Enlightenment Agreement
First, Locke argued that natural rights such as life, liberty, and property existed in the state of nature and could never be taken away by individuals or even voluntarily abandoned. These rights were “inalienable” (impossible to give up). Locke also disagreed with Hobbes regarding the statutes. For him, it was not only an agreement between the people, but between them and the sovereign (preferably a king). For Enlightenment thinkers themselves, however, the Enlightenment is not a historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, not bound by time or place. Immanuel Kant defines the “Enlightenment” in his famous contribution to the debate on the question in an essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), as the liberation of humanity from its self-created immaturity; « Immaturity is the inability to use one`s own understanding without the direction of another. » Kant expresses shared beliefs among illuminators of very different teachings and identifies enlightenment with the process of having to think for oneself, to use one`s intellectual faculties and to rely on them to determine what one believes and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have great confidence in the intellectual forces of humanity, both to gain a systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This trust is usually associated with distrust or hostility towards other forms or vectors of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myths and miracles), insofar as they are seen as a competition with the authority of one`s own reason and experience. The philosophy of the Enlightenment tends to be in tension with the established religion, insofar as the liberation from the self-inflicted immaturity at that time, the risk of thinking for oneself, of awakening intellectual forces, generally requires resisting the role of the established religion in the control of thought and action. The belief of the Enlightenment – if you can call it that – is that the process of enlightenment, of gradually becoming self-determined through the awakening of one`s own intellectual forces in thought and action, ultimately leads to a better and more fulfilled human existence. There were two different lines of thought of the Enlightenment: the radical Enlightenment, inspired by Spinoza`s philosophy, which advocated democracy, individual freedom, freedom of expression, and the annihilation of religious authority.
A second, more moderate variant, supported by René Descartes, John Locke, Christian Wolff, Isaac Newton and others, sought an adaptation between reform and traditional systems of power and belief. The political revolutions of the Enlightenment, especially the French and American revolutions, were considerably shaped and guided by earlier political philosophy during this period. Although Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651) defends the absolute power of the political ruler and thus opposes revolutionaries and reformers in England, this work is a seminal work of enlightenment political theory. Hobbes` work stems from the modern theory of the social contract, which incorporates Enlightenment ideas about the relationship of the individual to the state. According to the general model of the social contract, political authority is based on an agreement (often understood as ideal rather than real) between individuals, each of whom in this agreement aims to promote his rational self-interest through the establishment of a common political authority over everything. According to the general model of the contract (although this becomes clearer among later contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau than in Hobbes himself), political authority is not based on conquest, natural or divinely introduced hierarchy, or obscure myths and traditions, but on the rational consent of the governed. With the initiation of this model, Hobbes takes a naturalistic and scientific approach to the question of how political society should be organized (in the context of a far-sighted and non-sentimental image of human nature) and thus decisively influences the process of secularization and rationalization of the Enlightenment in political and social philosophy. Enlightenment ideas also influenced various anti-colonial economists and intellectuals throughout the Portuguese Empire, such as José de Azeredo Coutinho, José da Silva Lisboa, Cláudio Manoel da Costa and Tomás de Antônio Gonzaga. David Hume`s famous essay on the “norm of taste” raises the epistemological problem that subjectivism raises in aesthetics. If beauty is an idea within us and not a characteristic of objects independent of us, how do we understand the possibility of correctness and inaccuracy – how do we understand the possibility of standards of judgment – in this area? The problem is clearer to Hume because he intensifies Hutcheson`s subjectivism.
He writes in the treatise that “pleasure and pain … are not only necessary companions of beauty and deformity, but constitute their essence” (Treatise, Book II, Part I, Section viii). But if a judgment about taste is based on or expresses subjective sensations, how can it be wrong? In his answer to this question, Hume explains the expectation of agreement in taste judgments by invoking the fact that we share a common human nature, and he explains “objectivity” or expertise in taste judgments in the context of his subjectivism by appealing to the normative responses of well-placed observers. The two points (the commonality of human nature and the safeguarding of “objectivity” in sentiment-based judgments by appealing to the normative reactions of well-placed observers) are typical of the period in general and in particular of the strong empiricist tension in the Enlightenment. Hume develops the empiricist line in aesthetics to the point where little remains of the classical emphasis on order, harmony or truth, which, in the opinion of the French classicists, is captured and appreciated in our aesthetic responses to beauty, and therefore in the eyes of classicists, the reason for aesthetic responses. In Russia, the government began actively promoting the dissemination of art and science in the mid-18th century. This era produced the first Russian university, library, theater, public museum and independent press. Like other enlightened despots, Catherine the Great played a key role in promoting the arts, sciences, and education. She used her own interpretation of enlightenment ideals, supported by renowned international experts such as Voltaire (by correspondence) and in residence world-class scientists such as Leonhard Euler and Peter Simon Pallas. .