Why Kant and Günter Anders are more relevant than ever

In 1784, Immanuel Kant asked a deceptively simple question: “What is Enlightenment?” His answer still hits like a slap in the face:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without direction from another. … Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! That is the motto of the Enlightenment.”

Kant’s diagnosis was brutal: most people stay immature not because they’re stupid, but because they’re lazy and cowardly. They’d rather let priests, kings, or “guardians” think for them than take the risk of thinking for themselves.

Fast-forward to 2025. The new guardians have names like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok. And millions of us consult them every day. Not just to draft an e-mail or debug code, but for advice on relationships, career choices, ethical dilemmas, even what to believe. We don’t just outsource tasks; we outsource judgment. The only faculty we still use is the one that types the prompt.

That’s Kant’s “self-incurred immaturity” in its purest form; only the authority is no longer a person. It’s an algorithm.

Then there’s Günter Anders, writing in 1956 in The Obsolescence of Man. Anders essentially said:

“we no longer control our creations; they control us through dependency.”

Anders saw a reversal coming: instead of humans shaping tools, tools would start shaping humans. Large language models are accelerating that reversal in ways he could only have nightmares about.

1. We mold our questions, and increasingly our thinking, to what the model “likes” to hear.
2. We feed it data with every click, making it smarter while our own critical muscles atrophy.
3. We turn ourselves into tiny cogs in a global apparatus that already outperforms us on almost every cognitive task.

Worst of all is what Anders called Promethean shame; the shame of being merely born instead of manufactured, fallible instead of perfect, slow instead of instantaneous. When Claude spins out a brilliant 2,000-word essay in eight seconds and your own attempt looks clumsy by comparison, the shame isn’t directed at another human. It’s directed at the machine, and the quickest way to ease that shame is to lean even harder on the machine next time.

Put Kant and Anders together and you get a perfect feedback loop:

• The less you use your own mind (Kant), the more you feel inferior to the machine (Anders).
• The more inferior you feel, the less you dare to use your own mind.

Two warnings, one from 1784, one from 1956, are not relics. They are describing, with terrifying precision, the acceleration we’re living through right now.

So here’s the question we actually have to face in 2025:
Do we still have the courage to say “Sapere aude”; not to popes or princes, but to the algorithms that now sit on the throne? Or are we quietly sliding into a new, glittering immaturity, this time with perfect grammar and citations?