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The emergence of man from his self-imposed minority is referred to as Enlightenment. This minority is defined by the capacity to apply ones knowledge without the aid of another. It is self-imposed if the problem is not a lack of knowledge but rather a lack of courage and conviction in trusting ones intuition above others. According to Bristows (2010) research, the Enlightenment was a philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 18th century and emphasized principles like tolerance, liberty, constitutional governments, progress, separation of church and state, and fraternity.
Rationalism, as defined by the Enlightenment, is the belief that people gain knowledge by logic rather than sensory experience. When most philosophers admired reason but believed that knowledge comes from experience, the issue was crucial to Enlightenment debates. Rationalism plays a critical role in Enlightenment whereby Empiricism, the theory that all knowledge derives from and must be evaluated by sensory experience, has long been an opponent of rationalism (Bristow, 2010). On the other hand, rationalists believe that reason can grasp facts beyond the reach of sense perception in both certainty and generality (Bristow, 2010). Rationalism has fought against supernatural knowledge claims based on mystical experience, revelation, or intuition. It also included various irrationalism that emphasizes the emotional, biological, or unconscious, volitional, or existential at the expense of the rational by emphasizing the existence of a natural light.
Natural rights can be defined as rights independent of any specific government or cultures beliefs, laws, or customs. As a result, the concepts of inalienability and universality were central to Enlightenment views of the individual-government relationship. According to Locke, liberty, property, and Life are among the fundamental natural rights whereby the human law of Nature is the most basic preservation of humanity (Peters, 2019). Individuals have both duty and right to save their own lives to accomplish their aim. During the Enlightenment, natural laws were used to dispute kings divine right to rule, forming an alternative basis for constructing a social compact (Peters, 2019). In classical republicanism, government, positive law, and legal rights were based on mixed government, civil society, and civic virtue. On the other hand, others use the concept of natural rights to call all of these institutions into question.
Natural rights were influenced by Thomas Hobbes view of man in a state of nature. He claimed that one of the most important aspects of human rights was that they were universal to exercise his authority in the way he sees fit for the preservation of his Nature, that is, his own Life. Natural liberty and natural rules were differentiated by Hobbes. Hobbes claimed that in his natural condition, mans Life comprised entirely of liberties with no restrictions. He argued that the terms right ( jus ) and law ( lex ) are frequently misunderstood, correspond to opposing concepts, with law referring to rights and obligations referring to the absence of responsibilities (Peters, 2019). People will not obey natural laws unless they are first subject to sovereign power, without which all notions of wrong and right are worthless. Because human Nature prioritizes our well-being, rights take precedence over institutional, legal, or natural laws. Individuals will not obey natural laws until they are first subjugated to sovereign power.
It is important to note that such Enlightenment arguments may be just as unpersuasive as the Enlightenment assaults to which they answer. As critics point out, the Enlightenment idea being debated is a construct that bears little similarity to anything that would have been considered Enlightenment in the eighteenth century (Bristow, 2010). The fact that the philosophes are not our contemporaries, however intriguing they may be, may serve to shield us from the passion for bad history that has overwhelmed both critics and supporters of the Enlightenment effort.
Works Cited
Bristow, William. Enlightenment (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Library of Congress, 2010, Web.
Peters, Michael A. The enlightenment and its critics1. Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 51, no. 9, 2019, pp. 886-894.
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