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Immanuel Kant's Essay On Enlightenment

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Enlightenment is a phenomenon which has been widely discussed amongst the academics over the centuries. While reading Immanuel Kant’s essay on “what is enlightenment?” certain ideas jumped out and resonated with me. The aim of this paper therefore is to discuss those two important ideas from the text and to relate it with relevant real life examples. Kant emphasizes on the freedom to exercise public use of reason and thinking as a means of achieving enlightenment and yet at the same time he juxtaposes it with the idea of fulfilling one’s civic duties and obligations. Now what is important to note here is that, even though he is encouraging people as scholars to come together in a public space where everyone can present their opinions for and against some practices in the society, in an educated and civilized manner, that does not in any way imply that a person is free to use that reason to justify not fulfilling his duties …show more content…

Therefore, from what I can gather Enlightenment is not just about thinking critically and presenting one’s opinion but it is also about knowing when to employ it so that there is no chaos in the society. Thus, one can say that for Kant, Enlightenment is the path between chaos and order. Moving on, if we try and connect Kant’s idea of freedom of speech with today’s world. We can see internet as an example of a public space where people voice their opinions for and against different issues prevalent not only in their society but also in the world. And though the people can be seen as exercising their reason and thought process to debate important issues on various social media platforms on the internet – making public use of one’s reason, one can see people using freedom of speech as an umbrella under which to pick fights with other groups and to aggravate

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