Analyze How the Enlightenment Was Defined Both in Terms of Ideas

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The Answer is The term Enlightenment describes a period of cultural flowering in European history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It can be used to refer to the intellectual trends of the day, which emphasized the power of human reason, the perfectibility of humankind, the presence of universal rights, and the existence of universal laws to explain the workings of the universe and all human societies. It can also refer to the environment in which those ideas flourished, which was marked by a rise in literacy, a decline in religious persecution, and the growing popularity of scientific experimentation. The Enlightenment was a movement of elites, since most of the common people in western European societies continued to interpret the world using religious and folk traditions. However, the Enlightenment proved a very expansive movement. Its ideas, which sought to replace traditional distinctions of social status based on rank with recognition of individual merit, appealed to many literate people, spreading through port cities, commercial centers, and venues such as coffeehouses and salons. They also contributed to a broader cultural climate that questioned conventional wisdom and defied established beliefs and institutions such as the church and the monarchy, coexisting with political satirists, exposers of financial fraud, and the authors of bawdy tales that ridiculed authority figures. For their criticism of superstition and corruption, some Enlightenment intellectuals were imprisoned. Some of their ideas-like the pursuit of objective, verifiable knowledge- appealed to absolutist monarchs, and the movement depended on the patronage of royal, aristocratic, and commercial elites. But the latter did not approve of criticism that was too pointed in its attacks on established systems of religion or governance. Despite this potential for subversion, Enlightenment ideas emerged in response to a time of religious and political conflict in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Europe, when the wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation caused great destruction to large parts of the continent. The Protestant Reformation had encouraged the spread of literacy and the diffusion of new ideas, which now came to include a wish for a world with less religious strife. Enlightenment thinkers also drew upon the tradition of experimental science, coming to believe that knowledge came from collecting and organizing data rather than studying established authority. Finally, Europe's increasing contact with and knowledge about other parts of the world encouraged the wish for universal knowledge and the need to make sense of the diversity of the cultures they encountered. Here the limitations of Enlightenment principles become evident-although they sought objective knowledge and universal laws, their thoughts about other cultures reflected Europeans' sense that their own ways were superior. Likewise, although Enlightenment ideas encouraged residents of Europe's overseas colonies to assert their own rights to equality and self-determination, the movement resisted extending those privileges to women, the lower classes, and nonwhite peoples.

Analyze How the Enlightenment Was Defined Both in Terms of Ideas

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