Kant and the Berlin Enlightenment

Abstract

This article compares the concepts of enlightenment formulated by M. Mendelssohn in the article “On the question: what does ‘to enlighten’ mean?” and I. Kant in the article “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”. The author emphasises the paramount significance of Kant’s Copernican turn, which assigns the agent the responsibility for everything they do and everything that depends on them and facilitates, in Habermas’s words, “the structural transformation of the public sphere”.

Keywords

• enlightenment
• education
• culture
• goal of human being
• Kant’s Copernican turn
• public and private application of reason
• “structural transformation of the public sphere”