Enlightenment

11 Key excerpts on "Enlightenment"

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  Western Civilization: A Global and Comparative Approach

  Volume II: Since 1600

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

  The Enlightenment, 1715–1789

       

  The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that prevailed in Europe from the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 to the beginning of the French Revolution of 1789. While the Enlightenment primarily centered on France, it drew representatives and adherents from throughout Europe. The French thinkers associated with the Enlightenment were known as philosophes . During the eighteenth century, educated Europeans sincerely believed that their civilization had entered a new, more enlightened age, to which they contributed through learning, writing, and ideas that broke in significant ways with the past. New ideas and philosophical approaches did much to define and shape the age and its history. A complicated set of changing political and social circumstances contributed to a general reassessment of the role of the state and the goals of society.

  Enlightenment thinkers attempted to make philosophy meaningful in the context of the political and social realities that they sought to change. They frequently disagreed about philosophical issues, as well as in their views on politics, religion, and society. But in general the philosophes and other thinkers associated with the Enlightenment elevated reason over religion and superstition; valued education and learning over ignorance or uninformed belief; argued for religious tolerance over bigotry and intolerance; advocated humane treatment of people, including criminals; and championed freedom of speech and freedom of the press over censorship. They generally believed that society and human beings could be improved on the basis of common sense, reason, and education. They tended to believe that a natural law existed that was accessible to humanity and could serve as a guideline in all human endeavors. Finally, a growing number of European thinkers rejected the Christian religion and challenged the authority of the Christian churches that had done so much to shape the history of the preceding centuries and of European civilization in general.

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  A Modern Introduction to Theology

  New Questions for Old Beliefs

  • Philip Kennedy(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  4 the Enlightenment

  The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?

  Psalm 27

  A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. Thomas Jefferson

  The Enlightenment was a multifaceted movement that began in Europe during the seventeenth century and grew rapidly throughout the eighteenth. It reached its zenith around the end of the eighteenth century. It was both a distinct period of western history and a project to improve people’s lives. The Enlightenment was simultaneously an intellectual earthquake in the life of Europe; a wide-ranging cultural transformation; a naked challenge to the authority of the Church; and a resolute rejection of feudal social pecking orders. It was a time of dizzying philosophical and religious debate; of striking scientific accomplishment; and of dramatic political upheaval. It generated ideas that spawned a violent revolution in England’s American colonies in the 1770s, and the French Revolution that erupted in 1789. Western societies enjoy many of their current political practices and intellectual habits precisely because of the Enlightenment, and it is the influence of the Enlightenment on western societies that distinguishes them from others.

  The fundamental ethos of the Enlightenment is captured in an amalgam of four wonderful words: revolution, freedom, reason and criticism. The Enlightenment was a revolution against the arbitrary exercise of authority by monarchs and the Church. It called for people to think and act freely for themselves without immature and unthinking subservience to the tutelage of priests and pastors. It championed the exercise of human reason as a superlative tool for securing knowledge, rather than appeal to divine revelation or the Bible. And it subjected every aspect of social, political and religious life to relentless criticism or analysis. Broadly speaking, its proponents would not accept any proposition or doctrine as true simply on the basis of a self-styled authoritative pronouncement. In this, the Enlightenment spurned the overarching principle of hierarchical authority that governed the Church and educational institutions throughout the Middle Ages.

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  The Philosophy of the Enlightenment

  • John Hibben(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Jovian Press

    (Publisher)

  THE AGE OF THE Enlightenment

  ~

  THE SIGNIFICANT MOVEMENT OF THOUGHT known as the Enlightenment, or Aufklärung, falls in the main within the period of the eighteenth century. It is seldom, however, that the turn of a century happens to coincide exactly with the beginning or the end of a great epoch, either political, religious or philosophical. The period in philosophy which is referred to in a general way as the eighteenth century begins virtually in the year 1690 with the publication of Locke famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and is brought to its close in the year 1781 with the appearance of Kant Critique of Pure Reason. They are the natural boundaries of this “philosophical century.”

