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The Enlightenment

schizodude
a voice from the void
Fire of Insight
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"The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind"-Isaiah Berlin

What path would humanity have taken if the ideas and promises the Enlightenment seem to curtail to were put into practice and fulfillment? Why was it that humanity failed to grasp the future and let so many ideas fall into their graves?

mbass33
matthew bass
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The enlightenment was the philosophical product of early modernism.  Europe was in fact heading toward an intellectual and societal plateau at the beginning of the 18th century. Our entire concept of what we call the west comes from the enlightenment. Its not that they were forgotten, it is that they were absorbed into already existing social structures and systems. Also, no idealized form of thought no matter how perfect in theory it is cannot count for all variables of reality, human manipulation, or practicality. They still exist in practice just in a very compromised form.

sainteverything
Word Cannibalism
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I don't know we never really got a chance to practice anything. We would be a more advanced race is we didn't tend to burn everyone that got in our way.

Atehequa
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Joined 10th Sep 2011
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Ahhh, the age of enlightenment for some, a time of woe for others.

Perhaps the people of what is now called Europe were better off before they became 'Romanized' and most certainly worse after they became 'Christianized'. Indigenous origins, spirituality and culture were obliterated. Look as far back into your history to get a hint of how you got civilized. Compare that with how the indigenous populations of lands conquered by Christian Europeans got civilized.  

Ealantair
Lost Thinker
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To me, the age of Enlightenment was the kind of transition between one extreme (ignorance, totalitarianism, religious extremism) to another (knowledge and culture, praising democracy, favoring logic above religion and requesting the separation of the latter from any political matter, or any matter at all) that always happens whenever any given society reaches rock bottom in one way or another, and that always leads to some sort of revolution. Point is, it was the sort of idealistic state that never seems to last. The views of the thinkers of that era were definitely an eye opener, but were they really that different from what many of the older time Greek/Arab/etc thinkers had in mind?
Apart from that, I agree with Matthew Bass: great in theory, probably not so great if applied.

Astyanax
Ceejay
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The Enlightenment didn't end, it continues in the way liberal Western nations live and think today, in the way, for example, that we accept freedom of speech thought and religion as normal. That doesn't mean everything about Western culture is correct or even particularly enlightened, it means that we have the freedom and attitudes to explore, think, get things wrong, learn from our mistakes, and with luck, inch by inch, develop and improve. One example of the enlightenment's influence today is the existence of DUP and its discussion pages.  

If you want to see what happens when enlightenment comes to a halt, look at what's going on in the extreme Islamist cultures where girls are banned from going to school, freedom of thought is punishable by death, the imam's word is law, and a golden age of mathematics, philosophy and science ground to a halt round about seven hundred years ago.

Viddax
Lord Viddax
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Astyanax said:The Enlightenment didn't end, it continues in the way liberal Western nations live and think today, in the way, for example, that we accept freedom of speech thought and religion as normal. That doesn't mean everything about Western culture is correct or even particularly enlightened, it means that we have the freedom and attitudes to explore, think, get things wrong, learn from our mistakes, and with luck, inch by inch, develop and improve. One example of the enlightenment's influence today is the existence of DUP and its discussion pages.  

If you want to see what happens when enlightenment comes to a halt, look at what's going on in the extreme Islamist cultures where girls are banned from going to school, freedom of thought is punishable by death, the imam's word is law, and a golden age of mathematics, philosophy and science ground to a halt round about seven hundred years ago.


Kind of ironic as going back to the Medieval Ages/ Middle Ages, the Middle East because of their religion had a general more advanced school of thought than Europe and the West. Though feel free to corrct me if that is wrong.

Also, did the Enlightenment not have some harking back to the Ancient Era: such as some Socratic line of thought? Or am I confusing my history.

mbass33
matthew bass
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Forum Posts: 334

Viddax said:[quote-270931-Astyanax]The Enlightenment didn't end, it continues in the way liberal Western nations live and think today, in the way, for example, that we accept freedom of speech thought and religion as normal. That doesn't mean everything about Western culture is correct or even particularly enlightened, it means that we have the freedom and attitudes to explore, think, get things wrong, learn from our mistakes, and with luck, inch by inch, develop and improve. One example of the enlightenment's influence today is the existence of DUP and its discussion pages.  

If you want to see what happens when enlightenment comes to a halt, look at what's going on in the extreme Islamist cultures where girls are banned from going to school, freedom of thought is punishable by death, the imam's word is law, and a golden age of mathematics, philosophy and science ground to a halt round about seven hundred years ago.


Kind of ironic as going back to the Medieval Ages/ Middle Ages, the Middle East because of their religion had a general more advanced school of thought than Europe and the West. Though feel free to corrct me if that is wrong.

Also, did the Enlightenment not have some harking back to the Ancient Era: such as some Socratic line of thought? Or am I confusing my history.[/quote]

The enlightenment was much like the rennasaince(spelled correctly?), a rejection of the ancient Greek world view.

Viddax
Lord Viddax
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Ah, then I was mistaken. Thank you for clearing that up.

mbass33
matthew bass
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Joined 22nd Nov 2010
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Well, not completely. Europe's reawakening to the humanities is what sparked everything, but the massive growth resulted in our ctitical analysis of it

schizodude
a voice from the void
Fire of Insight
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Joined 14th Feb 2011
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thank you all for the insights and I do agree with some points made while disagree with others but I see your points thanks again

poet Anonymous

What about the enlightenment we all had before the dark ages that required a new (and lesser IMHO) enlightenment.

runningturtle87
Tyrant of Words
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The Age of Enlightenment marks a social break in public consciousness that culminates in the Industrial Revolution, the splitting of Christianity into 30,000 sects, the amalgamation and desolation of geopolitical powers, and the rush of live data as way to codify and harness the general population.  Once the power struggle had begun between the elites and the awakening masses, social theorists began to be used to cultivate the masses for the new consumerism of things not religion based, non-agrarian technologies, and built on subverted power structures, such as corporations.  Even Adam Smith and Marx are aligned in this, in that Smith warned against it and Marx said it would happen that the masses would be increasingly taken advantage of in myriad ways.  

What the Enlightenment did then was to refocus general populations from one transfixion to another.  We tried Imperialism, and that has ended in ethnic diversity's re-emergence.  We tried patriotic supremacy, and that ended in multiple world wars and ongoing political upheaval and civil war.  Now, we are on the verge of live data use to scour our privacy for consumerist opportunities and social engineering pathways.  All in all, modernist and Post-modernist thought brings us to a social development that requires that we protect ourselves from the onslaught of sales activity and social intervention by subgroups and institutions.  

Kant's call for our being aware of our potential and our own responsibility to safeguard our own lives is in alignment with where we are today.  Deconstruction and psycholinguistic parsing are so much a part of what our daily lives involve that we think in terms of CSI and global awareness.  Most of the many life times of awareness that we would need to mature through a thousand years of life are available to us on YOUTUBE in a single afternoon.  TED Talks and RSA animations are more education than most people got in a generation 100 years ago.  Full blown BDSM is available on NETFLIX, and we can do the work of Jung and Freud in a few seasons of American Horror Stories and Game of Thrones.  We've learned more in the last 100 years than we knew the previous 100,000.  All it took was blowing the doors of perception off, and away we went.  That is what the Enlightenment did.

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