Enlightenment, Age of

As a historical epoch, “The Age of Enlightenment” comprises the crucial developments of Western civilization in the 18th century. In France, which is considered the cradle of the Enlightenment, this period included the time from the death of Louis XIV (1715) until the coup d'état of Napoleon Bonaparte (1799). But Enlightenment was spread also over Europe, involving a range of developments in Germany,Britain, Scotland, and Russia, and crossed even further over the Atlantic to influence the substantial events in the history of North America. The founding fathers of the United States were devoted followers of either British or French Enlightenment thought.

The Enlightenment is generally known as a broad social, political, cultural, and intellectual movement, which had been the culmination of a longer period, initiated by the Renaissance and Humanism of the 14th and15th centuries and followed by Reformation and the natural philosophy and science revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries. This latter era as a whole, including the Enlightenment as its pinnacle, is described as “The Age of Reason.” At the same time, the Enlightenment marked a new beginning. New ideas and approaches to old institutions set the stage for great revolutions to come. Politically, this period included the revolutions both in France (1789–1799) and America (1763–1793). In terms of social development of humanity, the Enlightenment marked the decisive turn to modernity, with its ideals ofliberté, egalité,fraternité, all destined to have been split up into the opposite ideologies of capitalism and socialism; these too are the emanations of the Enlightenment, with their shared goal to transform the human world, even though pursued by radically different means of liberal democracy versus social revolution. In terms of cultural and intellectual paradigms, the Enlightenment marked the advent of the reign of rationality, science, education, and progress. The movement's intention was to lead humanity out of a long period of irrationality, superstition, and tyranny of the Dark Ages (the Middle Ages). Individualism, freedom, and change replaced community, authority, and tradition as core European values. In fact, the Enlightenment intellectuals themselves were those who coined the name for their era and project. They believed that human reason could be employed in order to build a better world. However, the Enlightenment was the age [Page 818]of reason, which could not eliminate faith as such, despite all its efforts; rather, it replaced the religious faith with the secular faith in reason itself. The essence of the Enlightenment in such a sense was best formulated by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his famous short essay titled “Was ist Aufklärung?” (1784), who gave the motto of enlightenment as “Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence!” However, Kant made a distinction between the “Age of Enlightenment” and the “enlightened age,” while associating the former with the public and the latter with the private spheres of human life. The full triumph of the Enlightenment principles he could see only in the public.

Intellectually, philosophy can be said to represent the heart of the Enlightenment. The philosophy of the Enlightenment had continued in the belief in a rational, orderly, and comprehensible universe and put forward the claim for a rational and orderly organization of the state and knowledge in a way expressed in the doctrine of Deism. The idea of universal rational order, either found in nature or made in human society, can be seen as the core of this philosophy. Thus, rationalization, standardization, and the search for universal unities are the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. This idea, as applied to social and political order, found its many ways of expression in the “rationalization” of governments in England, Austria,Prussia, and, in particular, in the ideals of the American Declaration of Independence, the Jacobin program of the French Revolution, as well as the American Constitution of 1787. The figure who had become the icon of the age owing to his best representation of such a line of thought was the elitist French philosopher François-Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694–1778). Voltaire had personally served as a counselor to several European rulers in order to achieve the enlightened state of governance. According to him, freedom and tolerance are the companions of human reason. His slogan “Écrasez l'infâme!” directed at the traditional Catholic Church and its followers, may serve also as a battle cry against all kinds of human stupidities and for the ideal of a rational society. Voltaire believed in the republic of scholars and in the primacy of ideas in historical evolution. Ideas were for him the motive force. Thus, he became the prophet of progress, which also is the gradual assertion of reason. Voltaire and his rationalistic followers have put much hope in the powers of reason to solve all human problems. One of the most optimistic of them was the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who in his posthumously published work Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795) provided what can be regarded as the most radical advocacy of human progress based on the power of reason and science in the history of thought. Nonetheless, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the second important Enlightenment philosopher next to Voltaire and his chief adversary, who started to oppose in many respects such overly constructionist prospects, while inclining more to naturalism, which would, eventually, lead to the Romantic movement. Whereas Voltaire insisted on the supremacy of the intellect, Rousseau emphasized the emotions; whereas Voltaire emphasized social, Rousseau emphasized natural forces. The Romantics represented a sort of internal declination within the Age of Enlightenment, which from Rousseau to German thinker J. W. von Goethe (1749–1832) adopted the naturalistic intuition of self-organization and evolutionary forces. The Romantics intuited the unhappy opposition between the naturalness of self-ordering of nature and the artificiality of rational ordering imposed on an organic world. Rousseau even went so far as to advocate a return to primitive simplicity. The modern dualism of culture versus nature has been born with Rousseau, who also applied it to the sphere of education in his famous novel Émile (1762).

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