enlightenment

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noun

The condition of being informed spiritually: edification, illumination. See teach/learn.

Definition: awareness, understanding
Antonyms: bewilderment, confusion, ignorance, puzzlement

A movement in 18th-century thought that aimed to combat superstition and prejudice and place human betterment above the supernatural. In music, it is reflected in the rise of a simpler, more accessible, galant style, in which graceful melody with a simple accompaniment predominated, replacing the elaborate counterpoint of the late Baroque era. The development of a light, Rococo style in French music after the death of Louis XIV, the reform of the Italian opera libretto towards simpler human dramas apt for treatment in a direct melodic style and the growth of a newly expressive instrumental style in north Germany (the Empfindsamer Stil) are all part of this movement.

Enlightenment, the, a general term applied to the movement of intellectual liberation that developed in Western Europe from the late 17th century to the late 18th (the period often called the ‘Age of Reason’), especially in France and Switzerland. The Enlightenment culminated with the writings of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and the political ideals of the American and French Revolutions, while its forerunners in science and philosophy included Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Locke. Its central idea was the need for (and the capacity of) human reason to clear away ancient superstition, prejudice, dogma, and injustice. Kant defined enlightenment (die Aufklärung) as man's emancipation from his self‐incurred immaturity. Enlightenment thinking encouraged rational scientific inquiry, humanitarian tolerance, and the idea of universal human rights. In religion, it usually involved the sceptical rejection of superstition, dogma, and revelation in favour of ‘Deism’–a belief confined to those universal doctrines supposed to be common to all religions, such as the existence of a venerable Supreme Being as creator. The advocates of enlightenment tended to place their faith in human progress brought about by the gradual propagation of rational principles, although their great champion Voltaire, more militant and less optimistic, waged a bitter campaign against the abuses of the ancien régime under the virtually untranslatable slogan écrasez l'infâme! (for which a rough equivalent would be ‘smash the system!’). In English, the attitudes of the Enlightenment are found in the late 18th century, in the historian Edward Gibbon and the political writers Thomas Paine and William Godwin, as well as in the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The flourishing of philosophy and science in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 18th century is known as the Scottish Enlightenment; its leading figures included David Hume and Adam Smith. See also philosophes. For more extended accounts, consult Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (1968) and, on the British dimension, Roy Porter, Enlightenment (2000).

C18 French (later European) intellectual climate in which belief in reason as a means to ensure human progress was combined with a questioning of tradition and authority, the systematic collection and categorizing of facts, and the study of nature on a scientific basis. In German-speaking countries it was called the Aufklärung. Its architectural manifestations were a reaction to Baroque and Rococo, the adoption of Rationalism and therefore a return to the principles of Classicism. International Neo-Classicism began to be established in the French Academy in Rome, and led to a growing severity, prompted by writers such as Laugier: it was also sustained by the growth of archaeology, which gave a solid basis upon which it could develop. Winckelmann and others drew attention to the art of Ancient Greece, while French scholars argued for even greater severity which led to the beginnings of Egyptology after 1798. In addition, C18 investigations and explorations encouraged sympathetic appropriations of other than European cultures, made manifest in a growing eclecticism, often expressed in the design of fabriques in landscaped gardens, one of the finest being Wörlitz in Sachsen-Anhalt (late C18), by Erdmannsdorff, Eyserbeck, and others. So the Enlightenment also influenced the design of Picturesque gardens, and the jardin anglo-chinois was more than fashion, for it suggested an admiration for English resistance to Absolutism, and the cultivation of a civilized, ironic detachment, leading to an attempt to give visual expression to a wide range of ideas and themes.

Bibliography

• Etlin (1994a)
• Picon (1992)
• V (1987)
• D.Watkin (2004)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

1. General Characteristics

The Enlightenment was an international movement of ideas, well described by Norman Hampson as ‘less a body of doctrine than a number of shared premisses’. Beginning in the late 17th c. and generally reaching a peak in the mid-18th, it took different forms in different countries. Somewhat misleadingly, most historical accounts have focused on France, as in the famous secondary definition in the former edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which reflects 19th-c. anti-Enlightenment thinking: ‘shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition, etc., applied esp. to the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c.’

In France, the ‘Siècle des Lumières’ (there is no exact equivalent to ‘enlightenment’) is an essential part of the national heritage, alongside and in some ways opposed to classicism. It has often been associated with the Revolution and the values espoused by republicans and the Left. There is indeed a myth of the Enlightenment, already present in d' Alembert's account of the move from darkness to light in the ‘Discours préliminaire’ to the bible of Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie. The myth has provoked many counterblasts, anticipated in the tirade of Beaumarchais's Bartholo (in Le Barbier de Séville): ‘Sottises de toutes espèces: la liberté de penser, l'attraction, l'électricité, le tolérantisme, l'inoculation, le quinquina, l'encyclopédie et les drames.’

The main thrust of the movement can be summed up in Kant's ‘Dare to know!’, implying both critical and constructive thinking. The former had its limits; it can be argued that the philosophes (committed enlighteners) showed a faith in reason, nature, or progress which they denied to existing practices or beliefs. Generally, however, Enlightenment thinking was inspired by Descartes's methodical doubt: customs, religions, laws, governments were subjected to scrutiny and rejected if found wanting. Typically, the philosophes only criticized in order to create or reveal an order more in harmony with human nature and desires and therefore more conducive to general happiness. Their preferred values were tolerance, sociability, and freedom. Laws, government, and education were to be remade on rational lines. Above all, science, freed from the constrictions of religious dogma, would lead to fuller knowledge of the natural world (which included the human) and to the technical and material progress on which greater happiness depended.

Most of these characteristics were common to Enlightenment thinking across Europe. The French Enlightenment, however, differs from that in Germany, Switzerland, or Scotland by its more radical tone. Where an Adam Smith was well integrated into his society, a Diderot or a d'Alembert, while they had friends in high places, were embattled against a political and religious establishment which used its power to suppress their ideas by censorship, imprisonment, and other penalties. Their position was consequently often more extreme or seditious, particularly in relation to the Church: witness Voltaire's ‘Écrasez l'infâme’. Until the last quarter of the century the philosophes were fairly remote from the actual conduct of affairs, and were thus more inclined to speculate freely and follow ideas to their uncomfortable conclusions.