  It was an age characterised by a restless spirit of inquiry — a century of challenge. A new life was awake and stirred in the minds of men. Traditions which had been long venerated became the objects of searching investigation and criticism. The authority of the church, of the state and of the school was no longer regarded as the court of last appeal. The old beliefs which failed to justify themselves at the bar of reason were discarded. The foundations of time-honoured systems seemed shifting and uncertain. There was an insistent demand for the free play of the individual judgment. There was, also, a constant reference to the light of reason, the inner illumination shining bright and clear in contrast to the shadows of mysticism, or to the false and flickering light of dogmatism. Hence the name of the age of illumination, or Enlightenment, — the name, also, of the age of reason.

  In this period there was more particularly a spirit of protest against metaphysical speculation, that is, against all attempts to explain the phenomena of human existence in any manner which transcends the ordinary processes of reason, and consequently possesses no firm foundation of reality. And reality, in turn, was conceived as that which is akin to nature and to the general course of natural phenomena as perceived through the channels of the various senses. There was an attempt to reduce the problems of thought to the basis of extreme simplicity, and to make a common-sense view of things everywhere prevail.

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  The Handy Philosophy Answer Book

  • Naomi Zack(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Visible Ink Press

    (Publisher)

  What was Enlightenment philosophy?

  Enlightenment philosophy was written during the time associated with the Enlightenment, which occurred roughly around the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment was an historical period in which the ideas of philosophers played dominant cultural roles, in contrast to the importance of religion during the medieval period, or the importance of science and technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  What was the Enlightenment?

  The Enlightenment was known to its contemporaries and future generations as The Age of Reason. The Enlightenment went beyond intellectual activity to affect painting, literature, architecture, religion, the sciences, and, of course, politics, culminating in the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the French Revolution (1789–1799). While there were common Enlightenment intellectual themes, conditions in different nations produced distinctive types of thought. Also, there was a marked development of ideas from the first half of the 1700s to the second half, principally because of the major social and political changes preceding and accompanying the American and French Revolutions.

  What were the common themes of the Enlightenment?

  The common themes were a set of values that included the following:

  1. Imbuing all other values was the importance of reason and its uses to discover ideal forms of human nature and society.
  2. The belief in the natural goodness of man, which was to be rediscovered by the reform of corrupt institutions.
  3. An overall secularity and downplaying of traditional Christian transcendence.
  4. A new aesthetic and ethics based on the goodness of nature.
  5. Perhaps most important, a great faith in progress or the belief that the present is better than the past and that the future will be better than the present.

  Nevertheless, none of the paramount Enlightenment thinkers simply played out these themes in direct ways. They almost all used reason or rational thought—together with a fair amount of wit—to propound and develop their ideas. The ideas themselves, though, sometimes had unforeseen consequences. That is, often the Enlightenment geniuses went too far, or were not able to fully think things through. As a result, skepticism, pessimism, and romantic madness took over when the ideas of progress and the ideals of human reason ran out.

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  The Emergence of Modern Europe

  c. 1500 to 1788

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, Heather Campbell(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 6 T HE E NLIGHTENMENT T he Enlightenment was both a movement and a state of mind. The term represents a phase in the intellectual history of Europe, but it also serves to define programs of reform in which influential literati, inspired by a common faith in the possibility of a better world, outlined specific targets for criticism and proposals for action. The special significance of the Enlightenment lies in its combination of principle and pragmatism. Consequently, it still engenders controversy about its character and achievements. Two main questions and, relating to each, two schools of thought can be identified. Was the Enlightenment the preserve of an elite, centred on Paris, or a broad current of opinion that the French intellectuals known as the philosophes, to some extent, represented and led? Was it primarily a French movement, having therefore a degree of coherence, or an international phenomenon, having as many facets as there were countries affected? Although most modern interpreters incline to the latter view in both cases, there is still a case for the French emphasis, given the genius of a number of the philosophes and their associates. Unlike other terms applied by historians to describe a phenomenon that they see more clearly than could contemporaries, it was used and cherished by those who believed in the power of mind to liberate and improve

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  American Philosophy: The Basics

  • Nancy Stanlick(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Enlightenment thinking in Europe and America affected all realms of human inquiry and interest from science to religion and from ethics to politics. The effects of Enlightenment rationality should not be understated. Without Enlightenment, there would have been no America.

