The Age of Enlightment

The Age of Enlightenment, a movement during the 17th and 18th century started from the Europeans, later moving into American colonies. The point of this movement was for the society to reform on a new base such as emphasizing reason and individualism over tradition. Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Beccaria, Locke, and Voltaire helped launched this project amongst Europeans. John Locke, for example, criticized absolute monarchy and favored self-government. Voltaire also believed that people should be able to speak their minds without the fear they may be punished. Through these philosophy influence, this eventually leads to European rulers ruling with a sense of equality, democratic governance, and abolition.

The precepts of the Enlightenment did not concentrate simply on religious liberty. It concentrated on universal ideas such as limited government, popular sovereignty, private property and yet others. And in order to secure these civil liberties, it was first necessary to establish a government predicated on limited authority. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.”

Chapters VI and VIII: The Scientific View of the World and the Age of Enlightenment

And Enlightenment criticized Christianity oriented values and they argued that people should look at the world with rationality that only the human have. And after the scientific revolution (16th ~18th century), Enlightenment began to provoke people, in earnest. Through out Scientific revolution, people started to believe real things (scientifically proved things), then the people started to stay away form supernatural things, and view of world also changed into rationally. There were 3 famous scientist existed during the revolution, who are Galileo Galilee, who claimed that Earth is rotating, Earth is not a center of the universe, William Harvey who presented circulation of blood, blood from heart send to other veins and come back to the heart again [7] and Isaac Newton, who presented Universal gravitation, which was things existed in the world can move by themselves without God’s interference, because each of them has gravity [8]. All of these happened during scientific revolution and it helped pave the way to the Enlightenment in the 18th

184). This period revolved around the conflict between traditional views of a personal God involved within the individual’s lives, the new spirit of the enlightenment with the importance of intellect (science) and human reasoning. The old views placed high values on a stern moral code, which taught intellect is less important than faith became apparent not true (Kupperman, 2000, p. 118). The enlightenment also suggested that people had control over their lives and their societies. Therefore, religious toleration in the colonies flourished, there were so many types of religion it was impossible for the British rulers or puritans of the day to enforce some sort of code or religious enforcement of an official faith (Brinkley, 2010, pg. 80-81), (Kupperman, 2000, p. 118).

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the world was plunged into the Age of Reason, otherwise known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a time period that stretched from approximately 1685 to 1815 and focused on human reason. By the time the enlightenment came to a close, it had birthed countless discoveries and revolutions in science, philosophy, and government. Influential figures of this time period included John Locke, Rene Descartes, and Thomas Jefferson, to name a few. With the Enlightenment’s priority on reason and science, it is not surprising that many Enlightenment thinkers had a difficult time accepting religions like Christianity. Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine are excellent examples of the relationship that

Religious, social, philosophical, and political upheaval spread throughout both Europe and the Americas during over the course of the eighteenth century. In prominent Western nations such as England, France, and Spain, religious tensions persisted from power struggles between Catholicism and Protestantism throughout the 1600s. However, while governments remained entrenched in organized religion at a state level, Enlightenment ideas emphasizing human reason brought about a new epistemological ideology, called deism (Duiker, 463). While this previously unfamiliar philosophy failed to replace the dominant Protestant or Catholic religions of established nations, revolutionist movements toward the end of the 1700s fully embraced deism. In

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Europe went through a period of intense thorough transformation. Even though religious wars in Europe had ended by the end of the seventeenth century through the Treaty of Westphalia, Religion was not the only matter that generated conflict among Europeans. The intellectual atmosphere generated by the age of Enlightenment generated conflict with the Roman Catholic Church as well as with the Monarchial authorities because many European and Euro-American thinkers made use of reason to study the natural world as well as human behavior, doubting the fairness of their religious, economic, social, and political systems. As a result, many enlighten thinkers, commonly known as philosophes, questioned the principles of absolutism, a form of government in which the monarchs had the exclusive right to make laws, and formed new ideas of liberty and progress, which were distributed across Europe and the Americas. Even though some European thinkers defended the traditional system of absolutism, the Age of Enlightenment lead to a series of revolutions in Europe and Euro-America that promoted the notion of selfdom and influenced the creation of new governmental systems, challenging and ultimately weakening the traditional system of European royal absolutism.

