Enlightenment historiography began in the period itself, from what Enlightenment figures said about their work. A dominant element was the intellectual angle they took.
Jean le Rond d'Alembert's
Preliminary Discourse of
l'Encyclopédie provides a history of the Enlightenment which comprises a chronological list of developments in the realm of knowledge—of which the
Encyclopédie forms the pinnacle.
[146] In 1783, Mendelssohn referred to Enlightenment as a process by which man was educated in the use of reason.
[147] Kant called Enlightenment "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage", tutelage being "man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another".
[148] "For Kant, Enlightenment was mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance".
[149] The German scholar
Ernst Cassirer called the Enlightenment "a part and a special phase of that whole intellectual development through which modern philosophic thought gained its characteristic self-confidence and self-consciousness".
[150] According to historian
Roy Porter, the liberation of the human mind from a dogmatic state of ignorance, is the epitome of what the Age of Enlightenment was trying to capture.
[151]
Bertrand Russell saw the Enlightenment as a phase in a progressive development which began in antiquity and that reason and challenges to the established order were constant ideals throughout that time.
[152] Russell said that the Enlightenment was ultimately born out of the Protestant reaction against the Catholic
Counter-Reformation and that philosophical views such as affinity for democracy against monarchy originated among 16th-century Protestants to justify their desire to break away from the Catholic Church. Although many of these philosophical ideals were picked up by Catholics,
Russell argues that by the 18th century the Enlightenment was the principal manifestation of the schism that began with Martin Luther.
[152]
Jonathan Israel rejects the attempts of postmodern and
Marxian historians to understand the revolutionary ideas of the period purely as by-products of social and economic transformations.
[153] He instead focuses on the history of ideas in the period from 1650 to the end of the 18th century and claims that it was the ideas themselves that caused the change that eventually led to the revolutions of the latter half of the 18th century and the early 19th century.
[154] Israel argues that until the 1650s Western civilization "was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition, and authority".
[155]
Time span[edit]
There is little consensus on the precise beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, though several historians and philosophers argue that it was marked by Descartes' 1637 philosophy of
Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), which shifted the
epistemological basis from external authority to internal certainty.
[156][157][158] In France, many cited the publication of Newton's
Principia Mathematica (1687),
[159] which built upon the work of earlier scientists and formulated the
laws of motion and
universal gravitation.
[160] The middle of the 17th century (1650) or the beginning of the 18th century (1701) are often used as epochs.[
citation needed] French historians usually place the
Siècle des Lumières ("Century of Enlightenments") between 1715 and 1789: from the beginning of the reign of
Louis XV until the French Revolution.
[161] Most scholars use the last years of the century, often choosing the French Revolution or the beginning of the
Napoleonic Wars (1804) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment.
[162]
In recent years, scholars have expanded the time span and global perspective of the Enlightenment by examining: (1) how European intellectuals did not work alone and other people helped spread and adapt Enlightenment ideas, (2) how Enlightenment ideas were "a response to cross-border interaction and
global integration", and (3) how the Enlightenment "continued throughout the nineteenth century and beyond."
[3] The Enlightenment "was not merely a history of
diffusion" and "was the work of historical actors around the world... who invoked the term... for their own specific purposes."
[3]
.......
In contrast to the intellectual historiographical approach of the Enlightenment, which examines the various currents or discourses of intellectual thought within the European context during the 17th and 18th centuries, the cultural (or social) approach examines the changes that occurred in European society and culture. This approach studies the process of changing sociabilities and cultural practices during the Enlightenment.
One of the primary elements of the culture of the Enlightenment was the rise of the
public sphere, a "realm of communication marked by new arenas of debate, more open and accessible forms of urban public space and sociability, and an explosion of print culture", in the late 17th century and 18th century.
[167] Elements of the public sphere included that it was egalitarian, that it discussed the domain of "common concern", and that argument was founded on reason.
[168] Habermas uses the term "common concern" to describe
those areas of political/social knowledge and discussion that were previously the exclusive territory of the state and religious authorities, now open to critical examination by the public sphere. The values of this bourgeois public sphere included holding reason to be supreme, considering everything to be open to criticism (the public sphere is
critical), and the opposition of secrecy of all sorts.
[169]
