Sapere aude. Dare to know. The obstacle was never a lack of understanding, it was the courage to use it.
Liberation, in this sense, is not political or economic freedom. It is the specific claim that acquiring knowledge, and the capacity to reason for yourself rather than defer to received authority, is itself the emancipatory act.
Immanuel Kant gave the classical Western statement of this in 1784: enlightenment is “man’s exit from his self-incurred immaturity,” where immaturity means the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. He called it self-incurred because its cause is usually not a lack of understanding but a lack of courage to use it, and gave the tradition its motto, sapere aude, dare to know. Paulo Freire arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: education either domesticates people into the system as it stands or becomes a practice of freedom, in which people move from passively absorbing the world to naming, questioning, and transforming it.
A structurally similar argument runs through classical Islamic epistemology, in the distinction between taqlid, uncritical deference to received authority, and ijtihad, independent reasoning exercised by a qualified mind. Scholarship on this tradition treats the historical drift from ijtihad toward taqlid as a slide into intellectual stagnation, and the recovery of independent reasoning, grounded in but not merely obedient to inherited knowledge, as its own form of liberation from ignorance. Three traditions, arrived at independently, converge on the same claim: the mind that reasons for itself is the mind that is free.
Source: Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784); Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).