Becoming Enlightened

The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was a vast intellectual movement that took place during the 17^th and 18^th centuries and profoundly influenced how people (particularly intellectuals) perceived both the world and humanity’s place in the world. As a way of perceiving, the Enlightenment was manifested in art, politics, religion, education, science, and economics. The movement advocated rationality—the use of reason—as a means to discover knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. Believing that the world had for too long suffered in ignorance, superstition, and tyranny, Enlightenment thinkers urged to use of reason to move humanity out of fear and irrationality.

Throughout the 1500s and 1600s, Europe had been ravaged by religious wars. After so much suffering caused by religious sectarianism, there was an upheaval which overturned the notions of mysticism and faith in individual revelation as the primary source of knowledge and wisdom. By using reason, human beings could discover knowledge for themselves. Creation was not perceived as being mysterious and unknowable. Thus the Enlightenment was an age of optimism, believing that progress was inevitable.

Sir Isaac Newton became the great hero of the Enlightenment. Using scientific observation and experimentation, Newton popularized the notion that there were “natural laws” that governed the universe—and that by using reason individuals could discover these laws. The Enlightenment stressed that the world was comprehensible and orderly. As a religious philosophy, deism stressed that the Creator could best be perceived by studying creation—not through centuries-old revelations. God was perceived as the divine and benevolent clockmaker.

In his 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant stated:

Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the

incapacity to use one’s own understanding without guidance of another. Such

immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of

determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by

another.