SPIRITUAL IMPOVERISHMENT? AND, ON BEING A GROWNUP!

Lucien Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The Christian Burgess and the Enlightenment, translated from the German by Henry Maas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1968, 1973) ("Kant, who adopted many of the basic ideas of the Enlightenment, and in some important respects went beyond them, began his essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? with the words: 'Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed minority. This minority is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. It is self-imposed if its cause lies not in a lack of understanding, but in the lack of courage and determination to rely on one's own understanding and not another's guidance. Thus the motto of the Enlightenment is 'Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding!' Idleness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a part of mankind, after nature has long since released them from the tutelage of others, willingly remain minors as long as they live; and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is most convenient to be a minor. If I have a book to reason for me, or a confessor to act as my conscience, or a physician to prescribe my diet, and so on, I need not take any trouble myself. As long a I can pay, I do not have to think. Others will spare me the tiresome necessity.'" Id. at 2-3. In short: take responsibility for yourself. Be a grownup! "The western world is now engaged in constructing a fundamentally secular and deconsecrated industrial society. This is a society in which--of it is achieved--all men will live in comfort. Perhaps there will also be a large measure of formal freedom and religious and philosophical toleration. But it is a society that threatens to deprive human life of all spiritual content, a society in which the growth of freedom is likely to be accompanied by the growth in numbers of those whose inner emptiness robs them of the desire to use it, a society in which religious and philosophical toleration will be made all the easier to achieve as spiritual impoverishment makes religious and philosophical commitment constantly more rare," Id. at 85.).