What Enlightenment Can Mean Today

This short essay revisits Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” and Foucault’s response to it - a glimpse into our upcoming Foucault course.

In 1784, Immanuel Kant was asked a deceptively simple question: What is Enlightenment? His answer, compressed into a few pages, became one of the founding texts of modern thought. But rather than describing a historical event or a period in European history, Kant proposed something far more radical: Enlightenment, he wrote, is man’s exit from his self-incurred immaturity.

That small word exit - in German, Ausgang - carries a surprising charge. It implies a departure, a leaving behind, an act of courage. Enlightenment is not about possessing more knowledge or acquiring superior reason; it is about leaving the habits and dependencies that keep us intellectually or morally dependent. It is an act of saying goodbye - to the certainties of yesterday, to the comfortable authorities that tell us what to think, to the inertia that keeps us repeating what we already know.

Kant’s gesture is modern not because it announces progress, but because it turns philosophy toward the present. What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday? That question, as Michel Foucault later noted, is the real heartbeat of Enlightenment. It shifts the focus from history as a sequence of eras to history as an attitude - an ethos of reflection on the now.

The Exit from Yesterday

Kant begins with a diagnosis: humanity’s immaturity is “self-incurred.” We are not children because we lack reason, but because we refuse to use it. It’s easier to let others think for us - to rely on priests, rulers, experts, algorithms. It’s easier to follow the instruction manual of life than to write our own.

Enlightenment, then, is not a matter of intelligence but of courage: Sapere aude - “Dare to know.” Daring to know means daring to think without the safety net of pre-approved ideas. It means stepping into uncertainty and accepting the risk that comes with freedom.

But for Kant, this “exit” is not an escape into solitude. It is a public act. Enlightenment happens not when one genius rises above the crowd, but when individuals begin to speak and reason openly, addressing one another in the shared space of critique. Reason, to be free, must be public. It must circulate.

Kant’s essay was published not in a scholarly journal but in a popular monthly magazine. He wasn’t writing for philosophers; he was writing for citizens. The Enlightenment, he believed, could only exist where people dared to think aloud - where the conversation between yesterday and today was not controlled by dogma or fear.

Enlightenment as an Attitude

Modernity, in this light, is not an era but an attitude - a way of relating to our own time. Enlightenment is not a chapter in a history book, but a permanent task: the effort to identify the limits that define us and to test whether they are as necessary as they seem.

To be enlightened, then, is to live critically. Critique, for Kant, is not denunciation but clarification - the careful determination of what reason can and cannot do, what freedom we have, and where that freedom meets its boundaries. Critique is the art of measuring our degrees of freedom

.

This makes Enlightenment a strange kind of optimism: not the belief that all problems will be solved, but the conviction that problems can be faced without superstition or fear. To live enlightened is to recognize that there is no guarantee - no divine plan, no natural law - that ensures progress. It is to understand that freedom is not granted by history, but practiced in the present.

The Return of a Question

When Michel Foucault returned to Kant’s 1784 text What Is Enlightenment?, he did not treat it as an artifact of intellectual history. For him, it was a question that still demands an answer. What intrigued Foucault was not the content of Kant’s philosophy but the gesture it represented: a philosopher turning his thought toward the present, asking not what truth is, but what it means to think today. Kant’s little essay, he suggested, marks the discreet entrance of modernity into philosophy - not as a doctrine or a period, but as a way of relating to one’s own time.

Foucault also warns against what he calls “the blackmail of the Enlightenment” - the false choice between being for or against it. We are not asked to decide whether to accept or reject the Enlightenment as an inheritance; rather, we are asked to analyze ourselves as beings who are, in large part, its products.

This self-analysis cannot be nostalgic, nor can it be purely celebratory. It must recognize that the very forces of rationalization and progress that promised emancipation have also generated new forms of domination. Knowledge and power, Foucault insists, are not opposites: they grow together. The Enlightenment’s dream of autonomy produced institutions - prisons, schools, hospitals - that disciplined bodies and regulated life. Its faith in reason gave rise to sciences that categorize, normalize, and control.

Yet this is not a rejection of Enlightenment; it is its continuation by other means. Foucault’s genealogies of power, from Discipline and Punish to The History of Sexuality, can be read as attempts to fulfill Kant’s task - to “dare to know” by tracing how reason itself became entangled with mechanisms of control. The question of Enlightenment becomes a question of how to separate growth in capability from growth in domination - how to practice freedom within the very systems that shape us.

Velázquez’s Las Meninas captures Enlightenment’s tension between seeing and being seen - a self-reflective image where vision, knowledge, and power observe one another, according to Foucault

The Courage of Truth

Kant’s call to "dare to know", becomes, in Foucault’s late work, the principle of parrhesia, the courage of truth. Enlightenment requires more than knowledge; it requires a readiness to speak freely and to assume the risks of that freedom. To use reason publicly, as Kant demanded, is not simply to think for oneself but to speak to others - to take responsibility for one’s thought in the open space of dialogue.

For Foucault, this act of speech is not an abstract exercise but a practice of subjectivity. The “care of the self” and the courage to speak are twin forms of Enlightenment. They define a freedom that is not given by institutions or guaranteed by progress, but continually practiced through self-critique and exposure to others.

This is why Foucault insists that Enlightenment is not the triumph of reason but its transformation into a form of life. Reason becomes ethical when it risks itself in the present - when it works on itself, tests its limits, and accepts that truth is never secured once and for all.

Enlightenment Today

To think of Enlightenment as an ongoing attitude is to see critique as a living practice rather than an academic exercise. It invites us to examine our own present as Kant examined his - to ask what forms of dependence, obedience, and immaturity continue to bind us, and what possibilities for freedom are still latent within them.

Our conditions have changed, but the structure of the question remains. We no longer submit to kings or priests; instead, we outsource judgment to experts, algorithms, and invisible infrastructures that shape how we live and think. The new “guardians of immaturity” are not clerics but systems - opaque, automated, and seemingly inevitable.

To be enlightened today would mean to make those systems visible, to reveal their contingency, to test where obedience is necessary and where it merely masquerades as reason. It would mean practicing a form of critique that is genealogical rather than dogmatic - one that studies how our present has been made, in order to imagine how it might yet be remade.

In this sense, the Enlightenment is not behind us. It is a task we inherit every time we ask how to live otherwise - a patient work of reflection joined to an impatience for freedom. Foucault’s final words on the subject could just as easily describe the project of philosophy itself: a “patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.”