Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

Immanuel Kant

2024년 5월 · Minerva Heritage Press

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A new translation of Immanuel Kant's "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" from the original German manuscript first published in 1784. This new edition contains an afterword by the translator, a timeline of Kant's life and works, and a helpful index of Kant's key concepts and intellectual rivals. This translation is designed for readability, rendering Kant's enigmatic German into the simplest equivalent possible, and removing the academic footnotes to make this critically important historical text as accessible as possible to the modern reader. Kant defines enlightenment as the process of freeing oneself from self-imposed immaturity, caused primarily by a lack of courage to use one's intellect without the guidance of others. This is an inherently dialectal process, a foundation of his theory of right, laying the foundation of Hegel’s theories. The essay emphasizes the role of individual reason and the importance of independent thought, criticizes the tendency of people to rely on others for understanding and moral guidance, and advocates the public use of reason as a pathway to enlightenment, distinguishing between the public and private use of reason and emphasizing the social implications of enlightenment and the limitations on individual freedom.

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher whose work in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics shaped the course of Western philosophy. In his landmark work, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposed "transcendental idealism," asserting that human knowledge is limited by the mind's structures, which mediate our understanding of reality. This "Copernican revolution" in philosophy argued that we can only know phenomena (appearances) and not noumena (things-in-themselves). In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant introduced the "categorical imperative," a foundational principle in ethics that calls for actions to be universally applicable. Kant's focus on autonomy, moral duty, and rationality laid the groundwork for modern ethical and political thought, and his ideas continue to influence fields such as philosophy, law, and cognitive science, positioning him as a central figure in the Enlightenment.