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一般來說，「思想史」是歷史學和/或社會學下的子領域。歷史學因為這門學問或課題有個「史」字；社會學因為「思想」的演變與發展受到「社會」環境的制約。本部落格已經有歷史學和社會學個別的專欄，本來可以依文章的旨意分列於它們兩者之下；但因為思想史包含各門學問，另闢一欄似乎有其必要。
最近看到兩篇討論「啟蒙運動」的文章；剛好我對這個課題很有興趣，同時覺得它很重要；所以藉此機會建立這個專欄。
首先將轉載康德的：《回應「什麼是『啟蒙』？」》(本欄2026/08/08)。
本文於 修改第 4 次
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啟蒙運動：批判、內涵、發揚 - Eliane Glaser
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下文中第0節和各節序號(含子標題)均為編者所加，以便指涉。此外，部份段落字數冗長，讀起來吃力；我根據「一段一個主題」原則，把它們另行分為幾個小段落；以上兩點如有不適當之處，還請指正。另請參考本欄2026/08/08所貼康德大作。
Flickering Enlightenment
Attacked by the Left and Right, the Enlightenment can only be saved through use of its greatest legacy: permanent critique
Eliane Glaser, Edited by Marina Benjamin, 05/28/26
0. 前言 -- 啟蒙運動的危急
The Enlightenment is going through a dark time. Critical race theorists on both sides of the Atlantic are following the philosophers Emmanuel Eze and Charles W Mills in holding the Enlightenment responsible for modern racism. In The Age of Empire (2021), the British sociologist Kehinde Andrews says that it is time to stop revering ‘dead white men’ such as Kant, Locke and Voltaire. Last year, the University of Edinburgh, which is widely seen as having had an ‘outsized’ historic role in promulgating racist scientific theories, undertook an excoriating process of self-examination, publishing a Race Review that acknowledged that the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were responsible for propagating ‘some of the most damaging ideas in human history’, including the idea that human societies exist on a hierarchical ‘ladder’, from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’, with Europeans at the top.
The Review highlighted the role of David Hume, who, in a notorious footnote to the 1753 version of his essay ‘On National Characters’ (1748), stated that non-white races are ‘naturally inferior to the whites’.
The university admits that it still has bequests totalling many millions of pounds from donors linked to the slave trade and other colonial conquests. At the same time, the city is embroiled in a long dispute over what to do with a statue of Henry Dundas, who most historians hold responsible for delaying the progress of abolition through UK Parliament.
Censured by the Left for its philosophy-washing of Empire, the Enlightenment is further under fire from the populist Right who see the long arm of its influence in the foundations of our established political institutions and the traditional architecture of representative democracy and professional expertise: those who stand up for Enlightenment values are liable to find themselves castigated as members of a ‘complacent liberal elite’.
Writing in The Observer in 2025, Will Hutton bemoaned the fact that, in an era of populist autocracy, what were once taken-for-granted goods – ‘justice, accountability, social fairness, scientific progress, international order’ – have become associated with a ‘Brahmin class – who are the new civilisational enemy.’
Attacks on this new enemy are fuelled, Hutton wrote, by ‘the need for vengeance on the standard-bearers of Enlightenment values.’ Right-wing critics of the Enlightenment are supported by Silicon Valley tech bros. In fact, the so-called ‘Dark Enlightenment’ pioneered by the far-Right software developer Curtis Yarvin, championed by the likes of J D Vance and Peter Thiel, seeks to obliterate the Enlightenment values of equality and democracy.
Famously, the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has rushed to defend the Enlightenment, subtitling his 2018 book on the subject: ‘The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress’. These core values, says Pinker, have led to measurable improvements in human health, prosperity and peace. Although it’s good to see prominent commentators stand up for agreed facts and the pursuit of knowledge, especially at a time when scholarship, politics and the media are being eroded by post-truth, conspiracy theories and a mistrust of experts, I cannot align myself wholeheartedly with this big-beast bandwagon.
In the midst of glaring economic inequalities, climate breakdown and widespread poverty in the Global South, Pinker’s faith in civilisational progress seems optimistic to say the least.
Besides, I believe there is something to the Leftist critique of the Enlightenment as either intrinsically or circumstantially racist. If we don’t engage with the Enlightenment’s complexities, it will continue to be weaponised by the culture wars, and for extremist polemical ends.
