FRAGMENTS

FROM

GERMAN PROSE WRITERS.

FRAGMENTS

FROM

GERMAN PROSE WRITERS.

ILLUSTRATED WITH NOTES.

LONDON:

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.

1841.

8:33 WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?*

8:34 [In the Akademie edition, the title is followed by a blank page.]

8:35 A man is enlightened when he emerges from a state of self-imposed pupilage. Pupilage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This state is self-imposed when the cause, of it lies, not in a deficiency of understanding, but of determination and courage to use it 228without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! —have the courage to use your own understanding, is therefore the motto of enlightenment.

Indolence and cowardice are the causes why so large a portion of mankind, long after nature has emancipated them from the guidance of others (naturaliter majorennes), voluntarily remain in a state of pupilage during their whole lives; and why it is so easy for others to assume the character of their guardians. It is so convenient to be under guardianship. If I have a book that possesses an understanding for me, a guardian of souls that has a conscience for me, a physician that prescribes my diet, and so forth, I need take no trouble myself. So long as I can pay, I need not think; others will undertake that toilsome business for me. By far the larger half of the human race (including the whole of the fair sex) regard the step to majority not only as laborious and difficult, but also as extremely dangerous; an idea which the guardians who have so benevolently taken upon themselves the supervision and guidance of their conduct, have assiduously inculcated. After they have first made their domestic animal sufficiently stupid, and have carefully prevented the quiet creature from venturing to set a step without the go-cart into which they have put it, they next proceed to point out the danger which threatens it, if it should attempt to go alone. Now in truth this danger is not 229so very great; it would learn 8:36to go alone at the expense of a few tumbles; but one fall generally makes it timorous, and frightens it from any further attempt.

It is difficult for any individual human being to apply the labour necessary to extricate himself from the pupilage which is become a second nature. He has grown to like it, and is really incapable of using his own understanding at once, because he has never been permitted to try. Maxims and formulae—those mechanical tools of the use, or rather abuse, of his natural faculties—are the gyves which keep him in a perpetual pupilage. He who throws them away will make but a feeble and unsteady leap over the narrowest ditch, because he is wholly unaccustomed to unrestrained movement. Hence there are but few who have succeeded in extricating themselves from pupilage by their own efforts, and have yet retained a steady gait.

But that a public should enlighten itself is far more possible,—indeed, if freedom be granted it, is nearly inevitable: for there will always be some few independent thinkers, even among the guardians of the multitude, who, when they themselves have thrown off the yoke of pupilage, will diffuse around them a rational sense of individual dignity, and of the obligation which lies on every human being to think for himself. It is remarkable that the public (at the instigation of some of its guardians, who are them230selves incapable of enlightenment) forces the very men who at first placed it under the yoke to continue to bear it; so mischievous is it to implant prejudices, since they recoil on those, or on the successors of those, who were their authors. Hence it is that a public attains slowly to a state of enlightenment. A deliverance from personal despotism, or from rapacious or domineering oppression, may be brought about by revolution: but a real reform in opinion will never be effected by such means; new prejudices will only take the place of the old, as leading-strings of the unthinking, unreasoning mass.

In order to enlightenment nothing is wanted but liberty; the safest and most innocuous that can be called by that name—i. e. liberty to make a public use of one’s reason on all subjects. But I hear exclamations from every side against the use of reason. 8:37The officer says, “Don’t reason, but obey orders;” the financier, “Don’t reason, but pay;” the priest, “Don’t reason, but believe.” These are so many restrictions of freedom. It is therefore necessary to inquire, what restrictions are adverse to enlightenment; what, not only not adverse, but favourable to it. I answer, the public exercise of reason must be constantly and invariably free; this is the sole means by which mankind can be enlightened: but the private exercise of it may often be subjected 231to very rigorous restrictions, without much prejudice to the progress of enlightenment. It is necessary to explain, that by the public use which each man makes of his own reason, I understand that which every man of science, in that capacity, makes of it in addressing the whole reading public. By the private use, I mean that which a man makes of his reason in any civil post confided to him, or as member of a political community.

Now in order to the interests of the community, it is necessary that such a degree of consentaneity of action should prevail among its members, as that each should promote, or at least should not obstruct, the accomplishment of certain ends; and that he should, as regards those ends, be a passive instrument of the government. It is clear that, considered as a part of the great machine of political society, a man must not reason, but obey.

So far, however, as any one part of this machine is to be regarded as simply one of the units composing the community (and even the community of the whole human race), and so far as, in his quality of man of science, he addresses himself to the public at large, he may unquestionably use his reason, without prejudice to the business which is committed to him.

Thus, it would be very mischievous if an officer were to question the utility of an order of his supe232rior; he must obey. But no one can justly contest his right, as man of science, to criticise errors in the military art, or to submit his criticisms to the judgement of the public.

The citizen cannot refuse to pay the taxes imposed on him; nay, any indiscreet censure of such taxes at the time of their collection, calculated to excite general resistance, may be punished as dangerous to the public peace. But the same individual does nothing inconsistent with the character of a good citizen, if he publicly expresses his thoughts 8:38on the inexpediency or the injustice of such taxes.

