Hello! My name is Philip Yusupov and I am a sophomore student. I was born in Brooklyn but grew up in Russia. So English is not my first language.

I believe that Kant’s understanding of Enlightenment relies heavily on how he defines freedom – an escape from immaturity, or the dependency on others for knowledge. Firstly, enlightenment is achieved by a select few who are courageous enough to use their own understanding to deal with the challenges of living. Systems of thinking and the institutions that birth them hold people back from exploring the world and its mysteries through their own understanding. Kant believes that Enlightenment is difficult to achieve in a society where there are obstacles to this journey of self-understanding and its use in the public. We rely on “guardians” to dictate to us when to do certain actions without consulting our own opinions. Kant defines this reliance as immaturity, a difficult habit to break out of. Though Enlightenment can be difficult for those that do break free of immaturity, Kant does believe that the public will be able to achieve an Enlightenment as a whole. However, Kant believes that only a ruler who allows open argument and discourse to occur while demanding obedience, can allow for Enlightenment to occur on a wide social scale. This then creates an effect where, the more intellectually liberated men become, the more society becomes conducive to treating a man with the dignity he deserves. I do not believe that we live in an enlightened age, at least in the sense that Kant definers Enlightenment as a broad social order or change. According to Kant, Enlightenment happens on a large scale when there are rulers who allow for discourse to happen and for ideas to flourish. I believe that we are too dependent on the professional opinions of experts, and that we are not encouraged to educate ourselves on numerous subjects. Education is meant to pave the way for a job and nothing more. We are not being challenged to educate ourselves and think in open and expansive ways. Instead, our concerns are to live out our days in social obedience while those in positions of power make decisions they deem important without, necessarily, our consent. Though I do think there are a limited few people, or a minority, that is Enlightened in the sense that they understand the workings of society and can distinguish between what is good or bad, I do not believe that our society can stand for an Enlightened mass. As Kant states, “a high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it” our own rights for intellectual freedom put those in positions of power in circumstances that are not to their liking. Why not have a complacent society that obeys and carries out its existence in silence, instead of a mass of people objecting to decisions that are self-serving as opposed to utilitarian? Much of what is happening today in politics reflects a yearning to move away from Enlightenment and to establish “machines” in place of “men” to which Kant opposed then as I do now.