The Age of Enlightment:

Initial comments:

The Enlightenment or the Age of Reason are names given to the predominant intellectual movement of the eighteenth century. It was an intellectual movement among the upper and middle class elites. It involved a new world view which explained the world and looked for answers in terms of reason rather than faith, and in terms of an optimistic,  natural, humanistic approach rather than a fatalistic,
supernatural one.

     These are characteristics which it shared with the earlier intellectual movement known as the Renaissance. Indeed, the Enlightenment may be understood as a logical continuation of the Renaissance. There is, however, an important difference. While the Renaissance was closely related to a search for the accumulation of past knowledge, the Enlightenment clearly involved a conscious effort to break with the past. 

Analysis:

First of all I like to provide a basic definition of the concept and then build from there up into the main ideas or texts from it.

Definition Neoclassic: of, relating to, or constituting a revival or adaptation of the classical especially in literature, music, art, or architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

After getting the big picture it is safe to say that the neoclassical period there are some evident traits, such as: religious (state and church relation and interaction), economical (production and distribution channels) and political (the wars within the European continent).

This was a time of comfortableness in England. People would meet at coffee houses to chat about politics, among other topics, and sometimes drink a new, warm beverage made of chocolate! It was also the beginning of the British tradition of drinking afternoon tea. And it was the starting point of the middle class, and because of that, more people were literate.

People were very interested in appearances, but not necessarily in being genuine. Men and women commonly wore wigs, and being clever and witty was in vogue. Having good manners and doing the right thing, particularly in public, was essential. It was a time, too, of British political upheaval as eight monarchs took the throne. I read that in the beginning, the Neo-classical period of literature can be divided into three distinct stages: the Restoration Period, the Augustan Period, and the Age of Johnson (Thanasoulas, 2001).

The anxiety for knowledge became general. The court meetings left place to the bourgeois saloons, the coffees or the cultural institutions. A necessity was felt to travel by reasons of study or pleasure, to know other languages, to make sport to keep the body fit or to improve the conditions of life of the citizens.

In this new attitude, the illustrated person is a philanthropist that worries about the others, and proposes and undertakes reforms in the aspects related to the society. They defended the religious tolerance, the skepticism was put into practice and it was even reached to attack the religions. In opposition to the absolute monarchies, Montesquieu defended the bases of the modern democracy and the separation of the legislative, executive and judicial powers. The illustrated people wanted to enjoy freedom and to choose their own governors. All that inspired the motto of the French Revolution: Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood (Rubens, 2007).

THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT: 1685-1730

The Enlightenment’s important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman Renee Descartes and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo, Kepler and Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, where in the span of three years Isaac Newton published his “Principia Mathematica” (1686) and John Locke his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689)—two works that provided the scientific, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment’s major advances.

THE HIGH ENLIGHTENMENT: 1730-1780

Centered on the dialogues and publications of the French “philosophes” (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Diderot), the High Enlightenment might best be summed up by one historian’s summary of Voltaire’s “Philosophical Dictionary”: “a chaos of clear ideas.” Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the universe could be rationally demystified and cataloged. The signature publication of the period was Diderot’s “Encyclopédie” (1751-77), which brought together leading authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human knowledge.

THE LATE ENLIGHTENMENT AND BEYOND: 1780-1815

The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Enlightenment vision of throwing out the old authorities to remake society along rational lines, but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led, a decade later, to the rise of Napoleon. Still, its goal of egalitarianism attracted the admiration of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and inspired both the Haitian war of independence and the radical racial inclusivism of Paraguay’s first post-independence government. Enlightened rationality gave way to the wildness of Romanticism, but 19th-century Liberalism and Classicism—not to mention 20th-century Modernism—all owe a heavy debt to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

Reaction:

Why do we worry or give concern with the era of enlighten coinciding with the neoclassic period?

The Enlightenment helped a new class to come to power in Europe. So we should ask ourselves why the more advanced civilizations of the Islamic world did not develop a similar movement of their own (Unknown, 2012).

In the current Western controversy over Islam, one theme recurs with increasing predictability. Many writers are prepared to acknowledge Muslim cultural and scientific achievements, but always with the caveat that Islamic civilization never experienced an equivalent to the Enlightenment. "Islam never had to go through a prolonged period of critically examining the validity of its spiritual vision, as the West did during the 18th century," writes the historian Louis Dupre. "Islamic culture has, of course, known its own crisis... yet it was never forced to question its traditional worldview."

Christianity was intellectually open and tolerant enough to allow critical thought to emerge, with the result that religion could gradually be superseded, and the separation of church and state brought about. The implication of course is that Islam has been incapable of allowing the same process to take place. The fate of Bruno (who was burned at the stake by the Holy Inquisition) or Galileo (who was threatened with the same fate) for daring to question the doctrines of the Catholic church casts some doubt on the claim that Christianity is intrinsically open to scientific rationality.

It doesn’t matter if consider it from an intellectual, political, or social standpoint, the advancements of the Enlightenment transformed the Western world into an intelligent and self-aware civilization. In addition to this, it directly inspired the creation of the world’s first great democracy, the United States of America. The new freedoms and ideas sometimes led to abuses—in particular, the descent of the French Revolution from a positive, productive coup into tyranny and bedlam. In response to the violence of the French Revolution, some Europeans began to blame the Enlightenment’s attacks on tradition and breakdown of norms for inducing the anarchy (Rubens, 2007).

Montesquieu’s work an early pioneer in sociology, he spent considerable time collecting data from various world cultures, which led him to the rather outlandish conclusion that climate is a major factor in determining the best form of government for a given region.

This small reaction paper could go on and on about details from the period, hence we would extend our interaction paper and reader for along long time so let me have leave you with a quote and then you may tell me as a reader or scholar what you think about my interpretation.

"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth" John Locke 1632 – 1704.