In the same manner, a clergyman is bound to instruct his catechumens and parishioners according to the creed of the church of which he is a minister; for this was the condition upon which he was received into it as such. But, as a theologian and a scholar, he has full liberty—indeed it is his vocation—to communicate to the public the results of his careful examination and conscientious opinion of what is erroneous in that creed, together with suggestions tending to a reform in the affairs of the church and of religion. There is nothing in this which needs oppress the conscience; for that which he teaches in pursuance of his office as minister of the church, he represents as something which he is not at liberty to teach according to his own way of thinking, but which he is appointed to teach according to the prescription and 233in the name of others. He says, our church teaches this or that; these are the proofs it adduces. He then extracts for his hearers all the practical utility possible, from premises which he could not himself subscribe with full conviction, but to the exposition of which he may pledge himself, because it is not entirely impossible that truth may lie concealed in them, and at all events they contain nothing repugnant to the essence of religion. If, indeed, he thought he discovered in them anything having this tendency, he could not conscientiously continue to perform his function—he must resign it. The use therefore that an appointed teacher makes of his reason before his flock, is a private use; since he is not, in his character of priest, free, and ought not to be so, being charged with a commission. On the other hand, as a theologian and scholar addressing the public properly so called (i. e. the world), the clergyman, in this the public use of his reason, enjoys, in common with other men, an unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his own person. For, that the guardians of the people, in spiritual things, should be themselves in a state of pupilage, is an absurdity which goes to the perpetuation of all absurdities.

But is not an association of clergymen, — a church assembly, or a venerable classis (as they call themselves in Holland),—justified in binding itself by oath to certain immutable articles of faith, 234in order to exercise a perpetual supreme guardianship over each of its members, and, indirectly 8:39through them, over the people? I answer, such a thing is totally inadmissible. A compact of this kind, which is entered into with a view to conclude the human race from all further enlightenment, is simply null and void, even though it be confirmed by the sovereign power, by diets and the most solemn treaties. One age cannot bind itself; nor can it conspire to place the following one in a condition in which it would be impossible for it to extend its knowledge, to purge itself from error, and to advance in the career of enlightenment. This were a crime against human nature, whose highest destination consists emphatically in intellectual progress; and posterity is therefore fully justified in rejecting all such attempts to bind it, as invalid and mischievous.

A combination to maintain an unalterable religious system, which no man should be permitted to call into doubt, would, even for the term of one man’s life, be wholly intolerable. It would be to blot out, as it were, one generation in the progress of the human species towards a better condition; to render it barren, and hence noxious to posterity. A man can indeed retard his own intellectual progress, though even then only for a time, as regards things which it is incumbent on him to know; but utterly to renounce it for himself, and far more for 235posterity, is an outrage on the most sacred rights of humanity. Now what a people ought not to determine for itself, 8:40a monarch ought still less to determine for it; for his legislative character and dignity rests on his being the depositary and organ of the collective will of his people. If he does but ascertain that every real or supposed spiritual improvement consists with the existing order and tranquillity of society, he may safely leave his subjects to do what they think necessary for the good of their own souls: in that he has no right to interfere; his business is to take care that none of them forcibly obstruct their neighbours in their endeavours to settle their own opinions, or to promote their own spiritual welfare by any means within their reach. It is even derogatory to his majesty to occupy the attention of his government with the writings by means of which his subjects are striving to adjust their opinions; whether he does this of his own judgment, (in which case he subjects himself to the reproach, “Cæsar non est supra grammaticos,”) or so deeply degrades his sovereign power, as to sustain the spiritual despotism of a few tyrants in his state against the rest of his subjects.

If it is asked, Is the age we live in an enlightened one? the answer is, No; but it is an age of enlightenment. That, as things now stand, the mass of mankind are capable, or can be rendered capable, of 236using their own understandings safely and usefully, without the guidance of another, is far from being the fact. But that the road to self-culture is now opened to them, and that the obstacles to an universal enlightenment, or to an emancipation from a self-imposed pupilage, are gradually becoming fewer, we have clear and abundant indications. In this sense this is the age of enlightenment—the age of Frederic.

A prince who does not disdain to declare that he esteems it his duty to prescribe nothing to men in matters of religion, and who, leaving them full freedom of opinion, rejects the arrogant name of toleration, is himself enlightened: he deserves to be esteemed by a grateful world and by posterity as the first who released the human race from pupilage (in so far, at least, as it is in the power of governments to do so) and left every one free to follow the guidance of his own reason in matters of conscience.[*] 8:41Nor is the benefit confined to his own subjects; the spirit of free inquiry has much less opposition to encounter, now that men have before them a proof that the public tranquillity and the union of society are not in the slightest degree endangered by its diffusion. Men gradually extricate themselves from a state of barbarism, if they are not purposely and artificially kept in it.

In considering the enlightenment by which men 237emerge from their self-imposed pupilage, I have insisted mainly on religion; because in science and art rulers have no interest in assuming the part of guardians over their subjects; and because pupilage in this matter is not only the most mischievous, but the most degrading of any. But the views of an enlightened ruler go still further, and tend to this— that even as regards his government, there is no danger in allowing his subjects to make a public use of their own reason, and frankly to lay before the world their opinions as to any practicable improvements in it, or their criticisms of its present state and acts;—of this we have before us a splendid and hitherto unequalled example.

But it is only a monarch too enlightened to tremble at shadows, and having at his disposal a well-disciplined army as a security for the public peace, who can say,—what a popular government could not venture to say,—“Reason as much as you will, and on what you will,—but obey.” And here we find a strange and unexpected contradiction in human affairs, which indeed, when regarded as a whole, are full of paradoxes. A higher degree of civil freedom would appear favourable to freedom of opinion, yet does, in fact, impose insuperable barriers to it; while a lower degree, on the contrary, gives opinion room to diffuse itself. But when, under the protection of a strong government, the desire and the duty 238of free thought has developed itself, it gradually renders the people more capable of political freedom. Finally, it influences the principles of the government itself, which finds it conducive to its own interest and prosperity 8:42to treat men [Kant’s text includes at this point the phrase “who are now more than machines”] in a manner consonant to the dignity of their nature.[*]

Kant. (Kleine Schriften.)

NOTES.