After class on Wednesday, I found myself kind of obsessed with thinking about the word we spent pretty much the entire session on: “enlightenment.” In Kant’s native German, the word is “Äufklarung”–which literally means something like “to clear up” (auf=up, klarung=make clear). According to our friend the Oxford English Dictionary, here are a few more definitions of “enlightenment”:

• “The action of bringing someone to a state of greater knowledge, understanding, or insight; the state of being enlightened in this way. Also: an instance of this. rare before 19th cent.”
• “spec. Usu. with capital initial. The action or process of freeing human understanding from the accepted and customary beliefs sanctioned by traditional, esp. religious, authority, chiefly by rational and scientific inquiry into all aspects of human life, which became a characteristic goal of philosophical writing in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Freq. in the Age of Enlightenment.”

But, do any of these meanings really give us a sense of what enlightenment is today, in 2013? Why is the word still used so often, in so many different contexts? It must be important…

I keep coming back to the passage where Kant states, “But that the public should enlighten itself is more possible…disseminate the spirit of the rational appreciation of both their own worth and every man’s vocation for thinking for himself.” Perhaps this is the key to understanding why we think about enlightenment today? It seems as though Kant is hinting at the importance that the “public” mobilize in order to break out of a pattern of being “followers.” He definitely thinks that it is crucial that all people learn to think for themselves and seems to think that “revolution” is a good and necessary thing. But, Kant was also living in a world ruled by a monarch.

How would “the public enlighten itself” today? Should “the public enlighten itself”? What is “the public”? What do we need to save?