Do we live in an Enlightened Age? The answer is No, but we do live in an....

A French salon in the age of Enlighenment

'The times will come when the sun will shine only on free men who have no

Master but their ‘Reason’. ' Condorcet

Aufklarung (German) Lumiere (French) Illumisimo (Italian);  debate over the meaning of the ‘Enlightenment’ began in the 18^th century and has continued unabated until our own time.

Kant called the Enlightenment ‘man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity,’

The Enlightenment was a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality and reason, rather than faith or superstition or revelation.  |it was a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual

Increasingly upheld by science rather than by religion or tradition.

Yet if we are seeking today the impact of the Enlightenment values -  to assess the ideas of the Enlightenment we may be better looking to anthropology to provide us with a coherent conception of culture for there is a multiplicity of pathways into the study of the Enlightenment

Indeed, there is a widely held view that the Enlightenment was ultimately totalitarian in its attempt by reason to subdue all – think of the horrors of the Concentration Camps, where the treatment of human beings was as mere ‘objects’ to be ‘administered’. It is argued by many that this is where ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’ reached its starkest apogee

One way to think of the Enlightenment might be to regard it as a thinking capsule containing sets of debates and concerns which appear to be characteristic of the way in which ideas, opinions, both social and political, interacted in the 18^th Century.

So to ask today whether we live in an Enlightened age? The response would have to be ‘No’, however we do live in an age of Enlightenment.

Source:  What is Enlightenment? New Approaches to European History.

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