Art of Enlightenment Ii Michel Foucault

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In 1983, Michel Foucault invited a few friends and colleagues to have a rather surprising discourse on the subject of Immanuel Kant's treatise on the question "What is Enlightenment?". In his essay titled, "What is Enlightenment", Foucault gives his own take on the question asked in the December 1784 publication of the Berlinische Monatsschrift. Immanuel Kant, in his response to the question "What is Enlightenment", defined Enlightenment as “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” and the “courage to use your own reason[2]”. Kant believed that “laziness and cowardice” were the prime reasons why many men remained un-enlightened[3]. Kant asserted that people refused to throw off the yoke of “self-imposed tutelage” because it was easier to pay people to think for them and run their lives[4]. As Kant put it a person could pay to buy a book to serve as understanding, a pastor to serve as a conscience and a physician to determine a diet. here was no real need for an individual to exert their own will or their own reason since these “benevolent guardians” would take over an individual’s life for them. The act of enlightenment, therefore, was the act of rejecting this easy form of life and asserting the primacy of your individual reason to reject the conventions of the social guardians who Kant asserted herded society like docile, dumb livestock." (Source: williampax.com) According to Geoffrey Harpham, "Foucault sought not just to rehabilitate the chronically "incomplete project " of the Enlightenment as a subject of contemporary discussion but also to establish some positive relation of his own to that fissile and complex movement by reopening the question to which Kant had provided "an answer", almost two centuries ago." Thus, Foucault analysis Kant's take on Enlightenment as well as provided his own interpretation of the philosophy. However, due
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