Leftists can cancel, wholesale, the Enlightenment’s reminder of the need for intellectual rigour and a commitment to truth, while conservatives can use it as a tub-thumping defence of the West that marginalises the vital campaign for social justice.
In consequence of this pincer-movement attack, the Enlightenment’s legacy is existentially vulnerable. It makes me deeply worried as someone whose entire career has been built on trying to understand and analyse the world around me – especially a world that still tries to confine thinking women to the realms of emotion and ‘personal experience’.
1. 對啟蒙運動的質疑
I believe that Enlightenment values are essential, but that we have largely forgotten how to make a good case for them: we need to rely on shared facts, tested by experiment; a public sphere where open discussion can take place; and the belief that discussion should be founded on reasoned argument.
We need, moreover, to cherish the more political values of tolerance, freedom, human rights and the common good. Advocates for artificial intelligence have the temerity to claim that large language models are ushering in a ‘second Enlightenment’ (a claim that was uncritically echoed in a paper published by the World Economic Forum last year) when what we are in fact seeing is the destruction of the Enlightenment legacy under the false banner of its name.
As the historian David Bell argued in The New York Times in 2025, AI is actually ‘shedding Enlightenment values’ by simply reinforcing ‘what we already think we know.’ In The Guardian, the journalist and geopolitical risk consultant Joseph de Weck warned that ‘AI is taking us back to the dark ages’, making us lazy, and stymying independent thinking.
The evidence suggests that we are going through a rapid de-enlightenment. Newspaper circulations, attention spans and trust in forms of agreed knowledge are in freefall. Misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes are gaining ground. If we let go of the valuable aspects of the Enlightenment project, we open ourselves up to a world of AI blather, ‘my truth’ pronouncements, wobbly sentiment and unchecked power.
2. 啟蒙運動的檢討
My unease with this parlous state of affairs has provoked me to go back and rethink the Enlightenment and what it has to offer. But, rather than unthinkingly recouping it as a mission, I want instead to tease out and weigh up its merits, to discern with nuance what is still fit for our times. I want to ask if it is possible to rescue the Enlightenment’s rallying power, and if it’s worth defending what the combined forces of Left and Right are coming together to attack. Are the Enlightenment’s deficiencies barnacles on an old ship, or integral to its design?
Ironically, in critiquing the Enlightenment, the postmodern Left has deconstructed the basis of its own belief systems, and now liberal intellectuals no longer know what to defend outside of demands for affirmation, or the assertion of the individual right to be who you want to be. In the midst of intolerant purity spirals, reason is in danger of being demonised as a white man’s oppressive tool, and writers and thinkers such as Kate Clanchy or Slavoj Žižek are cancelled rather than engaged with.
Yet what is more dangerous: holding to a set of Enlightenment values that might be flawed, or opening the floodgates to a post-truth world in which any authoritarian agenda might well hold sway?
3. 啟蒙運動的基本信念
I believe that it’s possible to conserve intellectual standards and be politically radical at the same time. Because there is another side to the Enlightenment that is not surfacing in the culture wars, and which is the opposite of centrist complacency: namely, intellectual humility and political challenge.
The difficulty with any discussion of the Enlightenment is that it’s not clear what the word actually means.
Broadly speaking, it was a philosophical project that grew out of the establishment of the scientific method in the 17th and 18th centuries: Francis Bacon and his circle had pioneered the rejection of alchemy, mysticism and superstition in favour of the empirical study of the physical world, and this became the basis of philosophical positivism.
If you visited the National Gallery’s exhibition devoted to Joseph Wright of Derby, you might have seen An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) – a tribute to natural philosophy that offers stark contrasts of darkness and light to dramatise the impact of scientific discovery.
In 18th-century France, a group of thinkers emerged known as the philosophes. Led by Voltaire, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot and Montesquieu, they championed the secular pursuit of knowledge.
Over the course of 20 years, Diderot and d’Alembert produced a 28-volume Encyclopédie, a ‘systematic dictionary’ to be passed on to future generations for the improvement of mankind.
Voltaire championed the primacy of mathematical logic.
And Montesquieu argued for the division of power within government to ensure that no one group could exert tyranny.
Enlightenment was also pursued in Scotland by figures such as Adam Smith, David Hume, James Hutton and Thomas Reid,
and in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, who sought to bring together human rationality and an exploration of the world around us.
