Hi I’m Zachary Tashiro, I’m a sophomore and am planning on majoring in finance, for now at least.

When I was reading Kant’s ideas about enlightenment, one had stuck out to me. His idea that enlightenment being able to function and think on your own. Kant states how the ideas of enlightenment could be summarized as being able to think on your own without the help from others. Kant in the text states that enlightenment is difficult to achieve as we do not want to work in order to gain it. He believes that as a society we are lazy and find it much easier to be able to follow one’s orders than to make our own. Kant also believes that a large part of not being enlightened is out immaturity, he shows how another large reason that we are not enlightened is how we do not have any courage in order to go out and achieve it.

Personally I do not think that we live in an enlightened age. Currently we have the large majority of people who take whatever they can find at face value. In fact it’s quite difficult to find someone who does research on everything they hear. People tend to take lies they read, and pass it off as factual information. If I were to propose a new definition for what enlightenment is, it would be the ability to question everything. This is because it would allow people to be able to think for themselves, but it would also mean that we are able to logically think about whatever information we get. This would also create the ability to argue, and discuss more. People would be able to be open to new argument and accept the fact going in, that maybe they could be wrong.