Sapere aude: the motto of Enlightenment

In December 1784 the Berlinische Monatsschrift — the “Berlin Monthly”, the house journal of the Prussian Enlightenment — printed a short essay by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) titled Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? — “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” It is barely a dozen pages long. It is also one of the most influential things ever written about what it means to think for yourself.

Here is Kant’s answer, the sentence everything else hangs on:

“Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”

Every word is load-bearing. It is not a definition of a doctrine, a period, or a set of beliefs. It defines an act — an emergence, a coming-out — that a person performs. Enlightenment is something you do, not something you have. What is Enlightenment?

Unpack the key term. Immaturity (German Unmündigkeit — also translated “minority”, “tutelage”, or “nonage”) is a legal-sounding word: a Mündel is a legal minor, a ward who cannot yet act for himself. Kant gives it a precise cognitive meaning: immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without direction from someone else. The immature person can think — the faculty is intact — but will not run it unsupervised.

Now the sharpest word: self-incurred (selbstverschuldet). Kant insists this immaturity is our own fault. And he is exact about why it is our fault. The cause “lies not in a lack of understanding, but in a lack of resolve and courage to use it without direction from another.” The problem is not brains. It is will. We have the equipment; we lack the nerve to switch it on.

From this diagnosis comes the cure, and Kant gives it as a slogan. Borrowing a line from the Roman poet Horace, he writes:

“Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding — that is the motto of enlightenment.”

Sapere aude literally means “dare to know” or “dare to be wise”. Notice Kant’s gloss: he does not translate it as “know more” but as have courage to use your own understanding. The imperative is aimed at your resolve, not your IQ.

So enlightenment, for Kant, is not the possession of an age that has arrived, nor a library of correct opinions. It is a process and an act — the ongoing daring of an individual, and eventually a whole public, to think for itself. Asked whether he lived in “an enlightened age”, Kant answered no: “we live in an age of enlightenment” — an age of the process, not its completion. The verb matters more than the noun.