What these thinkers had in common was a belief in the power of reason to liberate us from inherited custom and received wisdom. The Encyclopédie defined the philosophe as someone who, ‘trampling on prejudice, tradition, universal consent, authority, in a word, all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for himself’.
In 1784, a Berlin periodical invited readers to respond to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant sent in an essay, defining it as ‘man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity’, which he identified as ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.’
This rejection of dogma is inspiring. But the Enlightenment was a diverse, even contradictory movement, which is partly why it can now be deployed as a political football by those who occupy very different positions (see also liberalism).
4. 左派對啟蒙運動的批判
‘I’m really not at all convinced that there was such a thing as Enlightenment,’ the historian Dorinda Outram, author of several books on the Enlightenment, told me. The philosophes declare that they’re ‘producing universal categories that apply to all human beings, like universal humanity’, but then they ‘repeatedly exclude people from being under the aegis of those universal categories’, such as ‘Black people, women and the poor’.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft lambasted the Enlightenment for claiming universality while excluding women from the realm of rationality. ‘She really takes it and shakes it and says, look, this is all wonderful, but it’s not real unless you include everybody,’ Outram said.
Critics of the Enlightenment don’t necessarily reject universalism as an ideal, but point out that the commitment to universalism was selective.
Some historians not only charge the Enlightenment with hypocrisy, but believe that racism is in its bones. Angela Saini is a science journalist who has written about the origins of race science. ‘I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment,’ she told me. ‘It gave us so much of the world as we know it today,’ in terms of ‘rationality and the scientific method’. Carl Linnaeus’s system of biological classification, however, one of the main artefacts of Enlightenment science, divides people up by skin colour, which is ‘incredibly arbitrary’, Saini told me: he’s ‘essentially taxonomising humans in the same way that he’s drawing up taxonomies of the natural world.’
Voltaire believed that different ethnic groups had fundamentally different origins – a theory known as polygenism – and that the age of reason had arrived at maturity only in Western Europe. ‘Humanity,’ wrote Kant in 1802, ‘has its highest degree of perfection in the white race.’
The standard defence of Enlightenment figures, Kehinde Andrews told an Open University seminar, is that ‘yes, they were racist, but that’s separate from their moral philosophy … so why would we throw the baby out with the bathwater?’ That is the wrong way to think about it, Andrews said, since Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Kant ‘all had these beliefs that Europe was superior, that whiteness was better, that Black people were inferior’, and that this is ‘not a coincidence’, it’s actually the ‘premise of where they come from’.
Saini points out that these racist attitudes were also a product of their time, and were economically and politically expedient: the Enlightenment’s cherished notions of ‘freedom and equality and reason and secularism’ were forged alongside ‘these ideas about some people being inferior to others’. The hierarchies that were described as ‘natural’ were ‘self-serving’, Saini explained, because they not only justified colonial expansion but also ‘reinforced the social order’.
5. 對左派批判的批判
The experience of colonisation nonetheless mitigated racist attitudes as Westerners came into contact with cultures that were evidently intellectually and culturally sophisticated. For example, ‘they get more and more interested in China,’ Outram told me, and ‘the confrontation there is clearly not between reason and unreason. It’s just different sorts of reason.’
The Enlightenment was inconsistent because it was changing over time. ‘It’s a very different thing at the beginning of the 18th century from what it is at the end,’ Outram said, ‘when the focus is on a new sort of humanitarianism’ and new forms of ‘altruism’, such as ‘the philanthropic founding of lifeboat stations’, which is inspired by the idea that ‘people will willingly go out in dangerous conditions to try and rescue people who they have no links with, who are total strangers.’
As the historian Jonathan Israel argued in Radical Enlightenment (2001), in contrast to negative images of pale, male, wealthy elites with direct or indirect links to slavery, prominent Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Nicolas de Condorcet were in fact passionate abolitionists: Diderot contributed some stridently anti-slavery arguments to the Histoire des deux Indes (1770), a polemic against colonial rule, and bemoaned the treatment of ‘Negroes’ in the Encyclopédie (although he simultaneously describes them as having ‘little intelligence’), writing that ‘We have reduced them, I wouldn’t say to the conditions of slaves, but to that of beasts of burden; and we are reasonable! And we are Christians!’
Condorcet wrote in 1795 that the gains of the ‘Age of Discovery’ counted for nothing unless Europeans ‘acknowledge men of other climates, equals and brothers by the will of nature, have never been formed to nourish the pride and avarice of a few privileged nations’.
