«Sapere aude»: dare to know, have the courage to use your own understanding. With this motto Immanuel Kant answered, in 1784, a question posed by a Berlin magazine: what is Enlightenment? His reply, in the short essay «An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?», is still one of the most quoted pages in philosophy, and it speaks to us too.
For Kant, Enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from a state of immaturity for which it is itself responsible. «Immaturity» is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. And the fault is ours, says Kant, when the cause is not a lack of intelligence but a lack of resolve and courage.
Kant knows well why it is so comfortable to stay in that condition: if someone else thinks for us, we save ourselves the effort. A book that reasons in our place, a guide who has a conscience for us, a doctor who decides our diet: as long as we can pay or delegate, there is no need to strive. Thinking for yourself takes time, exposes you to the risk of being wrong and, at times, to disagreement with the people around you.
What does it mean today? It does not mean rejecting experts or doing everything alone: that would be another form of naivety. It means telling apart relying on something after understanding it from delegating out of laziness. This applies to the news we read, the advice that reaches us from social media, the algorithm that suggests what to watch and, at work, that «we have always done it this way» that nobody has ever checked.
A practical exercise, in three questions to ask in front of a belief or a piece of news: who says so? On what basis? What would change if it were not true? One belief a week is enough to train the muscle. If this reminds you of Plato’s allegory of the cave, which we discussed a few days ago, it is no accident: the thread that joins them is the effort, and the value, of looking beyond the shadows.
One clarification, in fairness: Kant does not call for rebelling on principle. In the same essay he separates the public use of reason, which must be free, from the use made in a given role or office, where one may obey while continuing to think. The courage he asks for is first of all inner. And you: which belief have you checked recently, discovering something unexpected? Tell me in the comments.
Sources
- Kant, I. (1784). Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? Berlinische Monatsschrift.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, «Immanuel Kant». plato.stanford.edu
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