Enlightenment

“Age of the Enlightenment;

Reason, Individualism and Skepticism”

By:

Karla J. Tirado

Colegio Reina Isabel

Prof. Salvador

History Class – 3ºB

December 14th, 2015.

1
Enlightenment

“Age of the Enlightenment;

Reason, Individualism and Skepticism”

Firstly, what’s the Enlightenment? Well, it was “a philosophical movement,

which dominated the world of ideas in Europe in the 18th century”. During the

Enlightenment, the way of thinking changed drastically. Rights and freedom were

introduced to people as well as equality, and tolerance. People could have private

properties; constitutions were established for people to have laws and rights. One

of the things that had the most importance during this wonderful period, was that

Montesquieu established three powers of government: legislative, executive, and

judicial.

Many historians say the Enlightenment started with the French Revolution,

but I say it was lead by the Scientific Revolution, which is the development of

sciences such as mathematics, physics, biology, etc. The Scientific Revolution

helped people to start the Enlightenment because it challenged the view on every

institutions or behavior/decision they didn’t like from their governors. They

questioned everything around them, scientific, political or religious matter.

This actually has to do with one of the core themes of this age: Skepticism.

Skepticism basically is the questioning on concepts (usually politics, economy or

religion) surrounding us. During the Enlightenment, Skepticism had a major impact

because they questioned extremely important aspects, such as the Divine Right,

which was the thought that God gave leaders some kind of power to govern

society; absolutely not true. Imagine if that was still or way of thinking? I’m glad this

surged way back in the 18th century; otherwise, our lives would be very different.

2
Enlightenment

Moving on, I want to talk about another core theme of the Enlightenment:

Reason. Reason was, and still is, an extremely important way of thinking which in

my opinion, have helped to improve society. Before the Enlightenment, the Church

had a major impact on every aspect of their lives, and thanks to Reason, people

saw things as they were, rather than believing everything the Church said. What I

like about this theme is that it didn’t disappear religion; it still had a certain respect

to people’s beliefs, but in a more realistic way.

The last core theme of the Enlightenment, actually the best one in my

opinion, is Individualism. I believe Individualism is all about human dignity. With

this concept, people in the Enlightenment got to know that each and every single

on of us have rights and privileges endowed to us from the moment we were born.

It had a huge impact since it have importance to everyone; as it name says, it

cared for people as individuals instead of leaders just seeing everyone else as a

bunch of people who were born to serve him or her. Without this, we wouldn’t have

Human Rights to claim or only leaders would have all money and services.

In conclusion, the Enlightenment and the core themes in it changed our

world forever. As you can see, things would be very, very different from what it is

now, and definitely not better. This amazing movement of freedom and

development, in my opinion, is the one that changed our world the most and I’m so

thankful that those brave persons in the 18th century stood up to the basic concepts

everyone erroneously had.