Enlightenment was invoked by later anti-slavery revolts, such as in Haiti at the turn of the 19th century, and by later anticolonial thinkers such as W E B Du Bois, who drew on its assertion of a common humanity and emancipation through reason.
I spoke to Richard Whatmore, a historian and author of The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (2023), who cited Voltaire writing in 1764 that ‘Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.’
For Whatmore, Enlightenment is ‘any strategy that prevents wars of religion from breaking out.’ In the 18th century, ‘diversity means disagreeing without wanting to flatten your rivals. As soon as you want to ostracise and exile, that’s the end of Enlightenment. That’s fanaticism.’
The difficult thing, he said, ‘is living together with people who think completely differently to the way that you do.’
Whatmore believes the Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution and its desire to create ‘an exclusive community’, which he likens to ‘our culture wars’. As soon as you descend into culture war, ‘that shows you’ve lost to an 18th-century mind’. Whatmore identifies this tendency on both the Trumpian Right and the identitarian Left. To oppose prejudice but cancel those who disagree with you is – arguably – a particularly modern form of hypocrisy.
Tolerance – applied to both people and opinions – is a slippery virtue. I can see both sides of the debate between universalism and particularity. So I mistrust the warm embrace St Paul extends to the Jews, inviting them into the Christian fold while simultaneously erasing the boundaries of Jewish identity, and also the disingenuous republicanism of France, where claims to a level playing field between religious groups are disputed by members of the Muslim community.
But I do subscribe to a genuinely egalitarian universalism that prioritises the capacity for peaceable disagreement over narrow demands for recognition by either identitarians or nationalists.
6. 「包容」及其真正的敵人
Universalism was hotly debated by members of the Jewish Enlightenment, including Moses Mendelssohn, who – like Kant – contributed an essay to the Berlin magazine essay call. Mendelssohn was in favour of Jewish assimilation, but the preservation of Jewish identity remained a fraught issue – coming to a head with the Nazi Holocaust and the widespread conclusion that the assimilationist ‘experiment’ had failed.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many of the foremost historians of the Enlightenment were postwar Jewish scholars, among them Peter Gay, who looked back to the Enlightenment to provide a model for how to avoid fascism. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has also argued against ethnocentrism and in favour of a universal morality that transcends national or cultural particularity.
Critics of Enlightenment universalism are right to uncover the power dynamics that too often underlie claims to ‘objectivity’. But the key point for me is that most attacks on Enlightenment values fail to take account of the power disparity actually in play: the fact that the so-called ‘liberal elite’ is actually in timid retreat. The populist Right taking aim at the ‘mainstream media’, experts, professionals and especially the apocryphal exclusive cabal called the ‘illuminati’ is essentially targeting embattled remnants or phantom ghouls.
Meanwhile, the Left trains its sights on cultural ‘gatekeepers’ whose influence is also either fictive or on the wane. Relative to the most downtrodden members of society, curators, book editors and tenured academics hold some power but, compared with the tech corporations, billionaires and political strongmen who are ruthlessly undermining them and everything they stand for, they really don’t.
When Eleanor Roosevelt drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, she took great care to include representatives from other countries and cultures, including the Chinese philosopher and diplomat P C Chang (張彭春). Chang was a pluralist and supported the Declaration, but there remained a particularist challenge: namely, that the Declaration emphasises individual rights and liberties whereas, according to the Confucian tradition, the self is defined by communal ties.
We should remember challenges like these, but we must not let them contribute to the destruction of those universalist institutions that were built on the philosophical foundations of the Enlightenment. The entire international order is currently teetering on the edge, threatened by neo-totalitarian leaders and undermined in turn by its former allies on the Left for being Western-centric and exclusionary. We let them perish at our peril, as it is these institutions that support the less powerful and hold the real elites to account.
7. 「理性」及其實踐上侷限
Reason is the compass I look to in my work and in my interactions with others – especially when there is conflict to resolve. But we should also recognise its limitations:
its sometimes stolid sidelining of qualities like habit, cognitive dissonance and ineffable experience. An over-insistence on rationality can look like arrogance if it is not checked internally, and
an unfortunate consequence of the attack on experts is that they can become more dogmatic in self-defence.
In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the Enlightenment’s rigid insistence on reason led inevitably to totalitarianism. They believed that the suppression of alternative value systems such as religion or tradition was a ‘disenchantment’ that was always underpinned by the threat of violence. ‘The fully enlightened earth,’ they wrote, ‘radiates disaster triumphant.’
