Many times throughout my life, I’ve heard about
this age called Enlightenment, and how important it was for the development of
Western Civilization. Whenever I hear
the mentioning of that age, names like Descartes, Kant, Locke, Newton, Rousseau,
and Voltaire jumble around my brain.
It’s well known that these people contributed much to our western, modern,
rationalist ways of understanding the world around us.
Kant, in particular, tried to describe the
essence of Enlightenment in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” The first sentence of that essay goes right
to the point. “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.” With this, Kant says that Enlightenment has
to do with the wherewithal and will of us, the people, to free ourselves from
authoritative, institutionalized teachings that we allowed to dominate our
thought processes throughout our lives. It’s
a call for us to throw off the shackles of society, to break the prison of
tradition, and to embrace our own mental capacities. This freeing of the mind isn’t something that
will just spontaneously happen over time, it’s not something that’ll just be
given to us. It’s something we have to
actualize through intellectual strength.
Reading Kant reminds me a lot of the Matrix movies because those stories
show such a deep, existential struggle for freeing the mind, body, and spirit
from the constraints of a computer generated world. Unplugging yourself from an artificial life
is one of the main themes, and that seems to echo what Kant is trying to get
across to us.
