There is little doubt that one of the legacies to us of the Enlightenment is the idea of thinking for oneself. The rallying cry of the era’s great philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was: “Have the courage to think for yourself!” It is pleasant, because so much easier, he noted, to let others do our thinking for us: priests, politicians, social commentators and the like. It is much more difficult to think for oneself. Kant insisted that the necessary condition for such free thought was freedom – freedom to argue, to disagree, to refuse.
Yes, it is easy to point out that there is no such one intellectual movement as ‘the Enlightenment’: those thinkers, writers, poets, essayists and so on whom we think of as making up the Enlightenment actually argued for many very different views: liberal, conservative, religious, atheist and so on. Nonetheless, out of the confusion of intellectual currents that we call the Enlightenment, we can perhaps isolate some the key ideas that have remained with us.
To Kant’s idea of thinking for ourselves we may add our belief in equal rights and, what goes along with this, tolerance. There may be others, but these are among the central ideas in question. And we tend to see the whole package of ideas as a victory over superstition and myth, congratulating ourselves therefore at the same time for being rational.
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