The Enlightenment

The first step towards modernity in Europe began in the 17th century, by way of one of the most influential movements in Europe: the Enlightenment. Its influence can be measured in fields such as art, science, architecture, music, and fashion. The revolutionary thinkers of this period injected a calm rationalism and learned criticism into all methods of thinking and creating. Like all intellectual movements, to understand the Enlightenment it is necessary to understand the historical context to which it was responding. Like other intellectual movements, the Enlightenment was a reponse to universal, constant, and ingrained ways of thinking rather than to specific historical acts such as the Stamp Act or the July Monarchy.

The universal ways of thinking that the Enlightenment sought to abolish can be best be broken into two parts. The first is religion, “the revealed truth.” Exactly similar to the religious conflicts of today, the seemingly never-ending killing of the Protestants by the Catholics and vice versa made those removed from the conflict, and thus those who could be fair and unbiased in their evaluation, to wonder “what is the revealed truth?” As the body count continued to climb, more thinkers began to ask more questions about matters of religion. And, because no tangible evidence could be found concerning the existence of a God, his appearance, the existence of his son or his son’s ghost, the thinkers simply decided that there is no divine Truth specific to one religion. This skepticism was displayed in Enlightenment politics, for example, in the form of Hobbes’ utilitarianism. Utilitarianism called for rulers to consider the “natural” rights of every man instead of the divine rights of certain elite groups, determined by allegiance to a religion. The emphasis on the tangible truths, or as they would later be called in the Preamble to the Constitution “self-evident truths,” led to the second influence for the Enlightenment.

In the 17th century, people began taking notice in the physical world not only as aesthetic, fleeting beauty and connection to God but as a more eternal and important place in and of itself. Thinkers began to explore nature on a deeper level; instead of saying “what beautiful stars” they asked “where do the stars come from?” This Socratic questioning was characteristic of the Enlightenment, and in the case of nature the answers came in the form of scientific reasoning. Over time, Enlightenment philosophers came to see nature as the highest form of reason, a form by which everything else about our world could be explained. When Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) suggested that the Earth revolved around the Sun, not vice versa, he was seeking to explain why nature took such a form as it did. Why was it light for a certain amount of hours, and why dark for others, etc. In the same way the Enlightenment thinkers refused to accept the inexplicable “Truths” of religion, they refused to accept the egocentric Truth of the universe revolving around the Earth. The Enlightenment was the beginning of modernity for England because it was, in essence, a revolution of old ideas and theories. Enlightenment questioning and revolutionary mindset were carried over into modern art.