  WHAT IS Enlightenment?

  Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century German philosopher and one of the chief expositors of Enlightenment rationality, explained what is alternately called “The Age of Reason” in his brief essay, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784). For Kant, Enlightenment is the emancipation of humanity from ignorance, error, and intellectual immaturity. It is characterized by confidence in human reason, trust in human autonomy, and belief in human dignity.

  The rise of Modern science granted people the ability to solve problems through rational means and it allowed them to see that the world was much different from what they thought. Revolutionary events in science had occurred with Copernicus’ rejection of the geocentric theory turning Aristotelian science upside down. The traditional view was that the Earth was the center of the universe and mankind was the ultimate creation on it. Being the “chosen” creation on the planet at the center of the universe, human beings were taught by the authority of the Church that everything was created for them, by God, and that the meaning of it all centered on humans, God, and salvation. The heliocentric theory challenged all that.

  Scientific discoveries of various kinds sent a significant shock through Western society. Faith in the truth and authority of the past was weakened by exploration of lands and contact with people previously unknown to Europeans. Europeans were beginning to realize that their ways were not the only ways and that there were people around the world who did not look, act, or think like Europeans. More exposure to difference and diversity in thoughts, people, religions, practices, governments, and societies began to challenge the way things were and led people to revolt against the status quo in science, religion, ethics, politics, and other realms.

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  Gramsci's Plan

  Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800

  • Robin Jacobitz(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • tredition

    (Publisher)

  Kant and the answer to the question: What is Enlightenment? As early as 1784, Kant created the ethical and historical-philosophical foundations for the liberation struggle of the bourgeoisie: In his “Critique of Pure Reason” of 1781, Kant had dealt primarily with epistemology and the critique of religion. In 1784, he considerably expanded the thematic spectrum of his philosophical approach with two writings. With the article “What is Enlightenment”, he prepared his first extensive writing on ethics, entitled “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” (1785). With the writing “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”, also published in 1784, Kant entered the field of the philosophy of history and thus created a basis for his statement “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” which appeared around the middle of the french revolution in 1795. Both works from 1784 are thus of strategic importance for Kant’s intellectual development. They will therefore be briefly presented below. The social conditions for these writings in 1784 were as follows. The Enlightenment in Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon was closely linked to the formation of bourgeois society and its corresponding mode of production within European feudal society. The scientific revolution deprived the Ptolemaic worldview of Christianity and religious teleology in general of authority among the leading scientists and in larger parts of the urban bourgeoisie. The development of new productive forces based on the new sciences strengthened the emerging bourgeoisie and its economic power. The peasants’ attachment to the sheepfold and guild organization of the economy became a noticeable fetter on social development. The financing of the pompous feudal state structures and their wars led to a chronic crisis of state finances

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  A History of Western Thought

  From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century

  • Nils Gilje, Gunnar Skirbekk(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Under Louis XIV (1638–1715), the absolute monarchy was firmly established in France: the national assembly was dissolved; the noblemen were, to a great degree, reduced to civil servants and courtiers of the king; and the government became centralized. But Louis XIV finally was overtaken by political difficulties at the end of his reign, and in the wake of this, political debate developed. Political discussion in France was awakened as people reacted against the government’s mismanagement. They criticized absolutism for not being sufficiently effective and rational. But these critics did not demand another form of government. They wanted a more enlightened and effective absolute monarchy. At that time, France did not have viable institutions dating from before the absolute monarchy that could ‘sustain the criticism’. It was thus difficult to attain moderation and to make the government more effective with the help of relatively representative institutions, like the British parliament. A change had to come in the form of a political upheaval. This upheaval came in 1789 with the French Revolution.