Outram thinks that Adorno and Horkheimer put their finger on something important: ‘the way in which Enlightenment values and Enlightenment thinking were very likely to tip over into their opposites.’
Enlightenment reason has always had its critics.
Rousseau believed that it corrupted innocent human nature.
Michel Foucault didn’t like its tendency to stigmatise those who don’t fit society’s definition of the ‘reasonable’: vagabonds, criminals and the mentally ill.
The philosopher John Gray thinks that its faith in progress is quixotic.
Saini told me that, as a journalist, she is focused on the end goal of changing people’s minds for the good, and simply stating what is ‘reasonable’ as self-evident truth is not always the best way of achieving that.
‘If I’m trying to convince someone who is hesitant about taking a vaccine to take it, it doesn’t work to hit them over the head with this idea that vaccines are safe and scientists have proven this,’ she said. After all, their fears often ‘come from a rational place. It could be a fear of losing bodily autonomy, a genuine fear of vaccine injury, or doubts that have been seeded by some information that they’ve read.’ Categorising someone’s mistaken position as irrational tends to entrench them in it further, ‘because they feel they’re under attack.’
Saini also cautions against dismissing the populist turn in our politics as wholly irrational. ‘There’s been a kind of block in politics for a long time, where people felt that nothing was happening; it didn’t matter who they elected.’ When populist candidates promise wholesale change, ‘it is very appealing to people,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily retreating from reason. It just means that they’re frustrated.’
Outram likewise stresses the importance of maintaining a pluralistic view of what reason and knowledge mean. ‘The attack on expertise is, in fact, a struggle between different forms of knowledge … I am an expert,’ she acknowledges, ‘so I have some skin in the game,’ but the expertise that ‘going through the Cambridge History School gives you is as valid as the tacit knowledge of, say, brewers of beer.’
For Outram, promoting morality is a more pressing priority than defending reason, because ‘unreason, misinformation and disinformation are all used in the service of cruelty … If you lie to somebody, you show that you don’t respect them.’ Lying – by governments or corporations, say – is invariably carried out ‘in defence of projects which are morally indefensible, otherwise you wouldn’t have to lie about them.’
It is the later Enlightenment value of care for others – articulated by Adam Smith and Edmund Burke – that Outram believes we should remember now: ‘the idea that we’re linked to all other human beings by sympathy and empathy,’ that ‘we can’t see other people suffer without feeling pain ourselves.’
(This recalls Kant’s moving statement, made in the context of advocating a cosmopolitan internationalism, that ‘a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’.) Morality is what stops reason succumbing to hypocrisy.
Of course, the accumulation of knowledge doesn’t automatically lead to human progress. But there is an alternative, counter-Enlightenment narrative that is hardly preferable: the narrative of Pandora opening her box, or Eve eating the apple. These stories express a fear of knowledge and the chaos it brings, yet we find that chaos actually comes from ignorance.
We must maintain epistemological humility, but we must also keep our cognitive bearings as the reality around us dissolves into White House-generated memes, clickbait advertising and AI slop.
8. 結論 – 發揚啟蒙運動的精髓
In contrast to the Enlightenment’s reputation for high-minded entitlement, its proponents aimed above all to promote critique that was both unassuming and restless.
In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume wrote that if those who are ‘dogmatical in their opinions’ could become ‘sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state’, this realisation would ‘naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve’ and ‘diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists’.
Intellectual modesty was intimately linked to tolerance of others: since ‘we are all formed of frailty and error,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature’.
Kant emphasised the inescapable limits of human knowledge. I am not the first to note that our own age of increasing ignorance is characterised, ironically, by people holding trenchantly to what they think they know.
Like Kant, Foucault also asked ‘What is Enlightenment?’ – the title of a 1984 essay. He defined it as ‘the permanent reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era’.
Seen in this light, the Enlightenment laid the foundations for the social sciences: the conviction that our ‘historical era’ is endlessly readable. This is my favourite definition of the Enlightenment: a commitment to ‘permanent critique’: of our world, and also – crucially – of ourselves. It is the best remedy for both manipulation and self-delusion.
