Enlightenment thinkers, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all had very similar beliefs of what made an individual enlightened and what made a society/nation enlightened. An enlightened person was defined as “one who dares to think for himself… trampling on prejudice, tradition, conventional wisdom, authority, in a word, all that enslaves most minds” according to the French Encyclopedie. Many enlightenment thinkers also disagreed with religion and authority in general. Europeans, during the age of exploration, sought out unfamiliar territory to find new goods and services to bring back to their land. Being exposed to a nation governed by reason and rationality, Europeans looked down upon native countries and cities that governed their nation based on their religious faith, traditions and culture. They saw them as “primitive and unreasonable” human beings, not to mention, “childlike” and basically inferior to the people back in Europe. Kant believed in enlightened monarchs with strict order and a “well disciplined army” not a country that is convinced to change their opinions constantly based upon what the higher authority had to tell them or a purely democratic nation.

Reading through “What is Enlightenment?,” there were many ideas and concepts that I agreed with that Kant or the Enlightenment thinkers believed in, some of which include the notion of freedom, rationalism and critical thinking as factors to what defined an enlightened person. But there were definitely a few ideas that I personally disagreed with. In the beginning of the reading, the author established what makes a human being human? They asserted that human beings, unlike animals, are governed with the faculty of reason: having the capacity to reflect on the the relationships between object or events throughout their lives. Though according to Enlightenment thinkers this is the characteristic that makes a human being human, a woman isn’t acquitted the same freedom and authority that men possess. Many of the enlightenment beliefs allude to supporting the notion that inequality of reason and knowledge varies among gender, race and religious beliefs, which I must say I personally disagree with. Kant’s belief that an enlightened nation is one that has strict order shows in part his support for inequality which still is very much present even today. The notion that your religious background or your ethnic background plays a factor in the superiority of your knowledge and reasoning capacity is completely absurd. We have successful Christian advocates, we have successful Muslims, there successful Asians and African Americans, not limited to the Europeans only.