Philosophers, thinkers and scholars like John Locke and Voltaire sparked the enlightenment. Other significant names during this period were Isaac Newton, who was a great physicist and later recognized as father of modern

The Enlightment age was a very important time period; it started in the eighteen century. This age was also known as the age of reason. Men of this age felt they were "Enlightened" group. They believed they were coming to their senses, educated men of this time thought that the universe was logical, rational, and reasonable, and this could even out a man's modern passions and actions. They had the beliefs that they had come closer to any other age to figure out how the universe and men worked and how to live more a good life more reasonably. The Enlightenment also challenged many of the former ideas, one of which was ignorance. Orgon in Moliere’s, Tartuffe,

“Moreover, the separation of church and state that we esteem in the U.S. today, along with the values of free inquiry, education, reason, and knowledge, all have their roots in the Enlightenment” (Koval). The Enlightenment was a major influence. “The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars, and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline. The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism” (“Enlightenment”). This Age of Reason became a major event in history where people began questioning different ideas in social, economic, and political ways. It is no shock how much of an impact Religion had on the Enlightenment. Through this Age of Reason, many famous thinkers and philosophers emerged. The Enlightenment led to many more cultural movements, these of which included the Reformation, and the Scientific

The Enlightenment marked the beginning of a revolution that began to utilize reason to base knowledge and truth. It was a new way of thinking and interpreting people and societies. Encompassing over seventy years, the Enlightenment spread drastically throughout the world, motivated by improving intellect and the human society. Scholars congregated at coffeehouses to debate and further their learning in a far less formal many than institutions. Enlightenment thinkers were a unique group intolerant of church and state and sought out to establish an improved way of life. Reason based science and religion were major controversial components of the Enlightenment. These two topics were discussed and debated constantly as conflicting ideologies and beliefs took shape. Influential scientists such as Aristotle and Nicholas Copernicus provided remarkable advances in the field of science. The Enlightenment period experienced immense changes in our view of the world that left everlasting effects to this day.

Americans in the Enlightenment period strongly connected themselves with the classical age in terms of how they approached their art. The Enlightenment period lasted for about 150 years, from approximately 1700 -1850. Throughout this time period many artists took inspiration from the classical age which occurred in ancient Greece and Rome hundreds of years before. We can see examples of this in buildings like The White house and Monticello in America, and Kedleston Hall in England. These three buildings, though located in very different parts of the world, all have a number of aestheticly similar attributes.

Enlightenment philosophers, like Voltaire, railed against organized theocracies and argued that religion prevented rational inquiry while it endorsed repression, tyranny and war. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who sought, “liberation of the human mind from the dogmatic state of ignorance,” had a major impact on the future ideology of revolutionaries.4 It was Enlightenment ideas which challenged people to question religious orthodoxy and use their own intelligence to draw conclusions about the legitimacy of traditional authority. These philosophies were the foundation of modern, egalitarian, democratic societies which would later replace Louis XVI’s absolutist monarchy. Enlightenment ideals had profound effects upon the politics of the early and mid-nineteenth century. However, a severe backlash against rationalism and liberal ideologies in France caused the return of church-state power; while conversely, in the state of Prussia, Enlightenment ideals inspired a suppression of the church’s power.5 Whether or not Enlightenment ideals and values were able to root themselves permanently in society, the introduction and widespread acceptance of secular ideas created major changes across Europe.

The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual and scientific movement which is characterized by its rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues. Enlightenment ideals challenged the way people were taught to think and let them express their criticism of the church, the monarchy or whatever system they saw as unjust. The impact of the enlightenment movement was first seen in 18th century Europe and soon spread to different parts of the world. People who believed in these ideals were called enlightenment thinkers. Enlightenment thinkers were a voice for the masses who felt they were being manipulated by people holding all the power. It also helped the masses realize that they did not need the church or monarchy, and enlightenment thinkers were able to assemble a following to stop people of power taking advantage of those who were not quite as powerful. Enlightenment thinkers gave an outlet to the common citizen who were seeing injustices in their government system.