Enlightenment of Spark Notes

The Enlightenment was a sprawling intellectual, philosophical, cultural, and social

movement that spread through England, France, Germany, and other parts of
Europe during the 1700s. Enabled by the Scientific Revolution, which had begun
as early as 1500, the Enlightenment represented about as big of a departure as
possible from the Middle Agesthe period in European history lasting from
roughly the fifth century to the fifteenth.
The millennium of the Middle Ages had been marked by unwavering religious
devotion and unfathomable cruelty. Rarely before or after did the Church have as
much power as it did during those thousand years. With the Holy Roman Empire
as a foundation, missions such as the Crusades and Inquisition were conducted
in part to find and persecute heretics, often with torture and death. Although
standard at the time, such harsh injustices would eventually offend and scare
Europeans into change. Science, though encouraged in the late Middle Ages as
a form of piety and appreciation of Gods creation, was frequently regarded as
heresy, and those who tried to explain miracles and other matters of faith faced
harsh punishment. Society was highly hierarchical, with serfdom a widespread
practice. There were no mandates regarding personal liberties or rights, and
many Europeans feared religioneither at the hands of an unmerciful God or at
the hands of the sometimes brutal Church itself.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, however, opened a path for
independent thought, and the fields of mathematics, astronomy, physics, politics,
economics, philosophy, and medicine were drastically updated and expanded.
The amount of new knowledge that emerged was staggering. Just as important
was the enthusiasm with which people approached the Enlightenment:
intellectual salons popped up in France, philosophical discussions were held, and

the increasingly literate population read books and passed them around
feverishly. The Enlightenment and all of the new knowledge thus permeated
nearly every facet of civilized life. Not everyone participated, as many
uneducated, rural citizens were unable to share in the Enlightenment during its
course. But even their time would come, as the Enlightenment also prompted the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which provided rural dwellers with jobs
and new cities in which to live.
Whether considered from an intellectual, political, or social standpoint, the
advancements of the Enlightenment transformed the Western world into an
intelligent and self-aware civilization. Moreover, it directly inspired the creation of
the worlds first great democracy, the United States of America. The new
freedoms and ideas sometimes led to abusesin particular, the descent of the
French Revolution from a positive, productive coup into tyranny and bedlam. In
response to the violence of the French Revolution, some Europeans began to
blame the Enlightenments attacks on tradition and breakdown of norms for
inducing the anarchy.
Indeed, it took time for people to overcome this opinion and appreciate the
Enlightenments beneficial effect on their daily lives. But concrete, productive
changes did, in fact, appear, under guises as varied as the ideas that inspired
them. The effects of Enlightenment thought soon permeated both European and
American life, from improved womens rights to more efficient steam engines,
from fairer judicial systems to increased educational opportunities, from
revolutionary economic theories to a rich array of literature and music.
These ideas, works, and principles of the Enlightenment would continue to affect
Europe and the rest of the Western world for decades and even centuries to
come. Nearly every theory or fact that is held in modern science has a foundation
in the Enlightenment; in fact, many remain just as they were established. Yet it is
not simply the knowledge attained during the Enlightenment that makes the era

so pivotalits also the eras groundbreaking and tenacious new approaches to

investigation, reasoning, and problem solving that make it so important. Never
before had people been so vocal about making a difference in the world;
although some may have been persecuted for their new ideas, it nevertheless
became indisputable that thought had the power to incite real change. Just like
calculus or free trade, the very concept of freedom of expression had to come
from somewhere, and it too had firm roots in the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment from History Channel

European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented
during the course of the long 18th century (1685-1815) as part of a movement
referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned
traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved
through rational change. 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.
THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT: 1685-1730
The Enlightenments important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen
Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman Renee Descartes and the key
natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo, Kepler and
Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, where in the span of three
years Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica (1686) and John Lockehis
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)two works that provided the
scientific, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenments major
advances.

In his essay "What Is Enlightenment?" (1784), the German philosopher

Immanuel Kant summed up the era's motto in the following terms: "Dare
to know! Have courage to use your own reason!"

Locke argued that human nature was mutable and that knowledge was gained
through accumulated experience rather than by accessing some sort of outside
truth. Newtons calculus and optical theories provided the powerful Enlightenment
metaphors for precisely measured change and illumination.

There was no single, unified Enlightenment. Instead, it is possible to speak of the

French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment and the English, German, Swiss
or American Enlightenment. Individual Enlightenment thinkers often had very
different approaches. Locke differed from Hume, Rousseau from Voltaire,Thomas
Jefferson from Frederick the Great. Their differences and disagreements, though,
emerged out of the common Enlightenment themes of rational questioning and belief
in progress through dialogue.

THE HIGH ENLIGHTENMENT: 1730-1780

Centered on the dialogues and publications of the French philosophes (Voltaire,
Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Diderot), the High Enlightenment might best be
summed up by one historians summary of Voltaires Philosophical Dictionary: a
chaos of clear ideas. Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the
universe could be rationally demystified and cataloged. The signature publication of
the period was Diderots Encyclopdie (1751-77), which brought together leading
authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human knowledge.

It was an age of enlightened despots like Frederick the Great, who unified,
rationalized and modernized Prussia in between brutal multi-year wars with Austria,
and of enlightened would-be revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas
Jefferson, whose Declaration of Independence (1776) framed theAmerican
Revolution in terms taken from of Lockes essays.

It was also a time of religious (and anti-religious) innovation, as Christians sought to

reposition their faith along rational lines and deists and materialists argued that the
universe seemed to determine its own course without Gods intervention. Secret
societiesthe Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Rosicruciansflourished,
offering European men (and a few women) new modes of fellowship, esoteric ritual
and mutual assistance. Coffeehouses, newspapers and literary salons emerged as
new venues for ideas to circulate.

THE LATE ENLIGHTENMENT AND BEYOND: 1780-1815

The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Enlightenment vision
of throwing out the old authorities to remake society along rational lines, but it
devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led, a decade
later, to the rise of Napoleon. Still, its goal of egalitarianism attracted the admiration
of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and inspired both the Haitian war of
independence and the radical racial inclusivism of Paraguays first postindependence government.

Enlightened rationality gave way to the wildness of Romanticism, but 19th-century

Liberalism and Classicismnot to mention 20th-century Modernismall owe a
heavy debt to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.