Key Ideas of the Enlightenment

Name: Joyce Scheffel

CMLIT 102W

Professor: Nathalie Fouyer

Date: Oct.12th. 2017.

“ I think the first duty of society is justice.”

_ Alexander Hamilton

This paper explores some of the key ideas of the Enlightenment, suggesting we might both rethink the interpretation we have come to place on them and develop perspectives more relevant to today. It is a starting point is to revisit Enlightenment principles that transformed the word in the last 250 years and to ground them in emerging models of human nature. By humanizing ideas such as autonomy, universalism, and progress, we have a focus for a renewed public sphere. This means we can live up to another Enlivenment exhortation by recognizing the contingent nature of modern consciousness, we can imagine another way 21-century enlightenment.

Enlightenment principles have come to be interpreted and whether they should be rethought in the light of today's challenges and important new insights into human nature. Although this may sound a long way from the more prosaic debates in Labour's leadership campaign, perhaps that process might benefit from imagining a radical politics that seeks not merely to respond to modern values, but to shape them.

To think about the core ideas of the Enlightenment, and how they gave rise to modern values, norms, and lifestyles, is a process of cultural psychotherapy, delving into the collective consciousness of modern people. The rise of science and technology, the growth of market capitalism, the expansion of social tolerance and personal freedom - all these drew on the impetus of Enlightenment thought.

The principle of autonomy holds that human beings should be free to use their reason to create self-authored, valuable lives. Ever since the Enlightenment, debate has raged about the implications of the ideal. But by the end of the 20th century, a combination of ideas (notably free-market economics) and changes in society (including the perceived failure of the postwar settlement and the rise of consumer capitalism) had led to the apparent triumph of an individualistic conception of autonomy and a high rationalist view of human nature.

The good news is that there is every reason to believe we can expand empathy's reach. Despite notable departures from the trend, the history of the human race has been one of diminishing person-to-person violence. Since the advent of modern civil rights, we have witnessed a transformation

...