Enlightenment France was by no means uniformly enlightened. Not only were many members of the privileged classes hostile to the philosophes, but the latter's ideas reached only a minority of the population. Many ‘enlightened’ writers expressed disdain for the dark masses, who continued to live in a customary world of popular culture and ‘superstition’.

2. Historical Development

a. The period between about 1680 and 1715 was described by Paul Hazard as the ‘crisis of European consciousness’. In France it was the time of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which among other things reflected a growing confidence in the new science and philosophy. Fontenelle in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes and Histoire des oracles, Bayle in his Pensées diverses sur la comète and Dictionnaire, and Richard Simon in his biblical criticism gave examples of the rational examination of established beliefs. Fontenelle also anticipated the High Enlightenment by popularizing the new science in an attractive, witty manner. In the wake of the libertins of the 17th c. and the early Utopian thinkers, the new Parisian coffee-houses [see Cafés] and circles such as the Temple and the group round Boulainviller were centres for free-thinking on religion and politics; this found expression in the clandestine manuscripts of Fréret and others (the most radical manuscript, however, comes from a different segment of society—the ‘Testament’ of the country priest Meslier). In their different spheres, the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Inscriptions were also beginning to be forces for intellectual change.
b. The years between 1715 and c.1745 are those of the early (or first-generation) Enlightenment. They see the acceleration of scientific enquiry and philosophical speculation, the growing attraction of deism, the radical discussions of the Club de l' Entresol, and above all the emergence of two major figures, Montesquieu and Voltaire. The Lettres persanes of the former anticipates many essential Enlightenment themes and attitudes, while his De l' esprit des lois is one of the great texts of the movement. Voltaire, while at first more poet than philosophe, emerged in 1734 with the Lettres philosophiques as the militant leader of Enlightenment thought that he was to remain until his death 44 years later. It is significant that this work was inspired by Voltaire's stay in England, where he had admired political liberty, religious tolerance, and the work of Newton and Locke. At this time English influence was dominant; it can be seen also in the work of Marivaux, who shared many Enlightenment values; his journalism is directly modelled on the Spectator [see British, Irish, and American Influences].

One of the most important developments of this period is indeed the rise of the periodical press, with the appearance of many journals in which Enlightenment ideas were expressed and criticized. Equally important is the creation of provincial academies; these provided a socially mixed forum in which philosophy and science could be advanced on a broad front. In addition, the major Parisian salons were increasingly permeated by philosophe ideas as the century progressed.
c. The years from about 1745 to 1770 are those of the High Enlightenment, in which the philosophes form a party around the Encyclopédie; this great production, for all its faults, is the summation of Enlightenment thinking, and its chequered history reflects the battle between the philosophes and their many enemies (the most prominent of these, the Jesuits, were expelled from France in 1764). This is the most militant period, marked by the materialistic theses of Helvétius, the anti-religious propaganda of Holbach and his associates, and Voltaire's campaign against the infâme.

The generation of philosophes born between 1705 and 1725 includes some very different figures, ranging from discreet scholars to coat-trailing propagandists; some of the most important are d' Alembert, Boulanger, Du Châtelet, Condillac, Duclos, Grimm, Helvétius, Holbach, La Mettrie, Mably, Marmontel, Raynal, the slightly younger Morellet and Turgot, and the Physiocrats. Three figures stand out: Diderot, whose position as editor of the Encyclopédie made him the leader of the philosophes, although his most important writing was not generally known until after his death; Buffon, who kept his distance from the party, but whose scientific work had great philosophical implications; and Rousseau, who from being a contributor to the Encyclopédie emerged as a paradoxical frère ennemi, denouncing the progressive ideals of his former colleagues, yet offering a more radical critique of the status quo and a visionary ideal.
d. From c.1770 Enlightenment thinking acquired power and respectability. The Encyclopédie was a great success; the Académie Française was infiltrated by d'Alembert; the Physiocrats, in the person of Turgot, were given the official opportunity to try out their theories in the real world. R. Darnton, in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), argues that in the pre-Revolutionary years there was a split between the official Enlightenment, in which figures such as Marmontel, Thomas, Suard, La Harpe, Morellet, Rivarol, and even Chamfort could pursue comfortable careers with pensions and sinecures, and a swarming ‘Grub Street’ of pamphleteers, pornographers, and the like, out of which emerge such major figures as Restif or Mercier, as well as many Revolutionary leaders, Brissot, Marat, Hébert, etc.

This thesis remains controversial, but it is certain that the ‘late Enlightenment’ sees an explosion of radical political thought (much influenced by Rousseau), often messianic or Utopian in tone. Enlightenment values become entangled with more mystical currents, which prefigure some aspects of Romanticism, from the theories of Dom Deschamps and Court de Gébelin to freemasonry, Illuminism, and Mesmerism. Nevertheless, the old Voltairean rational influences continue to work, and are superbly incarnated in the work of his editor, Beaumarchais. A different strand of Enlightenment thinking, the materialism of Holbach and Diderot, is pushed to unexpected extremes in the novels and pamphlets of the marquis de Sade. But it is perhaps Condorcet who, in the shadow of the guillotine, produced the best resumé of classic Enlightenment thinking.

3. Significance and Influence

This remains the subject of vigorous debate. The traditional Marxist view was that the Enlightenment represented the values of the rising bourgeoisie, which seized power in 1789; it was thus one of the causes of the Revolution (the same view was expressed by enemies of the Revolution—‘c’est la faute à Voltaire, c'est la faute à Rousseau’). Against this, modern historians have argued that the Enlightenment was a movement within an élite, which included both nobles and bourgeois. It is certainly true that the ‘société des Lumières’, as seen, for instance, in the contributors and subscribers to the Encyclopédie, is drawn from different social groups, including aristocrats, bourgeois, and artisans. On the other hand, it is clear that the values propagated by the Enlightenment—values which later generations take too much for granted—were essentially inimical to the old politico-religious regime.

