Enlightenment (~1650 – 1800)
The century and a half where Europe bet everything on reason — and mostly won.
What Defined It
A chain of philosophers builds the modern mind. Descartes starts with “I think, therefore I am” and founds modern rationalism. Locke counters from the empiricist side: the mind is a blank slate, all knowledge comes from experience. Hume pushes empiricism to its limit and finds that causation itself can’t be proven — waking Kant, by Kant’s own admission, “from his dogmatic slumber.” Kant’s three Critiques then try to save both reason and freedom from Hume’s skepticism.
Alongside the epistemology, a political project: Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot. The encyclopedia as weapon. The French and American revolutions as the political expression of the same impulse — that human beings can think their way out of inherited authority.
Underneath all of it: the rise of the bourgeois subject. A reader in a coffeehouse with a newspaper. Someone who can disagree with a king in print.
Key Figures
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant; Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Adam Smith; Newton.
Why It Matters
Modern science, modern politics, modern ethics — all three are Enlightenment projects. When Schopenhauer and the Romantics react against it, they are reacting against something specific: a world that believes reason can solve itself. The Enlightenment also leaves open wounds — colonialism, the instrumentalization of nature, the loss of enchantment — that the next two centuries will keep reopening.
Kant’s three Critiques are the era’s peak. After Kant, philosophy is permanently changed: the question is no longer “what is the world?” but “what can a mind like ours even know about it?”
Connections
- Kant — the era’s philosophical summit
- Critique of Pure Reason — metaphysics and epistemology
- Critique of Practical Reason — the moral law from within
- Critique of Judgement — aesthetics and teleology
- Barry Lyndon — Kubrick’s 18th-century tableau, the era’s manners and cruelty
Lineage
- Predecessors: Renaissance (humanism, the Scientific Revolution’s opening moves)
- Successors: Romanticism (direct reaction); German Idealism (Kant’s heirs)