Neither the identitarian Left nor the flag-waving Right is currently very good at self-critique. The Left is too self-righteous and the Right too wedded to an illusion of ‘balance’ to acknowledge its own ideological agenda. As for political radicalism, the Left’s narrow focus on identity prevents it from examining big-picture, socioeconomic power dynamics, and the Right’s rose-tinted nostalgia for Western greatness leads it to defend the status quo.
Neither side is remotely ‘enlightened’. We need to be humble and self-questioning, to be sure, but that should not stop us speaking truth to power, and challenging financial and technological elites. With the tech bros laying claim to a new Enlightenment (when, really, it’s the same white, male and Anglophone-centric old guard in new clothes), there’s all the more need to bolster the good in our intellectual inheritance.
The Enlightenment may have been a mixed, paradoxical project, but its critical attitude was bound up with revolutionary intent: to lay the intellectual foundations for a better world.
We must save the Enlightenment baby from its muddied bathwater by remembering its own teaching of discernment; advocating for rationality as an ambition rather than an absolute; and above all rejecting attempts to link expertise, cultural capital and high intellectual standards with power and privilege at a time when they are so gravely imperilled.
In our age of binaries, the fact that the Enlightenment contains multitudes is actually helpful. ‘There was a great deal of plurality in the way that people thought, even at that time,’ Saini said. ‘And that’s why I think, when we look at the past, we should hesitate from being too judgmental, because we ourselves will be judged by future generations for the way we live now.’
Refusing to consign people or ideas in history to wholesale categories of good or bad allows us to say, she told me: ‘We know the kind of world that we want and, if anything is possible, which is I think the lesson of history, then we can take what we know is useful.’ About the rest of it, Saini concludes, ‘We can say that was fine for you, it’s not fine for us. And that’s OK.’
Eliane Glaser is a writer and radio producer. She is also a visiting fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, UK. Her books include Elitism: A Progressive Defence (2020) and Motherhood: Feminism’s Unfinished Business (2022), and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Prospect and the London Review of Books, among others. She lives in London.
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本文於 修改第 5 次
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回應「什麼是『啟蒙』？」 --- Immanuel Kant
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請參考：
* What Is Enlightenment? (Kant)
索引：
dare to be wise：勇於思考，勇於明辨
minority：幼稚，不成熟；此處的minority與minor (「幼童」)意義相近，非「少數」。另一版本用immaturity一字；選擇此版本因它為WORD檔，其它版本多為PDF檔，需另行分段。
以下是康德原文的英譯。有些段落甚長，但我不敢妄斷大哲的手筆；只好請看官們費點大腦慢慢咀嚼。另請注意：「索引」下對康德第1段英譯用詞所做的詮釋。
An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
Written: 30th September, 1784;
First Published: 1798
Source: Immanuel Kant. Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, 1996;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [dare to be wise] Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.
It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remains minors for life, and that it becomes so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me. That by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex) should hold the step toward majority to be not only troublesome but also highly dangerous will soon be seen to by those guardians who have kindly taken it upon themselves to supervise them; after they have made their domesticated animals dumb and carefully prevented these placid creatures from daring to take a single step without the walking cart in which they have confined them, they then show them the danger that threatens them if they try to walk alone. Now this danger is not in fact so great, for by a few falls they would eventually learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes them timid and usually frightens them away from any further attempt.
Thus it is difficult for any single individual to extricate himself from the minority that has become almost nature to him. He has even grown fond of it and is really unable for the time being to make use of his own understanding, because he was never allowed to make the attempt. Precepts and formulas, those mechanical instruments of a rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of an everlasting minority. And anyone who did throw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over even the narrowest ditch, since he would not be accustomed to free movement of this kind. Hence there are only a few who have succeeded, by their own cultivation of their spirit, in extricating themselves from minority and yet walking confidently.
But that a public should enlighten itself is more possible; indeed this is almost inevitable, if only it is left its freedom. For there will always be a few independent thinkers, even among the established guardians of the great masses, who, after having themselves cast off the yoke of minority, will disseminate the spirit of a rational valuing of one’s own worth and of the calling of each individual to think for himself. What should be noted here is that the public, which was previously put under this yoke by the guardians, may subsequently itself compel them to remain under it, if the public is suitably stirred up by some of its guardians who are themselves incapable of any enlightenment; so harmful is it to implant prejudices, because they finally take their revenge on the very people who, or whose predecessors, were their authors. Thus a public can achieve enlightenment only slowly. A revolution may well bring about a failing off of personal despotism and of avaricious or tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform in one’s way of thinking; instead new prejudices will serve just as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses.
