Enlightenment

Influences and background

The Age of Enlightenment was preceded by different philosophical movements. In the 14th and 15th centuries humanist thoughts using ancient Greek and Roman traditions to provoke changes in society especially in the gloom of Christian doctrines of the Middle Ages and establishing an optimistic view on the human individual and his capacities as the crown of creation.

In the 16th century the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne initiated ideas known today as cultural relativism. Cultural relativists used the examples of other cultures to influence the development of their societies. They argued that cultural orientations and dogmas are no absolute truths so that no dominant culture has the right to impose their beliefs on any other inferior cultural group.

In the 17th century philosopher René Descartes based his most important theories on the force of reason ("cogito ergo sum") and doing so paved the theoretical way for future philosophers.

Additional to the theoretical movements there were economic, social and political changes in Renaissance Europe that promoted the establishment and future flourishing of Enlightenment thought. Among these changes were, for instance, the improvement of trade and communication, the rural exodus and urbanization. Additional support for the prosperity of these philosophical movements came from the economically and socially very powerful aristocracy which many of the most enthusiastic followers of the new thinking belonged to.

The Enlightenment Movement

The Age of Enlightenment (also the Age of Reason) derived from the ideas and thoughts of philosophers and universal scholars from mainly France and England between the 17th and 19th centuries. These thinkers believed that human reason could be used “to combat ignorance, superstition and tyranny and to build a better world” (cf. wsu). Their writings were principally directed against the domination of society by religion – mainly the Christian dogma - and by a hereditary aristocracy. Philosophical thought, scientific method and rationality became their means in the fight against inequality and injustice.

In Germany the Aufklärung, which already began in the mid-17th century, was a literary and philosophical movement lead by thinkers like Friedrich Schiller and Immanuel Kant.

French Enlightenment was closely connected to the group of the philosophes who were authors, scientists and thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau. Their appeal against social injustice caused by the countries governing classes provided “the intellectual basis for the French Revolution” (Isaacs, Alan et al 200).

English Enlightenment

Enlightenment in Great Britain was greatly influenced by the English John Locke, the Scot David Hume and the English Thomas Paine, one of the founding fathers of the U.S. and a great admirer of the French Enlightenment. The English and French Enlightenments experienced mutual influences through different channels. When Voltaire exiled to Great Britain in 1725 for about three years, the philosophical standpoints he encountered there had a huge impact on his own future thinking.

The Scottish intellectual movement around David Hume and Adam Smith that flourished in Edinburgh between 1750 and 1800 constituted one of the most productive foci of the British Enlightenment. Between 1768 and 1771 the ‘Society of Gentlemen in Scotland’, which had been formed in the 1740s “to emulate the great publishing achievement of the continental Enlightenment, Diderot's Encyclopédie” (Historyworld), published the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This was a dictionary of the arts and sciences that illustrated important scientific advances that had been made in Scotland in the fields of chemistry, geology and medicine. In literature the ideas of the Enlightenment have possibly encouraged the growth of literary realism and thus influenced the rise of the novel (cf. Isaacs, Alan et al). In arts it had a major influence on Romanticism that was based on more individualist attitudes which were cultivated by the Enlightenment movement.

British society in general became more open to change due to some transformations that it had undergone before. England had gone through a phase of constitutional debates (which had cost Charles I his head and brought his son, James II, into exile). Regarding religion, new grounds were broken and old dogmas abolished. English Protestantism demanded more freedom of speech and press and radical religious movements like Quakers and Unitarians prospered. Since England had dealt with two revolutions quite early in comparison to other European powers, its religious and aristocratic powers diminished gradually under the influence of the new ideas, not like in France, where they were violently uprooted during the Revolution.

Sources

Brians, Paul. "The Enlightenment." The Website of Prof. Paul Brians, Washington State University, original link: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/enlightenment.html, archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20100528014826/http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/enlightenment.html, current version: https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/10/12/the-enlightenment/. Accessed 30 Nov. 2010.

Gascoigne, Bamber. "History of Scotland: The Scottish Enlightenment: 1748-1785." History World, from 2001, ongoing, http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?ParagraphID=oaq>. Accessed 30 Nov. 2010.

Isaacs, Alan et al. eds. Oxford Dictionary of World History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.