• What was the Enlightenment?
• Characteristics of the Illustration
• Historical context of the Enlightenment
• Representatives of the Enlightenment
• Consequences of the Enlightenment
• The Enlightenment and the Encyclopedia

We explain what the Enlightenment is, its historical context, representatives and characteristics. Also, the first encyclopedia.

This time is also called the Age of Enlightenment.

What was the Enlightenment?

In the history from Europe, the Enlightenment was a cultural and intellectual movement that emerged in France, England and Germany in the mid-18th century. Until the nineteenth century brought profound changes in the culture Y society from the time, which is why the 18th century is known as the “Age of Enlightenment”.

His main objective was to fight ignorance and fanaticism religious "through the lights of the knowledge and of reason ”. Enlightened thinkers argued that, through the use of rationality and the accumulation of knowledge, the humanity it could combat superstition, obscurantism and tyranny.

Thus, the Enlightenment set out to advance towards a more prosperous and just world. In this way, faith in progress was established within Western culture, which can be understood as a consequence of the growing celebration of human reason, which began with the Renaissance.

Enlightenment thought spread throughout Europe, especially among the bourgeoisie and part of the aristocracy, through the printed media and social gatherings. It was also disseminated by intellectuals and popularizers who wrote about science, philosophy, politics Y literature.

Characteristics of the Illustration

The Enlightenment relied on reason and science.

In general terms, the Enlightenment was characterized by:

• Bet openly and totally for human reason and progress as the ways to build a better, fairer and happier society. This meant valuing human knowledge and disseminating it to the entire society, as well as the fight against ignorance, superstition and religious fanaticism.
• Have an anthropocentric view of the world (that is, centered on the human being, their capacities and needs), which leads to a pragmatic attitude towards life: only what is useful is worth the effort.
• To assume the tradition in a hypercritical way, which led to a reformist position, that is to say: the enlightened thinkers assumed the inheritance from the past critically and skeptically, so they were prone to correcting, amending, or modifying it, rather than being reverent and respectful.
• Holding an optimistic stance towards life (in stark contrast to the tradition medieval guilty), which started by assuming the human being as a naturally kind creature, although later corrupted by society.
• A secular and secular approach to society, which relegated religiosity and the Church from the leadership of society and the administration of knowledge: secular education, faith in the science, and the consideration of any knowledge not coming from reason as mere superstitions.
• Oppose tyranny and monarchical absolutism, in favor of republicanism and the establishment of a freer and more egalitarian society, typical of the bourgeois societies that would emerge later. This also implied opposing the caste society inherited from the Middle Ages.
• Different philosophical and cultural movements originated within it, such as the Rationalism, the Empiricism, Materialism, Idealism, Encyclopedism and Universalism.

Historical context of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is connected and related to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, specifically with the period known as the Age of Reason, since all its philosophical antecedents were given there.

This period witnessed the European religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, culminating in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Europe was plunged into a climate of instability, in which individual religious revelations were regarded as the main and genuine source of knowledge. At that time, about 70% of the population European was illiterate.

However, that panorama was not long in changing, as the Scientific revolution, thanks to the work of scientists such as Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), and Isaac Newton (1643-1727), whose contribution to the replacement of a religious world by a scientist he sowed the seeds that the Enlightenment would later collect.

The 18th century marked the beginning of the Bourgeois Revolutions, that is, the beginning of the fall of the Old Regime and the Absolutist Monarchy, which culminated in the 1770s.

Subsequently, there was a profound transformation of the economic, political and social models of Europe and the West, with the advent of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution In England.

Representatives of the Enlightenment

René Descartes is considered the father of modern philosophy.

Among the main representatives of the thought of the Enlightenment are:

• René Descartes (1596-1650). Philosopher, physicist and mathematician of French origin, considered the father of modern philosophy, and one of the founding thinkers of Rationalism, whose role in the Scientific Revolution was central and who inspired future generations of enlightened philosophers, such as Baruch Spinoza or David Hume .
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Well-known English philosopher, politician, lawyer and writer, considered the founding father of philosophical and scientific empiricism, as well as the author of the rules of the Scientific method experimental. In addition, he was the first essayist in his country.
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). One of the most important philosophers of the Western tradition, he was the founder of criticism and its greatest exponent, and a precursor of German idealism. His Critique of Pure Reason It is considered a text that forever changed the history of Western philosophical thought, and is still in force today.
• John Locke (1632-1704). English physician and philosopher, father of classical Liberalism and one of the most influential philosophers of the British empiricist school. His contribution to the theory of the Social Contract is notable, influenced by the work of Bacon, and also his own thought was influential in both Voltaire and Rousseau.
• Voltaire (1694-1778). With the full name François-Marie Arouet, he was a French writer, philosopher, historian and lawyer, belonging to Freemasonry and one of the most representative authors of the French Enlightenment. A member of the French academy, he published his work under the pseudonym “Voltaire”, cultivating literature and philosophy from a hypercritical point of view and a fine sense of humor.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Of Swiss origin, this writer, philosopher, lawyer, musician, botanist and naturalist was one of the most brilliant minds of the Enlightenment, despite the fact that his works earned him the enmity of Voltaire and other philosophers of the time. He is considered a precursor of pre-romanticism and a lucid essayist, being The social contract one of his most celebrated works.
• David Hume (1711-1776). Philosopher, economist and historian of Scottish origin, he is considered one of the most important thinkers in Western philosophy, whose work was strongly influenced by both empiricists (Locke, Berkeley) and rationalists (Descartes, Malebranche), and laid the foundations for the logical positivism and the philosophy of science.
• The Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755). Or simply Montesquieu, was how Charles Louis de Secondat, philosopher and jurist of French origin, was credited with the articulation of the Theory of separation of powers, fundamental in every republican constitution. His work is very close to Locke's thought, although he is also linked to Saint-Simon and the socialism, although it is admitted that his thinking is very complex and endowed with a personality own.

Consequences of the Enlightenment

Monarchies like that of Catherine II were guided by the values ​​of the Enlightenment.

The consequences of the Enlightenment include the following:

• The dissemination of scientific and rational thought throughout European society, influencing artistic styles and inaugurating doctrines philosophical, and forever marking the idea of ​​progress in the course of ideas in the West. This allowed religious institutions to further lose their power over society.
• His questioning of tradition and structures inherited from the past inspired the revolutions that between the 18th and 19th centuries they swept away the Old Regime, would make the American colonies independent from Europe (the United States and the Spanish-American republics) and would found the industrial world to the detriment of the agrarian one (the Industrial Revolution).
• The ideas of the Enlightenment led to the French Revolution of 1789, and, to avoid a similar outbreak, the other monarchies of Europe tried Enlightenment Despotism: an absolutist regime that tried to be guided by the political and philosophical precepts of the Enlightenment, without giving in to it. way his control of the can.

The Enlightenment and the Encyclopedia

The idea of ​​bringing together in the same printed work all the systematically organized rational knowledge was presented to the thinkers of the Enlightenment as a fundamental tool to combat superstition and ignorance.

Thus was born the encyclopedist project, whose great work was the Encyclopedia or reasoned dictionary of sciences, arts and crafts, popularly known as The Encyclopedia.

This informative work was published in 17 volumes, between 1751 and 1772. It was the work of the French Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, but it had the collaboration of numerous enlightened thinkers, such as Voltaire or Rousseau, who wrote many of their articles . This was the first in a long history of encyclopedias to come.