The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.
The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.
Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.
Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive - that you can touch the miracle of being alive - then that is a kind of enlightenment.
The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.
The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.
The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.