egoist: fully conscious ego with a strong sense of a rational "I". "Fully conscious" means a consciousness dedicated to acceptance of whatever one discovers to be truth, with no desire to "turn a blind eye" or to be subjective, relativist, determinist, or anything but as objective as one's ability allows.
Enlightenment (vs. enlightenment) [Note: this is a descriptive analysis only, not meant to be taken as definitive. Please see other reference works for a definition or a better working model. This is basically a space-filler, but it is essentially correct in its assumptions.]
Enlightenment with a lower case "e" is not the same as "Enlightenment." With an "e" it is supernaturalism, the desire to gain wisdom through spiritualism. This has nothing to do with philosophy, except with the logic that supernatural spiritualism is possible, and the metaphysics that it exists.
This kind of enlightenment is random, unreliable, and a waste of time if you plan to sit around and wait "to become" enlightened. Mohandas Ghandi is believed by the ignorant (no perjorative meant; I mean literal ignorance) to be "enlightened," but the truth is he was an extremely educated man who applied his education to his beliefs; or maybe he applied his beliefs to his education. If this is what you mean, then we are not talking "supernatural spiritualism" at all; we are talking about Enlightenment. Ghandi was Enlightened. The last generation of human who were of the Enlightenment were America's Founding Fathers. Certainly there have been Enlightened men and women since then, but as an entire generation, they were the last. So you know what Enlightenment did; it helped humanity by asserting the rights of men; by upholding justice, dignity, and individual sovereignty. It established modern science, and re-established Naturalism, relegating religious doctrine to its former place as the skeptical position of Naturalism. (That piece of history goes all the way back to St. Augustine, so you can see how much history the Enlightenment is responsible for having reversed.) The loss of Enlightenment through the 20 or so decades since America's founding has led to the reversal--again--of the rise of Augustinian metaphysics and logic. It is what is wrong with out world today. Perhaps Augustine was somehow enlightened; but he was certainly not Enlightened. extremism:
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