Enlightenment And Religion Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Enlightenment And righteousness - Essay ExampleHoly Bible was the last word and everything about a man was God-centric, God-decided, and God-given.Kantian CONCEPT Enlightenment was an effort to break through this stagnant cultural context into the freedom of originator and knowledge. Thats why the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called enlightenment as the great leap forward for the humanity. For Kant, Enlightenment was humannesss final coming of age, the emancipation of human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.. Sapere Aude (dare to know) was Kants watchword taken from the Greek poet Horace (Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, PP1). For Kant Enlightenment was an intellectual liberation a release from mans self-imposed tutelage. Because of this tutelage man was non able to understand the realities around him without the guidance of a tiptop intellectual guardian. The situation is self-imposed not because the man had no intelligence but because he was not abl e to use the intelligence. Getting out of the intellectual dependence of the other was what Kant professed.Enlightenment was an intellectual movement. It was by and large a middle-class movement against the hereditary aristocracy and religion a movement for the humanity in general and for the common man in particular. Though this movement is often associated with the 18th century, the roots of it go back further. Thinkers and writers who thought about the betterment of human life and society, who wanted to place Reason in the center of all human intellectual activity, who wanted to fight the tyrannical political system, and combat superstitious notion and ignorance were trying to enlighten the people around them. Putting reason in the center of human dubiousness opened the door to scientific curiosity and inquiries. Though the church could stop Galileo, they couldnt stop the breeding of scientific ideas.