Key Characteristics of the Enlightenment Movement
3-The Enlightenment was less a philosophical movement than an intellectual current.
The main characteristics of this movement are illustrated:
- In the religious sphere, the Enlightenment advocated religious tolerance. Many enlightened deists maintained natural religion, the theory that natural reason underlies the belief in the existence of a God who created the world. Natural religion is opposed to religious dogma and ensures an agreement on matters of faith and religious tolerance among all human beings.
- The illustrations were supporters of experimental science, while critics despised rationalist metaphysics. A shared conception of science was put forward by Newton in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
- In the socio-political field, the picture remained the liberalism of the bourgeois ideology. The social rise of the bourgeoisie was facilitated by the Industrial Revolution.
- The nobility reflected its luxurious lifestyle in Rococo art, while the bourgeoisie embraced neoclassical ideals.
- The current political system in most European nations during the eighteenth century was enlightened despotism, a form of government by which monarchs implemented social reforms without popular participation.
- Almost all shared the Enlightenment ideal of progress. Written by Kant, Perpetual Peace raised the need to establish a future League of Nations that would end the mutual rivalry states currently face.
- The Enlightenment movement centered on the cosmopolitan ideals of tolerance and respect for human dignity set out in the French Encyclopedia. According to Kant, the motto of the Enlightenment is: Sapere aude! (Dare to know!): Enlightenment is the process by which the human spirit, through education and culture, emerges from its minority and dares to use its reason autonomously.
- The process of secularization of reason running through the modern age: during the Enlightenment, reason becomes fully “human” and is secular, freed from its dependence on religion.
- Kant’s transcendental philosophy is responsible for carrying out a critical analysis of the limits of reason both in knowledge and in ethical action.
Specific conditions of the German Enlightenment influenced the philosophy of Kant:
- Germany in Kant’s time was divided into many small states and principalities, endowed with an almost feudal social structure and with a little influential bourgeoisie. Only Prussia was a modern state, which made the German Enlightenment focus primarily on social or political issues. His interest centered on issues related to the theory of knowledge and ethics.
- In the religious field, within Germany, we must highlight the influence of pietism, a Protestant sect that based religious practice on personal reflection and the exercise of virtue.
- Kant, in his youth, shared the ideals of dogmatic rationalism. Reading the writings of Hume awakened him from the dogmatic slumber of rationalism, leading him to doubt that metaphysics is a science.
- The pre-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement claimed the power of passion against the coldness of abstract reason.