Enlightenment in Europe

Enlightenment is a recurrent movement within the history of thought that demands justification of all current values, customs, and beliefs vis-à-vis the faculty of reason. As such, it neither advances its own set of philosophical doctrines nor can it be reduced to being the primary characteristic of eighteenth-century thought. Rather, it is a periodic event in the intellectual history of the West and in recent years also of non- Western cultures, in which reason becomes more concerned with its own operations than with specific contents. In the history of philosophical thought, Enlightenment has a cleansing function that often provides a new freedom and sense of discovery for the spirit of inquiry. Yet, although it generally claims to proceed both in the analytic and the synthetic mode, more often than not it focuses its energies on dismantling previous systems without advancing to new concrete and coherent contents. Thus, Enlightenment periods tend to give rise to subsequent philosophical movements that aim to work out specific contents without relinquishing the critical use of reason achieved by Enlightenment efforts and, hence, to make good on the unfulfilled Enlightenment promise to unite analytic and synthetic functions of reason.

In a narrower sense, Enlightenment refers to the dominant, albeit not exclusive, philosophical movement of the eighteenth century in Europe and North America as well as the literary and cultural production at large that is influenced by this thinking. As is the case with almost every historical period, the Enlightenment cannot be dated with precision. Moreover, its beginning and duration differ in different countries. And because the Enlightenment was also adopted as a certain style of government, it had social and political ramifications that did not always coincide precisely with purely intellectual events and, hence, must be dated separately without entirely divorcing them from the intellectual currents. Intellectually, one could let the Enlightenment in England begin in 1689, the year of the publication of Locke’s (1632–1728) Letters on Toleration. In Germany, 1687 was suggested for a starting date, the year in which Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) first announced and held a university lecture in German instead of Latin, the standard language of discourse in universities.