Modernity

The Roots of Modernity

As with any historical era, the Enlightenment cannot be bounded definitively by particular years, or even centuries. The ideas that mark the Enlightenment as a distinctively new period could be said to have emerged anywhere between the 16th and 18th centuries, through the work of scholars from Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke in the 16th and 17th centuries to Denis Diderot, Voltaire, and David Hume in the 18th century. The paradigm of Enlightenment philosophy that emerged from these and other diversely situated and positioned writers is characterized by an emphasis on the principles of rationality, empiricism, universalism, progress, individualism, freedom, and secularism.

The emphasis on scientific reasoning in Enlightenment philosophies constituted a clear move away from the Church and forms of knowledge established by religious authorities. The world was to be known through experience and critical examination rather than mythical, mystical, or religious explanations. Traditional worldviews thus became associated with oppressive superstition, irrationality, and prejudice. In the narratives [Page 1929]of modernity that spring from Enlightenment ideals, and even those that explore alternative approaches to modernity, this idea of a break with tradition remains central. While the latter is typically associated with the ignorance—or sometimes, more charitably, “innocence”—of the past, the modern worldview is seen to be better, given its future-oriented, progressive state, enlightened by reason.

Central to this positioning of reason as the most superior human attribute is the notion of the independent self. Selfhood continues to occupy a pivotal position in ideas of contemporary modernity, particularly in Western cultures; not just the self as an entity, but specifically the freedom and autonomy of that self, are of primary importance in both Enlightenment thinking and dominant narratives of contemporary modernity. Human agency is central to understanding the modern social order and what it means to be a participant in it. Enlightenment thinkers were by no means the first to emphasize these aspects of the self, much less to develop the notion of an independent self, but the developments of scientific empiricism and analysis during the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in Britain, lent a distinctly new impetus to these debates. The idea of the individual as an autonomous agent has become arguably the most defining aspect of modernity and has intensified through the democratic and capitalist processes that are globally dominant today.

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