One might hesitate today before naming the Enlightenment among the principal causes of the Revolution. Nevertheless, while many of the earlier philosophes (Voltaire, Montesquieu, Buffon) were far from revolutionary in their political thought, and while many of their successors (Mormontel, Condorcet, Morellet) fell foul of the Revolution, the Revolutionary leaders themselves were impregnated with various kinds of Enlightenment thinking. Rousseau in particular was the maître à penser of Robespierre and his colleagues. In subsequent years, the Idéologues and the écoles centrales helped to maintain the Enlightenment tradition. Although much attacked by both reactionaries and Romantics, this was to survive and triumph, often in caricatural form, in the progressive, anticlerical republicanism of the later 19th c.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• J.-M. Goulemot and M. Launay, Le Siècle des Lumières (1968)
• P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (1967-70)
• R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (1981)

The period of European thought characterized by the emphasis on experience and reason, mistrust of religion and traditional authority, and a gradual emergence of the ideals of liberal, secular, democratic societies. In England the movement can be discerned in the 17th century with the writings of Francis Bacon and Hobbes, and in France with the new emphasis on unaided reason in the work of Descartes. But the 18th century saw the full flourishing of the Enlightenment, especially in France (see Encyclopédie), Scotland (see Hume, Smith), and Germany, where the critical philosophy of Kant is both a kind of culmination, and also a portent of the succeeding Romantic period. Although it is difficult to find positive doctrines common to all these thinkers, the Enlightenment is associated with a materialist view of human beings, an optimism about their progress through education and science, and a generally utilitarian approach to society and ethics. However, the Constitution of the United States, which is not a utilitarian document but one based on an ethic of natural rights, is frequently cited as a concrete embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. It has been fashionable in postmodernist circles to talk of the Enlightenment as having had a project, and one which has failed, but the meaning of this criticism remains unclear. See also perfectibility, optimism and pessimism.

Common English translation of the Sanskrit term bodhi, which strictly means ‘awakening’ rather than ‘enlightenment’. Some scholars have criticized the translation ‘enlightenment’ as possibly misleading in view of its Western cultural and historical associations, although it has become widely established in the secondary literature. Enlightenment is the state that marks the culmination of the Buddhist religious path. The archetypal enlightenment was that of the Buddha when he attained nirvāṇa under the Bodhi Tree at the age of 35, although many disciples subsequently achieved the same goal. In Japanese Buddhism (see Japan) the experience of awakening is known as satori or kenshō.

The term "Enlightenment" refers to a loosely organized intellectual movement, secular, rationalist, liberal, and egalitarian in outlook and values, which flourished in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The name was self-bestowed, and the terminology of darkness and light was identical in the major European languages—"Enlightenment" for English speakers, siècle des lumières in France, illuminismo in Italy, Aufklärung for Germans and Austrians. Although it was international in scope, the center of gravity of the movement was in France, which assumed an unprecedented leadership in European intellectual life. Emblematically, the single most famous publication of the Enlightenment was the French Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisoné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (1751–1772; Encyclopedia, or, Rational dictionary of the sciences, arts, and professions), a massive compendium of theoretical and practical knowledge edited in Paris by Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot. The cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment was genuine, however. It was a German admirer of d'Alembert and Diderot, Immanuel Kant, who produced the most enduring definition of the movement. In a famous essay of 1784, Kant defined enlightenment as "emancipation from self-incurred tutelage" and declared that its motto should be sapere aude—"dare to know." Writers and thinkers associated with the Enlightenment were certainly capable of profound disagreement among themselves. But the common aspiration defined by Kant—knowledge as liberation—is what permits us to see a unified movement amid much diversity.

Origins

In a long-term perspective, the Enlightenment can be regarded as the third and last phase of the cumulative process by which European thought and intellectual life was "modernized" in the course of the early modern period. Its relation to the two earlier stages in this process—Renaissance and Reformation—was paradoxical. In a sense, the Enlightenment represented both their fulfillment and their cancellation. As the neoclassical architecture and republican politics of the late eighteenth century remind us, respect and admiration for classical antiquity persisted throughout the period. Yet the Enlightenment was clearly the moment at which the spell of the Renaissance—the conviction of the absolute superiority of ancient over modern civilization—was broken once and for all in the West. The Enlightenment revolt against the intellectual and cultural authority of Christianity was even more dramatic. In effect, the Protestant critique of the Catholic church—condemned for exploitation of its charges by means of ideological delusion—was extended to Christianity, even religion itself. At the deepest level, this is what Kant meant by "emancipation from self-incurred tutelage": the Enlightenment marked the moment at which the two most powerful sources of intellectual authority in Europe, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, were decisively overthrown, at least for a vanguard of educated Europeans.

What made this intellectual liberation possible? The major thinkers of the Enlightenment were in fact very clear about the proximate origins of their own ideas, which they almost invariably traced to the works of a set of pioneers or founders from the mid-seventeenth century. First and foremost among these were figures now associated with the "scientific revolution"—above all, the English physicist Isaac Newton, who became the object of a great cult of veneration in the eighteenth century. Hardly less important were thinkers who are more typically classified as "philosophers" today, including the major figures of both the rationalist and the empiricist traditions—René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on the one hand, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke on the other. Similarly honored were the founders of modern "natural rights" theory in political thought—Hugo Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and Samuel Pufendorf. These thinkers did not see themselves as engaged in a common enterprise as did their successors in the Enlightenment. What they did share, however, was the sheer novelty of their ideas—the willingness to depart from tradition in one domain of thought after another. Nor is it an accident that this roster is dominated by Dutch and English names or careers. For the United Provinces and England were the two major states in which divine-right absolutism had been successfully defeated or overthrown in Europe. If the ideological idiom of the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648) and the English Revolutions (1640–1660, 1688) remained primarily religious, their success made possible a degree of freedom of thought and expression enjoyed nowhere else in Europe. The result was to lay the intellectual foundations for the Enlightenment, which can be defined as the process by which the most advanced thought of the seventeenth century was popularized and disseminated in the course of the eighteenth.

