Quote by Immanuel Kant: “Have the courage to use your own understanding.”

Kant's definition of Enlightenment is this: stop delegating your thinking to authorities — religious, political, or cultural — and take responsibility for reasoning for yourself. It sounds simple. In practice, it is frightening, because it means you can no longer blame others when your conclusions are wrong.

What is Enlightenment? was Kant's 1784 response to the question posed by a Berlin journal. The American Revolution had just succeeded, and the French Revolution was five years away. Kant was arguing that intellectual self-governance was the necessary precondition for the political self-governance that Europeans were beginning to imagine.

German philosopher of the Enlightenment whose Critique of Pure Reason attempted to reconcile rationalism and empiricism and transformed Western philosophy. His ethical works, including the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, introduced the categorical imperative.