Kant’s „sapere aude“. Does it apply in practice?
Abstract
This paper will analyze three key ideas from Kant’s essay „An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?“ These are: dare to think, the public and private use of reason, and finally, the question of to what extent Kant’s Enlightenment phrase sapere aude can be applied in a pragmatic society. The central idea of this paper belongs to the freedom of thought, which encounters laws, powerful individuals, influential social institutions, and its own limitations such as cowardice in realizing the Enlightenment phrase dare to think as a means of freeing man from immaturity. By highlighting freedom of thought as a moment of rational and critical observation of the world, any possibility of aligning socially instructed thought and an individual’s moral behavior in society is excluded a priori. On the other hand, Kant considers that only an autonomous individual capable of morality, and not the state or other social institutions, is allowed to determine the limits of their own and others’ freedom of thought and prescribe laws according to their own free use of reason. Political and moral freedom, as the space of the Enlightenment motto dare to think, also represent a source of criticism of the moral-legal freedom of thought and its (in)applicability in practice.
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