Philosophy of the Enlightenment and its main characteristics

The Age of Enlightenment in Europe was formed in special historical conditions. These were the times of the reign of the absolute monarchy in France, which experienced a crisis and a gap between economic development and the system of power, as well as a tightening of clericalism (the Edict of Nantes on Tolerance was repealed). The sources of new ideas were the scientific picture of the world unfolded by Newton, as well as English social philosophy (John Locke, the philosophy of "common sense") and French free-thinking writers and thinkers such as Pierre Beyle, Descartes and Montesquieu.

The ideas of the Enlightenment, first of all, made the problem of the opposite of Reason and Faith the most priority philosophical question and put forward the cult of Reason and Progress as one of the most important goals of mankind. If the English philosophers who own the term "enlightenment" were theoreticians of the so-called cabinet character, the French enlighteners represented a real social movement, or "party" of philosophers. They were fond of politics, had access to a wide section of the population and wrote in French, understandable to those who had been literate. The main principle of the French Enlightenment was the belief in the prevalence of ideas over society. They believed that ideas influence the development of society, and in order to enlighten society, it is first of all necessary to educate people.

The philosophy of the Enlightenment is inconceivable without such, certainly, its brightest representative, as François Voltaire. True, he did not create his own philosophical system, but was famous as a fighter with fanaticism and superstition, not without reason his well-known cry against the domination of the clericalism of the Roman Catholic Church "Crush the Gad"! Voltaire was, in his views, a deist, he believed that the existence of Reason in the Universe proves the cause and purpose of this existence. He also opposed atheism, believing that the rejection of God would strike the moral and moral foundations of mankind. Voltaire tried to popularize Newton's doctrine of the laws of nature in France, and also criticized the theory of "innate ideas" of Descartes and Solipsism Berkeley. In the theory of cognition, Voltaire relied on Locke and Francis Bacon: knowledge is based on experience, but there are absolute knowledge, such as mathematics, morality, and the notion of God. In the field of psychology, the philosopher shared a fashionable at that time doctrine that man is a sensible mechanism without a soul, but with instinct and intellect.

The second unconditional authority that the philosophy of the Enlightenment created, and the opponent of Voltaire, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The most famous of his works are "Reflections on the origin of inequality between people", "Social Contract" and "New Eloise". Rousseau believed that the main driving force in man is not intelligence, but feelings, such instincts as conscience and genius. Rousseau criticized modern science and industry, assuring that they separate man from nature, creating artificial needs for him and alienating people from each other. The task of philosophy is to overcome this gap and make a person happy. In the field of history, Rousseau shared the notion of a "golden age" that was destroyed by private property. Back, of course, already, you can not come back, but you can at least partly rectify the situation by concluding a social contract and creating communities of equal small proprietors who solve all issues by referendum. Rousseau was also a theorist of "natural education" in the bosom of nature without a restrictive framework, and religiously adhered to the ideas of personal experience.

Philosophy of the Enlightenment is also represented by a galaxy of French materialists - Lametrie, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot. Holbach in the "System of Nature" reduced all phenomena to the movement of material particles, and Lametre connected matter not only with movement, but also with feelings, suggesting the presence in psychology of automatism ("Man-Machine"). They also supported the idea of the development of man from the inorganic "kingdom" through the vegetable and animal. One of the distinctive features of the French materialism of this era is its determinism: everything is subject to universal laws, there is no case, no goal, but only cause and effect. Cognition, in their opinion, proceeds from experience, is transformed into thinking, and its goal is the improvement of man. But the main condition of knowledge is the sensations with which we "register" the world around us. However, for example, Diderot, unlike Lametrie, believed that the person in such a system resembles, rather, not a machine, but a piano, since he uses a system of signs like the language (and the signs correspond to the piano keys). In social philosophy, materialists adhered to views on rational egoism, which can cooperate on common interests and so come to universal interest and morality.

Since almost all known philosophers the philosophy of the Enlightenment gave the world agreed that common sense and right ideas form the right social order, they created a project of the "Encyclopedia", the main ideologue and administrator of which was Diderot. He managed to bring together all the enlighteners, both materialists and deists, so that they wrote articles on all scientific achievements in both the natural and humanitarian fields, combined progressive views with criticism of the outdated and gave a picture of the human mind as a whole. This work began with great enthusiasm, but then most of the participants moved away from the project both for financial and internal reasons. Left alone, Diderot was able to complete this work to the end and publish all 52 volumes of the "Encyclopedia", summarizing everything that the science of the XVII-XVIII centuries has achieved.