The Age of Enlightenment - the heyday of intellectual lifehumanity, the emergence of new ideas, a new philosophy, oriented to the value of life and personality of each person and the recognition of the human mind as the main value. According to the dictum of the great German philosopher I. Kant, "enlightenment is a person's exit from a state of minority, in which he was at fault."
The epoch of enlightenment is philosophy and the basic postulates of the teaching.
The beginning was laid in the era of geographicaldiscoveries, when the horizon of a man who had just emerged from the dark Middle Ages began to expand rapidly. Geographical discoveries, new lands, expansion of trade - all this contributed to the development of science, enriching culture and philosophical ideas. Advanced people of the era could no longer be content with religious dogmas, postulates of faith and ancient philosophy. The science of the new time - the discoveries of Copernicus, I. Newton and others gave birth to a new caste of people who had a special worldview, different from the general. In their picture of the world, the main place was occupied by the concepts "natural law", "reason", "nature". The world seemed to advanced minds some kind of perfect mechanism, once debugged and acting exactly with a certain law. The role of God was reduced to "the beginning of everything," he confessed to the force that invented the order of things, but did not directly interfere with life. This teaching was called "deism" and was very popular among philosophers of the 17-18 century.
Human society was considered only a small cast from nature. Philosophers of the Enlightenment - Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke, Lomonosov and othersbelieved that we only need to "find" those natural laws on which human society is based and make them mandatory for implementation. They proclaimed the natural freedom of faith, conscience and choice of occupation, human dignity, equality of estates. Relations between rulers and the people were to be built on the basis of a natural contract between them, which would limit the extreme despotism of the lords. This approach was truly revolutionary - before that the monarch's power was considered to be given from above, and the sovereign, crowned by higher church hierarchs, was considered the vicar of God on earth. That is why most philosophers addressed their messages, primarily to the monarchs.
Philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment mercilessly criticizedThe then way of life - unlimited royal power, the fires of the Inquisition, the dominance of the church, the miserable and disenfranchised position of the third estate and working people - all this seemed to them a savage remnant of the past. Philosophers argued that all these are the fruits of the monarch's failure to comply with their duties with respect to subjects and abuse of power. They offered, as an example for imitation of an "enlightened monarch", who would rule the state, ensuring compliance with the natural law.
Many figures of the Enlightenment experiencedpersecution of the authorities and the church, their works were burned, subjected to severe censorship, the authors often did not know if they would wake up tomorrow, living and free people. Thus, one of the first signs of the era of enlightenment - the Encyclopedia Diderot was banned in France for printing, and the author was forced to seek rich enlightened patrons. However, these persecutions did not stop philosophers and writers. The Age of Enlightenment became a harbinger of a new time, showing people a worthy role model and a further development path.
The Age of Enlightenment brought one of the richest contributions to modern culture, many of its postulates formed the basis of modern law of the countries of Europe, the world declarations of the United Nations and other documents.
