The Essence of the Enlightenment
The Impact of Intellectuals
Immanuel Kant described the legacy of the Enlightenment when he said– Sapere Aude! Dare to know! "Have the courage to use your own understanding." The statement seems fitting enough, even for modern society today. Do not accept anything on blind faith and question everything.
To Each Age its Own Intellectuals
Every age of man has had those individuals who have questioned or challenged the accepted norms of society. These philosophers, scientists, and influential thinkers attempted to explain man as an individual and explain the world in which he lived. They have all had a central focus (albeit wildly different conclusions at times) of the meaning of life, the purpose of living, and the functioning of the universe. From Thales of Ionia in the sixth century BC to Socrates and Aristotle, man has ‘dared to know’.
No Shortage of 'Enlightened' People
The Age of Enlightenment was certainly a time in which there was many ‘enlightened’ individuals. However, Georg Christopher Lichtenburg, a German philosopher, noted that: “People talk a great deal about enlightenment and ask for more light. My God! What good is all this light if people either have no eyes or if those who do have eyes, resolutely keep them shut!” (1) Christoph Martin Wieland, another German philosopher, similarly noted: “As against one man who actively advances true enlightenment, there are a hundred who work against it with all their might, and ten thousand who neither desire nor miss his services.” (2) There was no universal awakening of the masses towards logic and reason and neither was there any sort of universal rejection of Christianity. That minority percentage of the population who did awaken to logic and reason and thus rejected religion were called philosophes for there was no other name for them (well, maybe heretic). It is from these influential men that we have derived much of what we know about the eighteenth century. Of course, the vast majority of the population remained anonymous as is the case even today. Those few individuals that do something truly amazing or so monumentally different that they catch the collective eyes of civilization, well, they carve their names into the annals of history.
Societal Forces and the Rise of Great Men (and women)
These great men were certainly a product of their time and place in history. The power of the church had been waning for centuries before the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. The growing discontent with the church throughout Western Christendom gave rise to a generation of men who almost uniformly rejected, not only the church, but organized religion as a whole. Society (for the most part) was willing to listen and give these men a platform for which to push the boundaries of tradition and begin a new era based on reason and not on faith. They were seeking a ‘man-centered universe’ as opposed to a ‘God-centered universe’. Immanuel Kant believed that “it was man’s chief task to discover his proper place, his distinctive station in the universe, and resist all temptations to rise above or sink below his true level.” (3) The philosophes wished to put man back in charge of his own destiny, for whatever that may have been.
Footnotes
1. Peter Gay, The Science of Freedom (New York: WW Norton & Co., 1969), 106
2. Ibid, 106-107
3. Ibid, 171
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