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. But I hear from all sides the cry: Do not argue! The officer says: Do not argue but drill! The tax official: Do not argue but pay! The clergyman: Do not argue but believe! (Only one ruler in the world says: Argue as much as you will and about whatever you will, but obey!) Everywhere there are restrictions on freedom. But what sort of restriction hinders enlightenment, and what sort does not hinder but instead promotes it? – I reply: The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among human beings; the private use of one’s reason may, however, often be very narrowly restricted without this particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. But by the public use of one’s own reason I understand that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers. What I call the private use of reason is that which one may make of it in a certain civil post or office with which he is entrusted. Now, for many affairs conducted in the interest of a commonwealth a certain mechanism is necessary, by means of which some members of the commonwealth must behave merely passively, so as to be directed by the government, through an artful unanimity, to public ends (or at least prevented from destroying such ends). Here it is, certainly, impermissible to argue; instead, one must obey. But insofar as this part of the machine also regards himself as a member of a whole commonwealth, even of the society of citizens of the world, and so in his capacity of a scholar who by his writings addresses a public in the proper sense of the word, he can certainly argue without thereby harming the affairs assigned to him in part as a passive member. Thus it would be ruinous if an officer, receiving an order from his superiors, wanted while on duty to engage openly in subtle reasoning about its appropriateness or utility; he must obey. But he cannot fairly be prevented, as a scholar, from making remarks about errors in the military service and from putting these before his public for appraisal. A citizen cannot refuse to pay the taxes imposed upon him; an impertinent censure of such levies when he is to pay them may even be punished as a scandal (which could occasion general insubordination). But the same citizen does not act against the duty of a citizen when, as a scholar, he publicly expresses his thoughts about the inappropriateness or even injustice of such decrees. So too, a clergyman is bound to deliver his discourse to the pupils in his catechism class and to his congregation in accordance with the creed of the church he serves, for he was employed by it on that condition. But as a scholar he has complete freedom and is even called upon to communicate to the public all his carefully examined and well-intentioned thoughts about what is erroneous in that creed and his suggestions for a better arrangement of the religious and ecclesiastical body. And there is nothing in this that could be laid as a burden on his conscience. For what he teaches in consequence of his office as carrying out the business of the church, he represents as something with respect to which he does not have free power to teach as he thinks best, but which he is appointed to deliver as prescribed and in the name of another. He will say: Our church teaches this or that; here are the arguments it uses. He then extracts all practical uses for his congregation from precepts to which he would not himself subscribe with full conviction but which he can nevertheless undertake to deliver because it is still not altogether impossible that truth may lie concealed in them, and in any case there is at least nothing contradictory to inner religion present in them. For if he believed he had found the latter in them, he could not in conscience hold his office; he would have to resign from it. Thus the use that an appointed teacher makes of his reason before his congregation is merely a private use; for a congregation, however large a gathering it may be, is still only a domestic gathering; and with respect to it he, as a priest, is not and cannot be free, since he is carrying out another’s commission. On the other hand as a scholar, who by his writings speaks to the public in the strict sense, that is, the world – hence a clergyman in the public use of his reason – he enjoys an unrestricted freedom to make use of his own reason and to speak in his own person. For that the guardians of the people (in spiritual matters) should themselves be minors is an absurdity that amounts to the perpetuation of absurdities.
