An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?

"Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" is a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. In the December 1784 publication of the Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly), edited by Friedrich Gedike and Johann Erich Biester, Kant replied to the question posed a year earlier by the Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner, who was also an official in the Prussian government. Zöllner's question was addressed to a broad intellectual public community, in reply to Biester's essay entitled: «Proposal, not to engage the clergy any longer when marriages are conducted» (April 1783) and a number of leading intellectuals replied with essays, of which Kant's is the most famous an…