Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction ( naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' – that is the motto of enlightenment. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. To the extent that the Enlightened state (and Kant had Frederick II’s Prussia in mind) permits free inquiry and expression, a gradual conversion of monarchical absolutism into self-government by the educated and propertied classes – the liberal, as opposed to populist democratic, ideal – becomes conceivable and desirable.Įnlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. This famous essay is a foundational document of German liberalism, in that it argues for intellectual freedom and freedom of expression as the means by which human beings attain moral and citizenly self-determination.

He exerted a profound influence on German cultural-intellectual life, most notably by arguing that knowledge and the world are constructed by the autonomous workings of human reason and moral imagination (here he opposed the Lockean tradition, which tended to assign the human mind the more passive function of reflecting the rationality of the perceived world). In the 1770s, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) emerged as a philosopher of major European stature. Immanuel Kant, 'What is Enlightenment?'' (1784)

Immanuel kant enlightenment