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The The Enlightenment The Enlightenment The eighteenth century s most exciting intellectual movement is called the Enlightenment. It s powerful dedication to reason and rational thought that until quite recently the era was sometimes characterized as the Age of Reason. The turn toward what became known by 1750 as the Enlightenment began in the late seventeenth century. Three factors were critically important in this new intellectual ferment. One, was a revulsion against monarchical and clerical absolutism and new freedom of publishing. Also, was the rise of a new public and secular culture.
And not least, the impact of Scientific Revolution, particularly the excitement generated by Newton s Principia (1687). Newton s work seemed to prove that order and mathematically demonstrable laws were at work in the physical universe. Perhaps a similar order and rationality could be imposed on the social and political institutions. This ideal fired the imagination of the leaders of the Enlightenment, who gradually became known as philosophes, simply French for philosophers.
But regardless of national origin, the name took hold for thinkers as diverse as the French writer Voltaire, the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804). The French philosophes were the most outspoken and most radical of the century, and to this day when thinking of the Enlightenment, France is the first to come to mind. Late in the eighteenth century, Kant gave the most succinct definition of the Enlightenment: bringing light into the dark corners of mind, dispelling ignorance, prejudice, and superstition. Kant went to the heart of one aspect of the Enlightenment: its insistence that each individual should reason independently, without recourse to the authority of schools, churches, or clergymen.
Kant hoped that the call for self-education and critical thought would mean no disruption of the political order. He distrusted the uneducated people seeking a gradual transformation of the human condition. There were radical thinkers during the late eighteenth century, such as the American revolutionary Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826) and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797) who prepared to endorse an immediate political disruption of the traditional authority of monarchy, aristocracy, fathers, and churchmen. Whether radical or moderate, the philosophes were united by certain key ideas. They believed in the new science, were critical of clergy and all rigid dogma but tolerant of people s right to worship freely, and believed deeply in freedom of the press. They were also willing to entertain, although not necessarily accept, new heresies such as atheism or the belief that the earth had gradually evolved or the view that the Bible was a series of wise stories but not the literal word of God.
Philosophes were found most commonly in the major European cities, where they clubbed and socialized in literary and philosophical societies. By the 1770 s, Paris had become the center of the Enlightenment, but circles of philosophes could be found in Berlin, Moscow, Budapest, London, The Hague, and, across the Atlantic, in Philadelphia. Their writings spread far and wide because they adopted a new style for philosophical discussion: clear, direct, witty, satirical, even naughty and audacious. At times, they were more like journalists, propagandists, writers of fiction, even pornographers.
Now and then, they wrote anonymously, but always they sought to live by their pens. Their success owed much to the growing literacy of urban men and women, a new prosperity that made books affordable, and, not least, the existence of an audience that liked what they had to say. The philosophes readers, too, were fed up with all vestiges of medieval culture. They resented priestly privileges, protected social classes, monarchical decrees in place of deliberation in representative assemblies, and restrictions on who could manufacture what and where. They had wearied of iniquitous taxes designed by bureaucrats who never had to pay them, and indeed of everything that could not be explained rationally. The Enlightenment established a vision of humanity so independent of Christianity and so focused on the needs and abuses of the society of the time that no established institution, once grown corrupt and ineffectual, could long withstand its penetrating critique.
To that extent, the writings of the philosophes point toward the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. To a lesser extent, the writers of the Enlightenment also point toward the ideals that remain strong in most democratic Western societies: religious toleration, a disdain for prejudice and superstition, a fear of unchecked political authority, and, of course, a belief in the power of the human mind to recognize the irrational and attempt to correct it. Appealing to the professional classes, literate merchants, and women with leisure to read, the philosophes opposed the old scholastic learning of the universities, mocked the clergy, and denied the Christian mysteries. They expressed confidence in science and reason, called for humanitarian treatment of slaves and criminals, and played a cat-and-mouse game with censors. Dedicated to freedom of thought and person, the combined these liberal values with secular orientation and a brief in future progress.
The philosophes helped shaped, if not define, the modern outlook.
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Research essay sample on Late Eighteenth Century Prejudice And Superstition Enlightenment
