autonomous and one who keeps him/herself in an intellectually heteronymous, i.e. dependent and immature status.
It is difficult for individuals to work their way out of this immature, cowardly life because we are so uncomfortable with the idea of thinking for ourselves.
Kant says that even if we did throw off the spoon-fed dogma and formulas that we have been given all our lives, we would still be stuck, because we have never “cultivated our minds.”
The key to throwing off these chains of mental immaturity is reason.
There is hope that the entire public could become a force of free thinking individuals if they are free to do so.
Why?
There will always be a few people, even among guardians, who think only for themselves. They will help the rest of us to “cultivate our minds.”
Kant's opening paragraph to his essay is a much-cited definition of a lack of Enlightenment as people's inability to think for themselves due not to their lack of intellect, but lack of courage.
Kant's essay also addressed the causes of a lack of enlightenment and the preconditions necessary to make it possible for people to enlighten themselves."[1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_is_Enlightenment%3F
dapaoo.