Geography and Chronology

Logically enough, having supplied the great pioneers and precursors in the seventeenth century, neither the United Provinces nor England were to play a dominant role in the Enlightenment itself. What these countries did provide, however, was the indispensable staging ground for the central practical business of the movement, the publication of books. For most of the century, Amsterdam and London—together with the city-states of another zone of relative freedom, Switzerland—were home to the chief publishers of the Enlightenment, many of whom specialized in the printing of books for clandestine circulation in France.

For France was the leading producer and consumer of "enlightened" literature in the eighteenth century, occupying a dominant position in the movement comparable to that of Italy in the Renaissance or Germany in the Reformation. The reasons for this centrality lie in the unique position of France within the larger set of European nations at the end of the seventeenth century. At the end of the long reign of Louis XIV in 1715, Catholic France remained by far the most powerful absolute monarchy in Europe—yet one whose geopolitical ambitions had clearly been thwarted by the rise of two smaller, post-absolutist Protestant states, the United Provinces and Great Britain. The remote origins of the French Enlightenment can be traced precisely to the moment that the sense of having been overtaken by Dutch and English rivals became palpable. The key transitional work, the French Protestant Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (Critical and historical dictionary), was published from Dutch exile in 1697. As the Enlightenment unfolded in France, the promptings of international rivalry remained central. The major texts of its early phase, Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721; Persian letters) and Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques (1734; Philosophical letters) both held up a critical mirror to what was now theorized as "despotism" in France—an imaginary Muslim one in the case of the first, a very real English mirror in the second. The critical edge of the Encyclopédie, the collective enterprise that defined and dominated the French Enlightenment at its peak, came from a still more urgent sense that intellectual modernization was a matter of national priority—demonstrated dramatically, indeed, by the magnitude of French defeat in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). The last years of the French Enlightenment saw the emergence of a distinctive school of political economy, whose conscious purpose was to find means of restoring the economic and political fortunes of France, in the face of British competition.

By this point, the example of the French Enlightenment had long since inspired or provoked a sequence of other national "enlightenments," according to a similar dynamic of international rivalry and influence. Second only to France in terms of its contribution to the Enlightenment was its perennial ally in political and cultural contention with England: Scotland—which, in fact, had been absorbed into political union with England in 1707. The first major thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment was David Hume, whose precocious Treatise of Human Nature was published in 1740. Hume's subsequent turn to history and politics paved the way for the works of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar in the 1760s and 1770s, which gave birth to modern economics and historical sociology—and whose common focus was precisely the issue of economic and social development across time. Italy, not surprisingly, as another zone of French influence, produced not a "national" but a great flowering of local "enlightenments," the most important being the Milanese and the Neapolitan, both specializing in juridical thought and reform.

Beyond this western European core, the Enlightenment spread, in the second half of the century, to the western and eastern peripheries of European civilization. French and Scottish ideas were enthusiastically embraced in the English colonies of North America, and, with a slight lag, in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the South. As in France and Scotland, this was largely a spontaneous process, the work of an independent intelligentsia—even if some of the key figures of colonial "enlightenments" soon became statesmen themselves. In eastern Europe, by contrast, where the major absolute monarchies now reached their maturity, the Enlightenment tended to arrive with royal sponsorship: Frederick the Great's engagement of the services of Voltaire and Catherine the Great's of Diderot—or, for that matter, the Polish nobility's solicitation of advice from Jean-Jacques Rousseau—are the most famous gestures of what came to be known as "enlightened despotism." In any case, the last flowering of the Enlightenment as a whole came in Germany, where it found a philosophical consummation in Kant's mature philosophy, completed during the years that the French monarchy fell victim to the revolution that ended the European Old Regime as a whole.

Ideas: Consensus and Divergence

What were the key ideas of the Enlightenment, beyond the challenge to inherited intellectual authority noted by Kant? The Enlightenment never presented itself as a single theoretical system or unitary ideological doctrine—if nothing else, the necessities of adaptation to different national contexts made unity of that kind unlikely. But the variety of its ideas was not infinite. The best way to approach them is perhaps in terms of a sequence of domains of thought or "problem-areas," in which a certain general consensus—often negative—can be discerned, together with a significant spectrum of differences of opinion.

Religion. No idea is more commonly associated with the Enlightenment than hostility toward established forms of religion—indeed, at least one major interpreter has characterized the movement in terms of "the rise of modern paganism" (Gay, 1966). It is certainly the case that the majority of adherents to the Enlightenment shared an intellectual aversion to theism in its inherited forms: specific objects of criticism included belief in miracles and other forms of divine intervention, the status accorded "holy" Scripture, and claims about the divinity of Jesus. At the same time, most Enlightenment thinkers regarded traditional churches, Catholic and Protestant, as engines of institutional exploitation and oppression. Hostility toward theism and a general anticlericalism did not, however, preclude an enormous variety of attitudes toward the supernatural and the "sacred" among followers of the Enlightenment. Forthright atheism did indeed make its public debut in Europe during the eighteenth century, in the works of figures such as Hume, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, and Paul Thiry, baron d'Holbach. But this was a minority position. The bulk of Enlightened opinion opted for the compromise of "deism" or "natural religion," which had the stamp of approval of Newton himself and which continued to attract a good deal of sincere devotion, in a wide variety of forms.

Science. It is a commonplace that the demotion of religion by the Enlightenment went hand in hand with the promotion of science—indeed, the very notion of a generic "science," as a sphere of cognition distinct from religious "belief," was undoubtedly a gift of the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment discovery or construction of science, in this sense, owed everything to the idea of a heroic age of scientific achievement just behind it, in the development of modern astronomy and physics from Nicolaus Copernicus to Newton. For all of the prestige that now attached to science, however, it would be a mistake to exaggerate agreement during the Enlightenment with regard to either its methods or findings. The philosophical heritage from the seventeenth century was far too various for that. Looking back at the eighteenth century, the last great philosopher of the Enlightenment, Kant, described an anarchic battlefield, divided ontologically between materialism and idealism and epistemologically between rationalism and empiricism. Moreover, there was also profound disagreement as to the social consequences of scientific advance, however defined. For every Condorcet, celebrating the beneficent effects of cognitive "progress" for liberty and prosperity, there was a Rousseau, decrying the contribution that science made to technological violence and social inequality.

