What is "The Age of the Enlightenment"?
We’ll spend the next three or four weeks answering this question, but to get us
started:
In
general terms, "The Age of the Enlightenment" refers to the period between
around 1650 and the French Revolution (1789) (others end the era at 1798: the
year Coleridge and Wordsworth published Lyrical
Ballads),
during which time Western Civilization saw an explosion in:
1)
The application of scientific reasoning
to, well, everything (yes, everything)
2)
The birth of republican democracy in
North America and Western Europe
3)
The application of religious tolerance
to political systems
4)
The seeds of social equality in
political systems.
We're interested in how these four qualities seem to be inherently linked, not
only historically, but perhaps logically, to one another, and how these in turn
shape the literature of this era. Understanding these connections is our main
task for this section.
The
term "Enlightenment" was coined by the major proponents of the movement itself,
as a part of their claim that educating people in the ways of scientific
reasoning would end all of humanities' ills: rationality could explain all
natural phenomena, including those of mankind, and could be used to govern
everything, including mankind. Reason would "light the way" toward a new,
utopian golden age in which people were radically more free, equal and happy.
The other movements we’ll cover in this course (Romanticism, Modernism,
Postmodernism) challenge this assumption.
The
Enlightenment is also commonly termed "Neo-Classical" as it builds its
philosophical, political and aesthetic values from rediscovered Greek (500-146
BC) (and to a degree Roman Republican (510-31 BC)) models. In this way, the
Enlightenment is an outgrowth of the Neo-Classical
Renaissance
and
Scientific
Revolution.
We'll also discuss how this "Enlightenment" refers to the waning of Plato's
nearly 2,000 year-long dominance, especially under the influence of Medieval
Christian conceptions of knowledge, and the rise of Aristotelean thinking.
See: Plato
vs. Aristotle
The
American Declaration of Independence
and Constitution are widely
considered the crowning glory of Enlightenment era, and although we could say we
still live in this age (we still embrace many of its values and beliefs), its
immense optimism was tempered by the atrocities following the French Revolution
(1789-1799).