What Is Enlightenment?

Metaphor (the description of an object as some other object that is not literally the same) plays several roles and takes several forms in Kant’s essay. The overall effect is to make Kant’s points more vivid and powerful via negative or positive connotations. On the negative side, Kant describes the unenlightened as livestock at the beginning of the essay and machines at the end, while the authorities that discourage Thinking for Oneself are guardians, and the shortcuts people take to make reasoning easier are “shackles of a permanent immaturity” (41, 8:36). In a positive twist, though, humanity’s capacity to reason is a “kernel” ready to break out of its “hard shell” (45-46, 8:41).

Kant sets out the parallelism of his trio of examples (the member of the military, the tax-paying citizen, and the clergyman) when he first introduces them: “The officer says, ‘Do not argue, drill!’ The taxman says, ‘Do not argue, pay!’ The pastor says, ‘Do not argue, believe!’” (42, 8:36-37). The repeated “Do not argue” construction, in addition to being rhetorically forceful, seeks to cement the trio in the mind of the reader so that they can more easily follow Kant’s later lines of argument.