[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Enlightenment
Who am I?’ is the ultimate self enquiry. Directly knowing the truth of who you are is called enlightenment or Self knowledge .The Enlightenment began in the mid to late 17th century; almost every source gives different dates and doesn’t really specify when exactly it started. But we can call the eighteenth century the age of the enlightenment because it was both a culmination and a new beginning. Fresh currents of thought were wearing down institutionalized traditions. New ideas and new approaches to old institutions were setting the stage for great revolutions to come.
Although the intellectual movement called "The Enlightenment" is usually associated with the 18th century, but its roots in fact go back much further. This is one of those rare historical movements which in fact named itself. Certain thinkers and writers, primarily in London and Paris, believed that they were more enlightened than their compatriots and set out to enlighten them. They believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Their principal targets were religion (embodied in France in the Catholic Church) and the domination of society by a hereditary aristocracy.
The main components of Enlightenment thought are as follows:
- The universe is fundamentally rational, that is, it can be understood through the use of reason alone.
- Truth can be arrived at through empirical observation, the use of reason, and systematic doubt.
- Human experience is the foundation of human understanding of truth; authority is not to be preferred over experience.
- All human life, both social and individual, can be understood in the same way the natural world can be understood; once understood, human life, both social and individual, can be manipulated or engineered in the same way the natural world can be manipulated or engineered.Human history is largely a history of progress.....