  The French did not only lack political institutions. The tradition of political theory had been largely severed. As a result, the French, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, imported British ideas on a grand scale. The ideals were Locke and Newton – the new liberalism and the new science. The French thinkers of the Enlightenment took the British form of government as their model. The French intelligentsia were Anglophiles (‘admirers of the English’). Voltaire visited Britain in the 1720s, and Montesquieu came in the 1730s.

  The Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was thus connected with social changes and with scientific progress: important scientific societies, like the Royal Society in Britain, were established already by the middle of the seventeenth century. Simultaneously, scientific journals and other publications promoting Enlightenment appeared. Large collections of works on all aspects of the knowledge of the day were published (such as the French Encyclopédie ). There was a corresponding modernization of universities throughout the eighteenth century, especially the German universities at the end of this period.1 There was a renewal of academic development in the universities, where, among other subjects, the humanistic disciplines were developing most markedly (cf. Ch. 16 ). By the end of the century, a new intellectual era had emerged. As the twentieth century approached, the scientization of society set in with increasing strength – not only in business and administration, but also in ideas and attitudes. In spite of the many and always changing opposing forces, the programme of the Enlightenment continued to move forward.

  The political debate in France during the eighteenth century had its source in the literary salons of the urban middle class. In this elegant setting politics, philosophy, and literature easily mingled. This debate, perhaps, did not lead to much that was new and original. It was largely a matter of old ideas being applied to new contexts. But when old ideas are thus applied, they often acquire a different implication. Here, too, British political thought, which at this time was rather conservative in Britain itself, functioned as a critique of society under the absolute monarchy of France. Thus, the idea of a natural law that was above the king, and that ascribed certain inviolable rights to the individual, served stability and social conservatism in Britain. But in the context of French absolutism, this idea functioned as a critique of the regime. And while it was meaningful to talk about such rights in Britain – because they existed there – the idea of such rights became abstract, speculative, and removed from reality in the French setting. The French imported Locke’s concept of human rights without having the practical political experience of the British. The notion of human rights was simultaneously radical, an attack on the absolute monarchy, and speculative, without a concrete political anchoring. The French version of the British ideas was often bitter and critical – not marked by the British mixture of down-to-earth conservatism and common sense reformism.

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  The Enlightenment and the Fate of Knowledge

  Essays on the Transvaluation of Values

  • Martin Davies(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  He offers, therefore, not the technical analysis of the scholastic connoisseur, but a symbolic form originating in what the heterogeneous aspects of the Enlightenment as a whole signify. In this the task of philosophy is crucial. In the eighteenth century (he says) it was meant to be not a separate discipline but the medium animating the various natural and human sciences. It does not remain on the level of ‘mere thinking’ [ das blosse Denken ], but penetrates into that ‘deeper order from which, like thinking, all human intellectual activity arises, and in which, according to a fundamental conviction of Enlightenment philosophy, it must be grounded’ (Cassirer 1973: VIII–IX). Thus, as desire for knowledge, the Enlightenment is defined as integral to human existence: thus defined, this desire vindicates its intrinsic cognitive and ethical value whatever historically happens. Apprehension may well continue to define modern culture, but not just because Enlightenment rationalism failed to achieve its ideals, still signs of intellectual and moral self-orientation, but rather because its loss would be irreparable. As Cassirer remarks in his preface, dated October 1932, ‘the century that had seen and venerated in reason and science “the supreme force of human beings” cannot and may not also for us be simply over and lost’. And he adds that ‘a way must be found not only for seeing it in its own structure, but also for liberating again the original forces that brought this structure forth and shaped it’ [ wir müssen einen Weg finden, es nicht nur in seiner eigenen Gestalt zu sehen, sondern auch die ursprünglichen Kräfte wieder frei zu machen, die diese Gestalt hervorgebracht und gebildet haben ] (Cassirer 1973: XIV). In these circumstances, its absence would indicate a dehumanized culture. 3

