Answering the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?”
Kant answers the question quite succinctly in the first sentence of the essay:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”
He argues that the immaturity is self-inflicted not from a lack of understanding, but from the lack of courage to use one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another. Our fear of thinking for ourselves.
He exclaims that the motto of enlightenment is “Sapere aude”! – Dare to be wise!
I turn 31 in a few weeks (or twenty eleven as I heard it described the other day, which is a joyous way to express it,) and the signs of receding youth fill me with a kind of disquietude as pieces of my body slowly fall away like wet cake. My hair has become grey and wiry, like a darker, aged version of Mattel's finest, and my once bounding energy akin to a cbeebies presenter on haribo has been replaced with a plodding, almost supine, state of consciousness. Perhaps I can blame parenting on that one.
My point is, such self-denigration is a backlash to the inevitable realisation that I am indeed no longer a child. This is something that, as a man, one resists and impugns like a toddler refusing to give up his favourite action man figure. It's scary and shuddersome. The mere acceptance of the fact one is no longer a child lays out before it rows of responsibility and accountability. Odd, you may think, that this should only dawn on me some seven years after getting married, and 3 since fathering my first child, but it's not about knowing, it's about accepting.
Kant made a salient point, that for a man to accept maturity, is to dare to be wise. And wisdom is something that creeps up on us, like the grey hairs on our head, or in my case, the hairs on our toes. Take that for a mental image. I am truly sorry!
As a new parent, I always rooted myself in self-incurred immaturity and an aspect of that was a determination to be a 'cool' dad. Not an older parent such as I had grown up with, but a hip, youthful father who would have fashion sense and not embarrass their children at the school gates, but rather be admired and respected and thought highly of by the other children. I longed that such phrases as "Your dad is so cool!" Would be uttered at the school gates. This, I was sure, would make my children blissfully content and overjoyed.
Now, three years down the line, I realise that this is not what my children want or need. What they do need, and what I had, is not a hip and trendy dad, but a wise one. A role model that can extol the virtues of hard work, the importance of spirituality, doing what's right because it's the right thing to do, and most of all simply someone to whom they can show love and have love shown back.
Olivia turns three in a few weeks, and starts nursery a few weeks after that. A terrifying prospect for me, but a joyous beginning for her. I shall resolve to be wise and mature at the school gates, and not wear an ed hardy tshirt in a desperate effort to be the coolest dad there. Or maybe I'm not ready to let that side of me go completely yet.
P x
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