Politics. The seventeenth century had seen a profound revolution in political thought, with the emergence of the modern "natural rights" tradition of Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and Pufendorf. One of the major achievements of the early Enlightenment was to popularize and disseminate this tradition, via an endless array of translations, summaries, and commentaries. By the mid-eighteenth century, the basic conceptual vocabulary of the natural rights tradition—"natural rights," "state of nature," "civil society," "social contract"—had entered the mainstream of Enlightenment political thought, which embraced, nearly unanimously, the belief that the only legitimate basis of political authority was consent. The path toward the vindication of "inalienable natural rights" in the founding documents of the American and French Revolutions lay open. Still, beyond this basic agreement about legitimacy, the practical substance of Enlightenment political thought was extraordinarily various. Only one major thinker, Rousseau, actually produced a theory of republican legitimacy—but in a form so radically democratic as to preclude its widespread acceptance prior to the era of the French Revolution. In terms of practical politics, the majority of Enlightenment thinkers accepted a pragmatic accommodation with monarchy—overwhelmingly still the dominant state-form in Europe—and instead pursued what might be termed a program of "proto-liberalism," concentrating on securing civil liberties of one kind or another—freedoms of religion, self-expression, and trade.

Social science. Meanwhile, the most influential work of political theory of the Enlightenment turned its back on natural rights theory altogether. In De l'esprit des lois (1748; The spirit of the laws), Montesquieu set forth a global taxonomy of state-forms, dividing the world into a West that had seen a transition from the martial republics of antiquity to the commercial monarchies of modern Europe, and an East dominated by unchanging "despotism." A succeeding generation of French and Scottish thinkers then developed Montesquieu's legacy in two different directions. One was the genre of "conjectural" or "stadial" history, which traced the historical development of societies through specific socioeconomic stages—huntergatherer, nomadic, agricultural, and commercial in the most famous of these, known retrospectively as the "four stages" theory. The other direction was toward an entirely new social science, that of economics or "political economy"—probably the most important single intellectual innovation of the Enlightenment. Within the ranks of "conjectural" historians and political economists, however, there was significant disagreement about the political and moral upshot of their findings. Thinkers as close in outlook as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson could disagree profoundly about the effects of economic progress on political life. The field of political economy itself was sharply divided between two quite different theoretical schools, French Physiocracy and the "system of liberty" set forth in Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Finally, more conventional narrative historiography, which underwent a great flowering in the Enlightenment in the work of practitioners such as Voltaire, Hume, and Edward Gibbon, showed a not dissimilar variety. In the face of every legend about the shallow optimism of the Enlightenment, it is worth noting that its historiographical masterpiece, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), recounted a tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions: the destruction of the classical world at the hands of "barbarism and religion."

Imaginative literature. From the start, poetry, fiction, and plays provided natural vehicles for the expression of Enlightenment ideas. Here, above all, the watchword is variety. It is very striking that the two most enduring works of imaginative literature of the French Enlightenment should be so dark in outlook. Its earliest work, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, is a stark parable about the lethal dangers of the pursuit of knowledge and freedom. Voltaire's philosophical novella Candide (1759)—doubtless the most widely read eighteenth-century work today—is a caustic satire on the "optimism" of philosophical rationalism. At the other end of this spectrum, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's late operas, scarcely less popular with contemporary audiences, convey an infinitely sunnier sense of basic Enlightenment ideas—from the raucous celebration of social and gender egalitarianism in Le nozze di Figaro (1785; The marriage of Figaro), to the stately presentation of a stylized Freemasonry in Die Zauberflöte (1791; The magic flute). In fact, The Marriage of Figaro can be regarded as an emblem of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism—the incendiary play on which it is based the work of a French Protestant admirer of the American Revolution, its libretto furnished by an Italian Jew, its composer an Austrian Freemason.

"The Enlightenment Public Sphere: Institutions and Identities"

Ideas naturally remain the primary focus of scholarly study of the Enlightenment. However, recent scholarship has devoted a steadily increasing amount of attention to what might be termed the "social history" of the Enlightenment—the form in which its ideas were expressed, the institutions by means of which they circulated, and the identities of the people who produced and consumed them. The theoretical inspiration for much of this research has come from the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas's early book, Der Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962; The structural transformation of the public sphere), which traced the development of a "bourgeois public sphere" for the exchange of ideas and information, which reached its climax in the eighteenth century—indeed, was at one with the Enlightenment (Habermas, 1989; Melton, 2001).

Habermas's analysis laid special stress on the socioeconomic developments in the early modern period that made the "public sphere" in this sense possible. The most crucial development of all, he suggested, was a revolution in reading and writing in the eighteenth century to match the original "print revolution" of the sixteenth. The suggestion has been amply confirmed by subsequent scholarship, which has focused on three specific changes in the "print culture" of the Enlightenment. One is simply a tremendous leap forward not just in literacy rates, but in the very meaning of literacy, as "reading" itself deepened and widened and as large numbers of women joined the ranks of the literate for the first time. Secondly, the Enlightenment saw a vast expansion not just in the volume of printed matter in Europe, but also in its variety: different genres of books, multiplying in every direction, were joined by a wide range of periodicals, as well as weekly and even daily newspapers. Finally, authorship itself finally started to be modernized during the Enlightenment, as first the idea and then the reality of literary property began to take hold—traceable in the careers of such major writers as Voltaire, Hume, and Rousseau.

Beyond this transformation of the literate "public," Habermas also suggested that the eighteenth-century "public sphere" depended on certain characteristic social institutions, which shared a kind of family resemblance as sites for the expression of a specifically Enlightenment "sociability." Most striking of all was the Enlightenment salon—periodic social gatherings of writers and intellectuals for the exchange of ideas, presentation of written material, and display of works of art, typically under female leadership and direction. The salons of eighteenth-century Paris are the most famous, but those of London, Berlin, or Vienna contributed no less to the local circulation of Enlightened ideas. Secondly, there was a set of slightly more "public," and certainly more masculine, establishments, part of whose allure depended on the consumption of intoxicants of one kind or another—the tavern, wine shop, and coffeehouse, pioneered in the United Provinces and Britain in the late seventeenth century and then widely imitated across Europe in the eighteenth. Finally, the propagation of Enlightenment ideas was a special concern of the network of Masonic lodges, again deriving from British origins, which then proliferated across the continent in the eighteenth century—the first secular, voluntary associations in modern Europe.

