Dare to Know

Immanuel Kant answered the question What is Enlightenment in seventeen eighty-four, in a handful of pages built around one German word, and Paul Guyer opens this episode by prying that word apart syllable by syllable. From there the essay gathers speed: why grown people remain minors for life, what courage has to do with knowledge, and a sly hint about who writes the rules of morality and whose interest they serve. It ends, unusually for Kant, with a seed inside a rough husk, and Guyer stays with that image until it opens. Dare to know sounds like a slogan; Guyer reads it as a diagnosis.