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Kant's Politics of Enlightenment
THE ENDURING RESONANCE OF Kant's brief essay "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" (henceforth "WE") can be traced in large part to the connection it makes between two ideas central to the self-understanding of European modernity. The first is the idea of autonomy implicit in its famous definition of enlightenment: "Enlightenment is the human beings emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the inability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another ... Sapere aside! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment."1 Kant's rallying cry to independence of thought resonates with the view that individual autonomy is a central component of modern self-identity. The second is the defense of freedom in the public use of reason: "For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the least harmful of anything that could even be called freedom: namely freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters."2 With this emphatic endorsement of freedom of expression as a precondition of enlightenment, Kant appears to situate the project of enlightenment squarely in the tradition of liberal political thought.
Yet the interpretation of the essay as a defense of a liberal model of freedom of expression proves to be problematic on a closer reading. Even Kant's famous definition of enlightenment is not without its puzzling aspects. He employs the legal term "minority" (Unmiindigkeit, often translated as "immaturity"), the condition of a child or dependent who has not reached the legal age of adulthood, to describe the condition of human beings before they have achieved enlightenment; but as some of his contemporaries remarked, the idea of a minority that is "selfincurred" makes no legal sense. That their puzzlement was not just a matter of injudicious terminology is shown by Kant's apparent indecision over whether the failure of individuals to make independent use of their reason is due to lack of courage on their part3 or whether it is because they have been prevented from doing so by constraining social authorities.4 Even more perplexing is Kant's idiosyncratic distinction between the private and public uses of reason: "by the public use of one's own reason I understand that use which...