What was the social profile of those who attended Enlightenment salons, frequented eighteenth-century coffee shops, and joined Masonic lodges? In line with his Marxism, Habermas himself stressed the "bourgeois" or even capitalist origins and character of the "public sphere" of the Enlightenment. In fact, at its upper reaches, the movement was thoroughly mixed in social terms: the roster of its leading figures suggests a kind of united front between aristocrats—Montesquieu, Condorcet—and an emergent middle-class intelligentsia, typified by the careers of Voltaire or Diderot. Below this level, however, there is no doubt about the fundamentally bourgeois character of the Enlightenment, in the broadest sense of the term. In fact, one of the most important achievements of scholarship over the past thirty years has been the patient reconstruction of what the historian Robert Darnton called the "business of Enlightenment"—the commodification of Enlightenment ideas, in the book trade above all. Darnton has also been a pioneer in uncovering the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas down the social scale, far below the cosmopolitan elite of famous names, to what he termed the "Grub Street" journalism of an emergent popular culture (Darnton, 1979 and 1982).

As it happens, however, the liveliest sector of the current social history of the Enlightenment is concerned not with social rank but with gender. What was the role of women in the Enlightenment? The leading part taken by women in organizing and hosting salons, as well as the rising rate of female literacy, points to one kind of answer—that the Enlightenment indeed marked a watershed in the history of female participation at the highest reaches of European intellectual life (Goodman, 1994). At the same time, the absence of feminine names from the canon of the major writers of the epoch also suggests some of the limits of this emancipation. Early feminist ideas were in circulation in Europe from the late-seventeenth century onward: the works of Mary Astell (1666–1731) are a major reference point today. But Astell, a deeply devoted Anglican, was far from an Enlightenment thinker. On the whole, the actual record of eighteenth-century thought on women and gender suggests a kind of confused collision between competing values: the egalitarianism of Enlightenment social sensibilities was counterbalanced by a robust naturalism emphasizing the biological differences between the sexes. Not a few of the most famous writers of the era—Rousseau is the most notorious—adopted positions that can only be described as antifeminist. It very striking that the first great classic of feminist philosophy, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), was written by an English radical who, while she identified very closely with the French Enlightenment and admired Rousseau, owed the publication of her work to a very different political context—that of the French Revolution.

Reform and Revolution

This brings us in fact to an initial question about the place of the Enlightenment in the wider currents of European history. Its maturity as an intellectual movement coincided with the start of a cycle of political revolutions that ended, after a half-century of social convulsion and warfare, with the destruction of the Old Regime of early modern Europe. What was the relation between the Enlightenment and what the American historian R. R. Palmer called "the age of the democratic revolution"? For conservative critics of the French Revolution such as Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre, the answer was simple and dramatic: the Enlightenment caused the Revolution—Voltaire and Rousseau sketched a scenario for political transformation that was then willfully enacted by the Abbé Siéyès and Maximilien Robespierre. The idea is easy to dismiss in its hyperbolic or conspiratorial forms. But how in fact should we conceive of the relation between the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment and the political revolutions that overthrew the Old Regime?

Many scholars have stressed the practical thrust of the Enlightenment critique of political, social, and religious institutions, which certainly appeared to express a desire not merely to analyze but to change the world. At the same time, it also seems clear that the basic orientation of this criticism was reformist and not revolutionary. No major Enlightenment thinker ever advocated "revolution," in the sense of a conscious change of political regime, even by peaceful means—the memory of the last serious example of such a project, the failed Commonwealth that issued out of the English Civil War, was a potent warning against such presumption. On the whole, the practical political energies of the Enlightenment were devoted to a far more modest set of ends, the securing of a set of basic civil liberties—freedom of religion, self-expression, trade—nor did many thinkers contemplate the extension of these liberties beyond an elite minority of white male property owners. It is perfectly appropriate that the most celebrated examples of Enlightenment activism should be the one-man campaigns mounted by Voltaire to "crush the infamy," as his motto put it, of anachronistic religious persecution. Of course, Voltaire was not the only Enlightenment thinker to become more directly involved with affairs of state, on occasion. But the oxymoron of "enlightened despotism" suggests the limits of such episodes. In eastern Europe, this was largely a matter of rendering the rule of divine-right absolutism more rational and efficient. In the West, experiments in the practical application of Enlightenment ideas—for example, efforts to deregulate the grain trade in France, inspired by Physiocracy—tended to be short-lived fiascoes.

The immediate origins of both the American and the French Revolutions can be traced, not to the conscious plans of revolutionaries dreaming of overthrowing regimes, but to fiscal crises brought on by debts incurred in international warfare—disputes over the escalating costs of imperial defense in the case of the first, state bankruptcy brought on by bankrolling the American revolt itself, in the case of the second. The Enlightenment cannot be said to have "caused" either, in any plausible sense of the term. This is not to deny any relation between them, however. On the contrary, if the Enlightenment played a minimal role in the origins—largely spontaneous and contingent—of the American and French Revolutions, it was absolutely central to the processes of political and social reconstruction undertaken by both, once old regimes had collapsed. The various declarations of "natural rights" that accompanied every step of this saga, from Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776) and the American state constitutions to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and the American Bill of Rights (1791) and beyond, tell their own story—so many variations on the basic civil libertarianism of the Enlightenment. Politically, the Age of Revolutions afforded opportunities for state construction beyond what any Enlightenment thinker had envisaged. But the ensuing experiments in republican constitution making were all conducted in self-conscious continuity with eighteenth-century political thought. The one great success story here, the American constitution of 1787, with its antidemocratic machinery of "checks and balances," is notoriously a creature of the Enlightenment. Neither the French Revolution nor the wars of liberation in Latin America succeeded in creating comparably durable state structures, of course. But by far the most significant sociopolitical accomplishment of the former, the Napoleonic Civil Code (1804), was itself a straightforward expression of the egalitarian and rationalizing designs of the Enlightenment. Moreover, the fact that the restoration of monarchy that followed the overthrow of Napoleon was so unstable and short-lived is a testament to the long-term impact of the Enlightenment in altering the social and political expectations of Europeans. When the dust settled after another cycle of political revolutions a half-century later—unifying and modernizing Italy, Germany, the United States, and Japan by means of revolution "from above"—the social and political landscape to be seen in Europe and North America was very much in line with the hopes and aspirations of the Enlightenment.

