What We Talk About when We Talk About the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was one of the few historical time periods to be named by those who lived in it. People in the "Classical Era" did not name themselves "classical thinkers" just as people in the "Postmodern Era" didn't name themselves "postmodern thinkers" but the people of the Enlightenment did think of themselves as "Enlightenment thinkers." Specifically, the Enlightenment refers to a series of changes - a paradigm shift - in European thought that marked a significant break from the past. Just prior to the Enlightenment, Europe was going through what historians call "the Dark Ages" and the thinkers of the Enlightenment sought to infuse European thinking with the "light of truth."

While we know what "Enlightenment" meant to the thinkers of that era and we have a very general understanding of what those thinkers sought to accomplish (a light of truth), it is difficult to pinpoint when this change in thinking began or when it ended and suddenly became something else. One of the reasons why it is so difficult to pinpoint the origin is because the various regions of Europe developed differently and at different intervals. The difficulty we have in pinpointing the end of the Enlightenment lies in the fact that many of the institutions in Europe and the institutional traditions that we inherited from Europe are still with us. In many ways, we still operate within an Enlightenment worldview.

For example, one of the main tenants of Enlightenment thought is that the universe is fundamentally rational and can be understood using reason. This is a foundational component of much of our thinking every day. We also tend to believe that truth exists and that one can determine what truth is by observing the world around us (what is known as "Empiricism" in philosophy) and using reason to make sense of those observations. Essentially, these methods used to ascertain truth have our own experience at their foundations and we appeal to these experiences when we ascertain truth. Prior to the Enlightenment, the authority of the church or the state was the final arbiter of truth and not the experience of those observing the natural world. Using Enlightenment thinking, one can understand the whole of human experience. This applied to the social world as well as the natural world.

Enlightenment thinkers saw the narrative of human history as being a progression from one thing to another. This progressive view of history suggested that all of humanity could be improved upon through education (especially in the natural sciences). Because there was no way to "prove" religious doctrines "empirically" through observation, they were useless in terms of understanding the natural world. Because Enlightenment thinkers rejected the authority of the church and state as being the arbiters of truth and because they instead relied on observation as a means of discovering that truth, a scientific revolution occurred. This revolution resulted in new ways of understanding of both the world and those of us who live on it. Political philosophers began to ask themselves, "If the king doesn't get his power from God, then where does he get it?" By asking this simple question, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke both developed significant philosophical answers to that question and their answers are still sending ripples through the waters of history today.