Enlightenment’s Wake

The Enlightenment's great legacy is to think for ourselves, but is this founded on a myth?

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.

Continue reading

Enjoy unlimited access to the world's leading thinkers.

Start by exploring our subscription options or joining our mailing list today.

Start Free Trial

Already a subscriber? Log in

Latest Releases
Join the conversation

binra 24 September 2015

Faith in Reason is sanity - for Reason is another term for sanity. But a faithless identifiction within a superficial rationality is unsane. Enlightenment is not a state of attainment or understanding from which to build, but an ongoing openness to light of awareness that discerns and thinks and learns from its reflections of experience. Self concept operates a distorting filter of denial. Beware of identifying in self concept - it makes us ego-centric and therefore out of true and un-Reasoned.

In its pure sense faith is all we have to operate with and from - whatever idea polarity we then choose to accept and focus within. Enlightenment is aligned purpose as to what is being given faith. Endarkenment knows not what it does and meets its own denied feelings of fear, hate and guilt without recognizing its part in them - and so the feelings are triggered and the original patterns re-enacted as those 'who know not what they do' - while of course believing it is operating as free agents and justified in all it does. For the same reason it does not listen - because it believes it already knows, and is defended and protected by a deep aversion to encounter the feelings that originally set up the withdrawal from and usurping of light.
But feelings are not get-rid-able but can either be constantly and repeatedly denied, or opened to in willingness for reintegration and evolved. For feelings carry the original judgments that set them and these judgments are correctable, such that feelings don't have to be denied or got rid of but can rebalanced in the heart - in the wholeness and free flowing experience of the movement of being - in which the intuitive and the analytical can rise to serve the need or desire in a fluid and seamlessly unified expression.
The belief that we know is the self concept that works against knowing. Life is not RULES to merely uncover and assert and apply, nor is it unprincipled and random event. The will is the capacity to think and feel and is responsive and receptive to the communication of Spirit - that might be called the Movement of the inner directing focus of our being - which operates preverbally and is first discerned and then defined and experienced as a feeling with meanings arising from the definitions accepted and reacted from. It is not that we should invalidate anything we have experienced - but that we use it to clarify our focus and our receptivity so as to experience what is here to be experienced in a way that we truly enjoy and prefer or are best served by. The dictate of the model upon living reality is the sacrifice of joy to loveless rule. Regardless what kind of model or self image is thus accepted and asserted. The idea of the One True Model is a mistaken attempt at self validation which embodies an invalidity in its foundation. The nature of creation is a rich and interpenetrating and reflective diversity of exppression, exploration and experience. We are literally killing ourselves in our current mode of identification. By our own choices - unconsciously running within the seemingly self-protective beliefs against uncovering fears we are unwilling to own or bring to light. And so denied fear and guilt or shadow power, operates our world beneath the facade of respectability and acceptability. The exposure of corruptions and false foundations within the institutions and ideas to which we accorded faith and allegiance is meeting those very feelings which the self-image and its presentation served to hide. If we do not recognize our part in this - then we merely re-enact another form of denial - which moves us further into darkness of an oppositional will. But if we own what is ours, we can then change it, for only a recognized mis-choice can be changed for a better one. The desire to integrate and align with a true sanity in life is uncoverable beneath our fears because it is innate to our inheritance or true being. Our willingness for this is what makes us truly Human rather than mechanism or slave unit. It is both a grace and an acceptance - felt as a shift to an expanded perspective in which 'oppositional will' makes no sense and has no attraction to the 'as if' part of the minds freedom to explore.