The Intellectual Legacy of the Enlightenment

In the long run, then, the Enlightenment can be said to have succeeded in changing the world, much as the Renaissance and the Reformation had before it—through a complicated interweaving of intended and unintended consequences. There is, however, one important difference between the first two and the last of these episodes of intellectual "modernization." On the whole, the great issues and passions of the Renaissance and the Reformation have long since receded into history, their very success having also canceled their actuality. There is no sign yet that the Enlightenment is "over" in the same sense. Despite the claims once made on behalf of Marxism or psychoanalysis in their heydays, the Enlightenment has yet to be coopted or surpassed by any later intellectual movement, in the way it did the Renaissance and Reformation.

There is no surer sign of this than its fate in twentieth-century scholarship. For alongside a massive professional literature on its thought, probably exceeding that devoted to the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the "scientific revolution," the Enlightenment has inspired a polemical and philosophical commentary on it that is unprecedented in modern intellectual history. On the one hand, the movement has attracted a powerful series of advocates, concerned to defend its intellectual and political legacy, typically by straightforward identification with it. These include Ernst Cassirer, whose Philosophie der Aufklärung (Philosophy of the enlightenment), published on the eve of his exile from Nazi Germany in 1932, launched the serious academic study of its subject, and, above all, Peter Gay, whose two-volume study, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966, 1969)—which ended with a ringing vindication of Enlightenment liberal humanism, still incarnated today in the American constitution—remains the most authoritative single synthesis of the field. On the other hand, the Enlightenment has also been the object of an endless series of polemical attacks in the twentieth century. What is perhaps most striking is that the greatest of these have not come from the right of the political spectrum, as in the tradition descending from Burke and Maistre to Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, but from its center—Carl Becker's perennially popular The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers—as well as its far left—Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's classic of Western Marxism, Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947; Dialectic of enlightenment) and virtually the entire early oeuvre of the French historian Michel Foucault. For Becker, the fatal flaw of the Enlightenment was its naive utopianism, modeled on that of its ostensible Christian opponents. Both Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault regarded Enlightenment rationalism less as utopian than as inherently authoritarian in nature, its fundamental will to power plainly visible in twentieth-century fascism, Stalinism, and consumer capitalism alike.

Today this field remains divided between contemporary representatives of these positions. The descendents of Becker, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Foucault can be found among the major theorists of postmodernism, who continue to attack the Enlightenment both for its utopianism—its supposed addiction to "grand narratives" of progress and emancipation—and its intellectual authoritarianism, embodied in its various philosophical "essentialisms" or "foundationalisms." If successors to Cassirer and Gay are somewhat less vocal today, it is perhaps precisely because the Enlightenment might not seem to require such strenuous advocacy, in a world dominated by a triumphant neoliberalism claiming direct descent from it. The contemporary politics of the Enlightenment remain unpredictable, however. Paradoxically, by far the most visible promoter of its values today is in fact the most famous living representative of the tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno—Jürgen Habermas, who has long urged the Left to embrace what he terms the "unfinished project" of the Enlightenment. The note of modesty, acknowledging the gap between goal and accomplishment, in fact captures the self-definition of the Enlightenment far better than any kind of self-congratulation. It was Kant himself who answered the question, "Do we now live in an enlightened age?" by saying: "No, but we live in an age of enlightenment"—a judgment that perhaps remains as true today as when it was first rendered.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bayle, Pierre. Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections. Translated by Richard H. Popkin. Indianapolis, 1991.

Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Translated by Fania Oz-Salzburger. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Kant, Immanuel. Political Writings. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.

Kramnick, Isaac, ed. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. New York, 1995. An excellent anthology of short selections from primary sources.

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de. Persian Letters. Translated by C. J. Betts. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1973. Translation of Lettres persanes (1721).

——. The Spirit of the Laws. Translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989. Translation of De l'esprit des lois (1748).

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. 2 vols. Indianapolis, 1981.

Voltaire. Candide and Related Texts. Translated by David Wootton. Indianapolis, 2000.

Williams, David, ed. The Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999. An anthology of longer selections from primary sources, oriented toward political and social thought.

Secondary Sources

Becker, Carl. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New Haven, 1932.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove. Princeton, 1951.

Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

——. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge, Mass., 1982.

The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. Published annually by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies: essential guide to the literature. Philadelphia, 1975–.

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. 2 vols. New York, 1966, 1969.

Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Hampson, Norman. The Enlightenment. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1968. The finest single-volume interpretation in English.

Kors, Alan Charles, ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 4 vols. Oxford, 2002. Now the authoritative multivolume guide.

Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Porter, Roy. The Enlightenment. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York, 2001. This and the Outram text are intelligent, up-to-date brief surveys of the field.

Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. The Voltaire Foundation has published several volumes—books, essays, proceedings of conferences—every year for nearly four decades; essential for all scholars of the Enlightenment.

Venturi, Franco. Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K., 1971.

Yolton, John W., editor. The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992. The best one-volume handbook.

—JOHNSON KENT WRIGHT

Enlightenment is a term used in occultism, mysticism, and Eastern religions to denote the awakening to and/or appropriation of the highest and most essential truths of the universe. Enlightenment usually includes an intellectual mastery of the teachings of a particular tradition, the personal mastery of various occult techniques (spiritual disciplines), the direct contact with and embodiment of the highest divine realities, and the social acknowledgment of the enlightened one's accomplishments by at least a small community of students or followers. Enlightened teachers may claim authority from their having studied personally with an enlightened master who transmitted his/her wisdom and acknowledged that transmission more or less publicly. Others may have engaged in a systematic study of a tradition that included both the study of tests and the practice of a guarded set of spiritual disciplines. Acknowledgment of enlightenment in such cases is due not so much to the status of one's teacher but to the passing of a set of standard initiations. In many Western initiatory systems, the highest grades of enlightenment are self-proclaimed and then verified by one's fruits. Of course, new groups often arise when a student reaches the higher levels of accomplishment only to reach a very new or different understanding of the universe.

