LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Enlightenment: Immanuel Kant
built 193 days ago
The term "Enlightenment" refers to a loosely organized intellectual movement, secular, rationalist, liberal, and egalitarian in outlook and values, which flourished in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The name was self-bestowed, and the terminology of darkness and light was identical in the major European languages—"Enlightenment" for English speakers, siècle des lumières in France, illuminismo in Italy, Aufklärung for Germans and Austrians. Although it was international in scope, the center of gravity of the movement was in France, which assumed an unprecedented leadership in European intellectual life. Emblematically, the single most famous publication of the Enlightenment was the French Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisoné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (1751–1772; Encyclopedia, or, Rational dictionary of the sciences, arts, and professions), a massive compendium of theoretical and practical knowledge edited in Paris by Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot. The cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment was genuine.... It was a German admirer of d'Alembert and Diderot, Immanuel Kant, who produced the most enduring definition of the movement.
Source:
More than a set of fixed ideas, the Enlightenment implied an attitude, a method of thought. German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed as the motto of the age, “Dare to know.” A desire arose to reexamine and question all received ideas and values, to explore new ideas in many different directions—hence the inconsistencies and contradictions that often appear in the writings of 18th-century thinkers.
Source:
What were the key ideas of the Enlightenment, beyond the challenge to inherited intellectual authority noted by Kant? The Enlightenment never presented itself as a single theoretical system or unitary ideological doctrine—if nothing else, the necessities of adaptation to different national contexts made unity of that kind unlikely. But the variety of its ideas was not infinite. The best way to approach them is perhaps in terms of a sequence of domains of thought or "problem-areas," in which a certain general consensus—often negative—can be discerned, together with a significant spectrum of differences of opinion.
Source:
In Germany the universities became centers of the Enlightenment (Ger. Aufklärung). Moses Mendelssohn set forth a doctrine of rational progress; G. E. Lessing advanced a natural religion of morality; Johann Herder developed a philosophy of cultural nationalism. The supreme importance of the individual formed the basis of the ethics of Immanuel Kant. Italian representatives of the age included Cesare Beccaria and Giambattista Vico. From America, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin exerted vast international influence.
Source:
Along the same lines as Voltaire, Immanuel Kant articulates the process of Enlightenment as one occurring by gradations, that is, among certain individuals, and then others, until eventually it has overtaken all. The thesis of his essay Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 1784), namely, that free thought is the natural state to which human beings will individually return when they are not subject to coercion, is formulated such that it depends for its universal actualization on the magnanimity of those precocious individuals who should happen to emancipate themselves from mental slavery before the rest of mankind. Kant does not hold it to be impossible that such enlightened individuals might agree amongst themselves to keep the rest of the population enslaved. Instead, he judges in advance that any such agreement would be void, insofar as it would be a crime against human nature, which is to say that the subjugated immature class would naturally rebel. Unfortunately this premise is unsound.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Immanuel Kant