The Enlightenment (Age of Reason), emerged initially in Europe and then prevailed in North America, amid the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century. The Enlightenment was known as a philosophical, intellectual and cultural movement that stressed upon thinking, reasoning, logic and criticism, over blind faith, and superstition. It also stressed upon education, that it had the power to change human life and their character.
The Enlightenment caused rift between brought intellectuals and political and religious institutions. This was happened because the enlightenment was skeptical of religion, particularly the Catholic Church, governments and privileged. It was a primary factor that hindered social orders getting to be enlightened during the eighteenth century. That’s why these scholars had been depicted as intellectual “terrorists” against the norm. They questioned religion with the logic, regularly rather favoring deism.
The Enlightenment had its establishments in a couple of areas, including science, religion, travel literature which highlighted that the Christian impression of God was not a comprehensive guideline. The most notable and important establishment of the Enlightenment was the Scientific Revolution, which affected the perspective of the world. The method of reasoning, logic, and rationale was stressed upon, in order to comprehend the world.
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Science played an imperative part in Enlightenment. The scientific revolution resulted in the development of new frameworks of reasoning and rationalizing. The teachings of the church, Bible and Renaissance, were incompetent when questioned by logical advancements. This resulted in the implementation of new scientific discoveries. The empirical observation was first applied to the physical universe, to learn about humanity and to create a “science of man”.
The Scientific Revolution had various accomplishments. It was marked by a shift from a geocentric (Earth-centered) view to a heliocentric (Sun-centered) view” (Hall). This is a reasonable difference to Christianity, which set people at the focal point of the universe. Another imperative accomplishment of the Scientific Revolution was that a mathematical understanding of the movement of heavenly bodies was achieved. Additionally, the Scientific Revolution was described by philosophical ways to deal with understanding the universe. “The researchers from the Scientific Revolution concurred that through understanding, humans could improve the world” (Hall). The reasoning behind understanding the physical world was against the church’s teachings. Logical advancement included the discovery of carbon dioxide (fixed air) by Joseph Black, Telescope by Galileo, the contention for profound time by James Hutton and the invention of steam engine by James Watt.
As far as Philosophy is concerned, The philosophers of the Enlightenment were for the most part French intellectuals. They were writers, professors, and social reformers and they came mainly from the nobility and the middle classes. While many of the intellects held different opinions, however they all agreed that philosophy could be the foundation for betterment. They also were captivated by reason and secularism.
The most radical of the Enlightenment thinkers was Denis Diderot. Diderot denounced Christianity; he considered it to be fanatical and unreasonable. He endeavored to classify, organize, and understand society just as the scientists of the Scientific Revolution attempted to do the same with the physical world. Similar to the researchers of the Scientific Revolution, Diderot believed that by utilizing the apparatuses or strategies for science, one could comprehend anything on the planet. Diderot put religion under logical investigation, that is, religion was not something that provided conclusive answers, and rather, science and reason were.
Enlightenment was divided into two thought processes. The radical enlightenment, (that focused on Democracy, liberalism, freedom of expression and eradication of religious). Second thought dealt with new reforms and the traditional systems of power and faith.
One of the most prominent figure of enlightenment was John Locke, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers labelled as the “Father of Liberalism”. He not only contributed to the development of liberalism but as a trained person in medicine, defended empirical approaches of the Scientific Revolution.
He stood for humans rights and advocated for them. He said everyone is entitled for it and government should protect and provide those rights. His ideas were adopted into the declaration of independence and laid the foundation of many political systems and gave millions of people freedom.
His contributions in education had a considerable impact that was shown by the four editions that were published in his lifetime, a fifth that turned out after his demise and some twenty-one versions in the eighteenth century. There were various interpretations into European dialects amid the eighteenth century too. Peter Gay remarked that “John Locke was the founder of the Enlightenment in education as in much else”
The era of Enlightenment was not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development. That laid the foundation of many areas of human existence. Immanuel Kant defines enlightenment as “humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity with the process of undertaking to think for one self, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act”.
