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Articles

What’s Wrong With The Enlightenment?

Not as much as some people think, says Phil Badger.

What is being referred to when we speak of ‘The Enlightenment’ is not always easy to pin down, but in broad terms, it can be considered as an intellectual movement having its origins in the eighteenth century which involved a radical change in the way that philosophers and others understood the role of reason. In simple terms, reason got promoted to a higher status than it had hitherto enjoyed, and for some it came to replace faith as the basis of understanding both the physical and moral worlds. Many figures could be taken to embody the core themes of Enlightenment thought, but one, Immanuel Kant did so to such an extent that his ideas have become synonymous with it. In his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) Kant helpfully summed up the basic idea thus:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.

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