Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a political and philosophical current of the 18th century in Europe. It advocated social equality, individual freedom, and the use of reason and science to solve man's problems. Not only was it a rational but also a humane and empathic approach to social reality and the human condition. This philosophical movement was the main ideological cause of the French Revolution, which established the French First Republic, and the American Revolutionary War and their republican government.

The Enlightenment was a the period of transition from absolute monarchism to constitutional democratic republican governments. It is often associated with the struggle of the nascent bourgeoisie and the popular masses against the nobility privileges and social inequality. This intellectual and philosophical movement was so broad and influential that even its contemporaries believed that the “dark ages” had given way to an age of Enlightenment (in French, siècles des lumières, in German, Zeit der Aufklärung).

The term “Enlightenment,” which is encountered in the writings of Voltaire and J. G. von Herder, was definitively established after the publication of Kant’s article “What Is the Enlightenment?” in 1784. Historical and philosophical scholarship of the 19th century characterized the Enlightenment as an age of boundless faith in human reason (“the age of reason,” “the age of philosophers”), an age of belief in the possibility of rebuilding society on rational foundations, and the age of the downfall of theological dogmatism and the triumph of science over medieval Scholasticism and the obscurantism of the church.

The ideologists of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Montesquieu, posed the question of the practical structuring of the society of the future. Because they viewed political freedom and civil equality as the cornerstone of society, as they directed their criticism against the despotism of the absolute monarchy, as well as that of the church. They were opposed to the entire feudal system, with its privileges for certain social estates. Lenin noted that the representatives of the Enlightenment were inspired by “a violent hostility to serfdom and all its economic, social, and legal products.

Above, Jean-jacques Rousseau, one of the main thinkers of the Enlightenment.

The philosophical views of the Enlightenment, which took shape in conformity with contemporary science, were permeated with the anti-feudal ideology. Many Enlightenment thinkers developed materialist doctrines that matter is the only reality, endowed with an infinite diversity of properties. In their polemics against the theistic doctrine that god created the world, the Enlightenment thinkers argued that nature is a primordially organized whole, bound together by a chain of natural causal ties and laws. In their theory of knowledge, the representatives of the Enlightenment developed a sensationalist orientation that denied the existence of innate ideas (including the idea of god) and asserted that sensations and perceptions (the result of the influence of the external world on man) are the source of human knowledge.

Enlightenment thinkers subordinated the social structure to objective empathic reason, as well as state institutions, which, in their opinion, had to serve the “common good”, and social mores and customs. The feudal system and its institutions were regarded as “unnatural” and “unreasonable.” In their attitude toward social development, the representatives of the Enlightenment were idealists. Their theories, based on reason and common sense, and not on prejudiced religious medieval ideas.