An age of enlightenment, not an enlightened age

Kant poses it plainly: do we now live in an enlightened age (ein aufgeklärtes Zeitalter)? His famous reply: “No — but we do live in an age of enlightenment” (Nein, aber wohl in einem Zeitalter der Aufklärung). The distinction is the whole point of the lesson. An enlightened age would be a finished condition, a destination reached. An age of enlightenment is a road being travelled. Kant plants humanity firmly on the road, not at the end of it. What is Enlightenment?.

What makes it an age of enlightenment is that the obstacles are diminishing. As things now stand, Kant says, much is still lacking before people are, or can easily become, capable of using their own understanding confidently and well in religious matters. But the signs are clear that the field is now being opened for them to work freely toward it, and that the hindrances to general enlightenment — to humanity’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity — are gradually growing fewer. The tide is going the right way, even though it has not yet come in.

This is why Kant honours his own moment as the “century of Frederick.” Under a ruler who protects the free public use of reason, the ground is being cleared: people are given the room to work their own way out of tutelage, especially in matters of religion, where the guardianship was heaviest. The prince’s contribution is not to make people enlightened — no one can do that for another — but to remove the external obstacles and let self-thinking do its slow work.

Now the political payoff, deepening the reform-versus-revolution theme. A revolution, Kant argues, may well overthrow a particular despotism or a grasping oppression — but it will never bring about a true reform in the way of thinking (eine wahre Reform der Denkungsart). Instead, new prejudices simply take the place of the old ones and serve, just as well, as leading-strings for the thoughtless mass. Toppling the tyrant does not, by itself, cure the tutelage; it may only change who holds the leash.

The freedoms then interlock in a hopeful sequence. Intellectual freedom — the free public use of reason — can advance even under a firm political order that keeps tight civil discipline. But it does not stay sealed off. Once a people has, through that freedom, gradually grown mature, its new capacity to think for itself reacts back (wirkt zurück) upon the principles of government — which then finds it advantageous to treat the human being, who is now more than a machine, in accordance with their dignity. Free thought, given time, remakes the state that once merely tolerated it.