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  The Shaping of Modern Psychology

  An Historical Introduction

  • L.S. Hearnshaw(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7

  Eighteenth century developments

  I

  The eighteenth century was a period of great significance in the development of psychology; it saw, on the one hand, the crystallization of the many suggestive new ideas of the seventeenth century philosophers into a separate Wissenschaft, or scientific discipline, with a recognized identifying label – psychology; and it saw, on the other hand, the beginning of protest movements against the imposition upon the study of the human mind of the methods and assumptions of the physical sciences. The guiding lights of the Age of Enlightenment, as the period is commonly termed, were the Englishmen Newton and Locke. They dominated the intellectual life not only of England, but to a great extent also of France and to a lesser extent of Germany, and the empirical approach of Locke was the major influence in the emerging discipline of psychology. Locke, however, never had the field to himself. He was challenged by Scottish philosophers of the ‘common sense’ school, by moralists and Platonists in England, and by rationalists in Germany. And all of these had a lasting influence on psychology. But perhaps even more important was the Romantic revolt, which began in the eighteenth century, against the whole ethos of the Enlightenment and the domination of reason, a revolt which involved ‘a vast transformation of ideas, language, attitudes and ways of thinking’, and which ‘for two hundred years has deeply and decisively affected European life’1 including, we may add, European psychology. This revolt was no doubt an outcome of the profound social changes which the eighteenth century brought about, involving the rapid decay of traditional values and ways of life, and the emergence of a new, largely secular society dominated by economic forces. Marx and Engels may have exaggerated in saying that there remained ‘no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous cash payments’.2

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  Theology and the Enlightenment

  A Critical Enquiry into Enlightenment Theology and Its Reception

  • Paul Avis(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Pointless, because it looks to me like an attempt to put a grown-up man back into adolescence, i.e. to make him dependent on things on which he is, in fact, no longer dependent, and thrusting him into problems that are, in fact, no longer problems to him any more. Ignoble, because it amounts to an attempt to exploit man’s weakness for purposes that are alien to him and to which he has not freely assented. Unchristian, because it confuses Christ with one particular stage in man’s religiousness, i.e. with a human law. (p. 327)

  In these preliminary thoughts from prison, Bonhoeffer was coming to the realization that Christianity and the church should come to terms with the Enlightenment and the progress of rational mastery of the world through technology. It should cease to fight blindly against it and instead it should shoulder the responsibilities and dilemmas of modernity in which we address most of our problems as though God does not exist (etsi deus non daretur).

  The freedom to think things out for oneself, the freedom to investigate, even in the face of the prohibitions and threats of powerful, privileged authority in church and state, and to speak and act upon them, was the main platform of the European Enlightenment. No-one could stop a person thinking. So this freedom meant: (a) having the liberty to research, speak and write, to make public one’s private thoughts, when the threat of censorship was removed; (b) enjoying legal toleration of opinion, when the fear of persecution was removed; (c) exercising the right to challenge injustice, privilege and the abuse of power in high places, once the threat of the Bastille (for the philosophes) was removed. With these liberties, which should be seen as responsibilities, European civilization came of age. In Peter Gay’s phrase, the Enlightenment was a ‘recovery of nerve’ on the part of European civilization after all the strife, turmoil, destruction and mass death that the religious and dynastic wars of the previous century (especially the Thirty-Years’ War in which between five and eight million persons had perished), had brought about. The churches and the unresolvable clash of Roman Catholic and Protestant confessional identities had imposed bloody conflicts on Europe. Now it was time to see whether an appeal to reason, rather than to dogma, could do better. Reason would not only explode superstition and expose corruption and deceit; it had the power to shape a better world for all humankind.20

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