Enlightenment And Religion - Essay Example

Holy 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 reason and knowledge. That’s why the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called enlightenment as the great leap forward for the humanity. “For Kant, Enlightenment was mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error…….. Sapere Aude (dare to know) was Kant’s watchword taken from the Greek poet Horace” (Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, PP1).

For Kant Enlightenment was an intellectual liberation; a release from man’s self-imposed tutelage. Because of this tutelage man was not able to understand the realities around him without the guidance of a super intellectual guardian. The situation is self-imposed not because the man had no intelligence but because he was not able to use the intelligence. Getting out of the intellectual dependence of the other was what Kant professed.Enlightenment was an intellectual movement. It was mostly 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 superstition and ignorance were trying to enlighten the people around them. Putting reason in the center of human inquiry opened the door to scientific curiosity and inquiries.

Though the church could stop Galileo, they couldn’t stop the development of scientific ideas.