But should not a society of clergymen, such as an ecclesiastical synod or a venerable classis (as it calls itself among the Dutch), be authorized to bind itself by oath to a certain unalterable creed, in order to carry on an unceasing guardianship over each of its members and by means of them over the people, and even to perpetuate this? I say that this is quite impossible. Such a contract, concluded to keep all further enlightenment away from the human race forever, is absolutely null and void, even if it were ratified by the supreme power, by imperial diets and by the most solemn peace treaties. One age cannot bind itself and conspire to put the following one into such a condition that it would be impossible for it to enlarge its cognitions (especially in such urgent matters) and to purify them of errors, and generally to make further progress in enlightenment. This would be a crime against human nature, whose original vocation lies precisely in such progress; and succeeding generations are therefore perfectly authorized to reject such decisions as unauthorized and made sacrilegiously. The touchstone of whatever can be decided upon as law for a people lies in the question: whether a people could impose such a law upon itself. Now this might indeed be possible for a determinate short time, in expectation as it were of a better one, in order to introduce a certain order; during that time each citizen, particularly a clergyman, would be left free, in his capacity as a scholar, to make his remarks publicly, that is, through writings, about defects in the present institution; meanwhile, the order introduced would last until public insight into the nature of these things had become so widespread and confirmed that by the union of their voices (even if not all of them) it could submit a proposal to the crown, to take under its protection those congregations that have, perhaps in accordance with their concepts of better insight, agreed to an altered religious institution, but without hindering those that wanted to acquiesce in the old one. But it is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution not to be doubted publicly by anyone and thereby, as it were, to nullify a period of time in the progress of humanity toward improvement and make it fruitless and hence detrimental to posterity. One can indeed, for his own person and even then only for some time, postpone enlightenment in what it is incumbent upon him to know; but to renounce enlightenment, whether for his own person or even more so for posterity, is to violate the sacred right of humanity and trample it underfoot. But what a people may never decide upon for itself, a monarch may still less decide upon for a people;, for his legislative authority rests precisely on this, that he unites in his will the collective will of the people. As long as he sees to it that any true or supposed improvement is consistent with civil order, he can for the rest leave it to his subjects to do what they find it necessary to do for the sake of their salvation;2 that is no concern of his, but it is indeed his concern to prevent any one of them from forcibly hindering others from working to the best of their ability to determine and promote their salvation. It even infringes upon his majesty if he meddles in these affairs by honoring with governmental inspection the writings in which his subjects attempt to clarify their insight, as well as if he does this from his own supreme insight, in which case he exposes himself to the reproach Caesar non est super grammaticos, [Caesar is not above the grammarians] but much more so if he demeans his supreme authority so far as to support the spiritual despotism of a few tyrants within his state against the rest of his subjects.
If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment. As matters now stand, a good deal more is required for people on the whole to be in the position, or even able to be put into the position, of using their own understanding confidently and well in religious matters, without another’s guidance. But we do have distinct intimations that the field is now being opened for them to work freely in this direction and that the hindrances to universal enlightenment or to humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred minority are gradually becoming fewer. In this regard this age is the age of enlightenment or the century of Frederick.
A prince who does not find it beneath himself to say that he considers it his duty not to prescribe anything to human beings in religious matters but to leave them complete freedom, who thus even declines the arrogant name of tolerance, is himself enlightened and deserves to be praised by a grateful world and by posterity as the one who first released the human race from minority, at least from the side of government, and left each free to make use of his own reason in all matters of conscience. Under him, venerable clergymen, notwithstanding their official duties, may in their capacity as scholars freely and publicly lay before the world for examination their judgments and insights deviating here and there from the creed adopted, and still more may any other who is not restricted by any official duties. This spirit of freedom is also spreading abroad, even where it has to struggle with external obstacles of a government which misunderstands itself. For it shines as an example to such a government that in freedom there is not the least cause for anxiety about public concord and the unity of the commonwealth. People gradually work their way out of barbarism of their own accord if only one does not intentionally contrive to keep them in it.
I have put the main point of enlightenment, of people’s emergence from their self-incurred minority, chiefly in matters of religion because our rulers have no interest in playing guardian over their subjects with respect to the arts and sciences and also because that minority being the most harmful, is also the most disgraceful of all. But the frame of mind of a head of state who favors the first goes still further and sees that even with respect to his legislation there is no danger in allowing his subjects to make public use of their own reason and to publish to the world their thoughts about a better way of formulating it, even with candid criticism of that already given; we have a shining example of this, in which no monarch has yet surpassed the one whom we honor.
But only one who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of phantoms, but at the same time has a well-disciplined and numerous army ready to guarantee public peace, can say what a free state may not dare to say: Argue as much as you will and about what you will; only obey! Here a strange, unexpected course is revealed in human affairs, as happens elsewhere too if it is considered in the large, where almost everything is paradoxical. A greater degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s freedom of spirit and nevertheless puts up insurmountable barriers to it; a lesser degree of the former, on the other hand, provides a space for the latter to expand to its full capacity. Thus when nature has unwrapped, from under this hard shell, the seed for which she cares most tenderly, namely the propensity and calling to think freely, the latter gradually works back upon the mentality of the people (which thereby gradually becomes capable of freedom in acting) and eventually even upon the principles of government, which finds it profitable to itself to treat the human being, who is now more than a machine, in keeping with his dignity.
Königsberg in Prussia, 30th September, 1784
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