Most enlightened teachers offer students a system of practice, some form of yoga or meditation being the most popular. It is generally assumed that the teacher has followed this method successfully and that their success offers hope that the student can also attain enlightenment by perpetuating the master's course of action. Having followed the path, the master provides evidence of his/her contact with higher realities and his/her embodiment of them. One of the most obvious examples is the kundalini yoga teacher who offers students the experience of shaktipat, the transfer of energy from the master to the student to initiate the enlightenment process. Others demonstrate their contact with the divine by the aura of sanctity that encompasses them, the wisdom of their words, and/or the austerity of their lives, although it often comes in the demonstration of their ability to speak directly to the immediate situation of a particular student (a sign that they have experienced and already passed that situation).

Enlightened teachers make claims to have perceived occult (that is, hidden) realities. Though ultimately no acknowledgment of that status should be necessary, if they are to become teachers, they generally find confirmation of their status in a social context. Confirmation of an enlightened master's status may be partially based upon outward accomplishments, but also always has an element of subjectivity since the members making the profession do not have access to the levels of reality to which the master has claimed access. Members of most occult, mystical, and Eastern religions will profess a belief in the enlightened status of their leader, while occasionally questioning the enlightenment of the leaders of rival groups. People who leave a group will often justify their action by claiming a loss of belief in the enlightened status of their former teacher.

Underlying any discussion of enlightenment is a belief that our perception of the ordinary world of waking consciousness is distorted, lost in illusion. Matter is less than real, and the avenue to the real world is found in the inner search, through a change in consciousness, through a gaining of a new perception of reality.

British scholar Andrew Rawlinson, who has made the most extensive study of modern teachers considered to be enlightened by their followers, has noted several basic approaches to the topic. One set of teachers generally holds that enlightenment is a state to be attained. To become enlightened requires a lengthy period devoted to spiritual practices, possibly over several lifetimes. The wide variance in the recommended practice (yoga, meditation, occult development, prayer and chanting, magic) is the major item distinguishing these types of groups. Some of the more advanced practitioners of a spiritual discipline may in fact be picking up their accomplishments from a previous lifetime.

Another set of teachers feels that enlightenment is an inherent quality of human existence. The divine is the only reality and all we have to do is wake up to that fact. As humans are in essence divine, the whole of reality is immediately accessible. In these cases, exemplified by some forms of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism, the teacher's job is to place the student in situations where they are likely to grasp the truth. Enlightenment comes not from mastering the environment, even if that is an inner environment, but from an act of self-realization.

In the case of the former understanding of enlightenment, the condition under which most occult teachers operate, the world is generally considered to be divided into a complex set of layers, the visible world being but the lowest. These various layers emanate from the divine. Enlightenment comes from accessing the highest levels of spiritual reality. An enlightened teacher would not only have accessed those higher levels, but be capable of communicating some elements of those higher realities to others and of assisting their disciples in their movement upward. In most occult systems, people who have accessed the lower levels may possess various occult abilities, a sign that they have at least begun the pathway to enlightenment, though they would not yet be considered enlightened.

Rawlinson has made important observations concerning the unique situation in the modern West in which a variety of enlightened teachers are available to the average seeker, who may compare and contrast their personal suitability.

Sources:

Cohen, Andrew. Enlightenment Is a Secret. Corte Madera, Calif.: Moksha Foundation, 1991.

Enomiya-Lassalle, Hugo. Zen: Way to Enlightenment. Marlboro, N.J.: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1968.

Hixon, Len. Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions. Burdett, N.Y.: Larson Publications, 1995.

Ichazo, Oscar. The Human Process for Enlightenment and Freedom: A Series of Five Lectures. New York: Arica Institute Press, 1972.

Lozowick, Leo. The Book of Unenlightenment/The Yoga of Enlightenment. Prescott Valley, Ariz.: Hohm Press, 1980.

Melton, J. Gordon. Finding Enlightenment: Ramtha's Ancient School of Wisdom. Hillsboro, Ore.: Beyond Words, 1998.

Millman, Dan. Everyday Enlightenment. New York: Warner Books, 1998.

Rawlinson, Andrew. The Book of Enlightened Masters. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1997.

An intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked by a celebration of the powers of human reason, a keen interest in science, the promotion of religious toleration, and a desire to construct governments free of tyranny. Some of the major figures of the Enlightenment were David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, the Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire.

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Quotes:

"A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again" - Simone Weil

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." - Henry David Thoreau

"Enlightenment must come little by little-otherwise it would overwhelm." - Idries Shah

"The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links." - Arthur Koestler

"The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness." - Nikos Kazantzakis

"In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge." - Victor Hugo

See more famous quotes about Enlightenment

• Religious States and Experiences - enlightenment: state of spiritual awakening
• Enlightenment, Truth, and the Unknowable - enlightenment: state of being in harmony with laws of the universe; realization of ultimate universal truth and absence of desire

Dansk (Danish)
n. - oplysning, indsigt

Nederlands (Dutch)
Verlichting, verlicht zijn

Français (French)
n. - éclaircissement, instruction, édification, révélateur (au sujet de)

Deutsch (German)
n. - Aufklärung, Erleuchtung

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - διαφώτιση, (ιστ.) Διαφωτισμός (κίνημα του 18ου αιώνα)

Italiano (Italian)
illuminismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - explicação, iluminismo (Filos.)

Русский (Russian)
просвещение, просвещенность, просветительство

Español (Spanish)
n. - aclaración, ilustración, esclarecimiento, instrucción

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - upplysning

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
启迪, 教化

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 啟迪, 教化

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 계몽

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 教化, 文明開化, 啓蒙運動, 悟り, 啓蒙

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) حركه التنوير, تنوير‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮הבהרה, השכלה‬

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