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Immanuel KantWhat Is Enlightenment?
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1784A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key FiguresCharacter Analysis
Immanuel Kant
Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher of the late Enlightenment period. He lived his entire live in the town of Königsberg in the part of Germany known at the time as Prussia. Though he never left Königsberg, he became one of the leading intellectual figures of his time and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western philosophy through his copious writings and correspondence with other thinkers across Europe.
Two schools of thought about the nature of human knowledge dominated much Enlightenment philosophy: rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists (such as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) tended to believe that all true knowledge comes from the deductive reasoning powers of the human mind, while empiricists (such as John Locke and David Hume) rejected the notion that any ideas are “innate” and insisted that all knowledge comes from experience. Kant was the first philosopher to synthesize these competing schools of thought in what he called “transcendental idealism,” an elaborate philosophical system in which experience and the human mind work together to generate knowledge of a world that conforms to the structure of the mind.
Kant’s work ranges across so many issues—from astronomy to morality and from theology to political philosophy—that one cannot concisely summarize it, but the bulk of his mature work (from the 1780s forward) concerns the power of the human mind to shape the world and to govern itself. “What Is Enlightenment?” exemplifies this focus, as he equates enlightenment with the human mind’s development of the power to govern itself and rationally justify its beliefs and decisions.
Frederick the Great
King Friedrich II (1712-1786), known as Frederick the Great, was the king of Prussia, Kant’s home, from 1740 until his death. Frederick was philosophically minded and was a product of the Enlightenment period; he supported philosophical inquiry and believed in “enlightened despotism,” which justified a ruler’s authority by social contract rather than divine right and saw the leader’s task as to enact the will of the people. In this respect, he was very different from both his predecessor (his father, Friedrich Wilhelm I) and his successor (his nephew, Friedrich Wilhelm II), who were both more authoritarian and opposed the Enlightenment and freedom of thought.
One of Frederick the Great’s first acts as king exemplifies the notion of enlightened despotism: reinstating the professorship of Christian Wolff, the most important thinker of the German Enlightenment during Kant’s intellectual development. In 1723, Frederick’s father had removed Wolff from his professorship at the University of Halle on the basis of a religious controversy that his views had stirred up; Wolff had since been teaching outside Prussia. Frederick’s support for freedom of religious thought allowed Wolff’s return to Prussia.
Kant was a great admirer of Wolff’s work, and he expresses his appreciation for Frederick’s approach to freedom of thought in “What Is Enlightenment?” by identifying Frederick as the first ruler to permit the public discussion of religious ideas—a form of The Separation of Church and State. Unfortunately for Kant and for the German Enlightenment, the hopes that Kant held for Frederick’s rule were dashed upon the king’s death just two years after the essay’s publication.
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By Immanuel Kant
