 Kant was a central figure in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. One of his popular essays, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” discusses Enlightenment in terms of the use of an individual’s own reason (8:35f). To be Enlightened is to emerge from one’s self-incurred minority (juvenile) status to a mature ability to think for oneself. In another essay, “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thought?” Kant defines Enlightenment as “the maxim of always thinking for oneself” (8:146). “What is Enlightenment” distinguishes between the public and private uses of reason. The private use of reason is, for government officials, the use of reason they must utilize in their official positions. For example, a member of the clergy (who in Kant’s Prussia were funded by the state) is required to espouse the official doctrine in sermons and teachings. The public use of reason is the use an individual makes of reason as a scholar reaching the public world of readers. For example, the same member of the clergy could, as a scholar, present perceived shortcomings in that very same doctrine. Similarly, military officers could, using public reason, question the value or appropriateness of the orders they receive, but in their functions as military officers, using private reason, they are obliged to obey the same orders. Kant intends the debates using public reason to cover legislation and acts of the state as well. Since the sovereign might err, and individual citizens have the right to attempt to correct the error under the assumption that the sovereign does not intend to err: “a citizen must have, with the approval of the ruler himself, the authorization to make known publicly his opinions about what it is in the ruler’s arrangements that seems to him to be a wrong against the commonwealth,” writes Kant in “Theory and Practice”. This freedom of the pen is “the sole palladium” of the rights of the people, for without this means the people would have no way to make any claims to rights at all (8:304).