Enlightenment

Post date: May 24, 2021 3:28:17 PM

One thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge...

It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions...

Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods... So the situation was that all the sources from which it was generally believed knowledge came actualy knew very little, and were mistaken about most of the things that they claimed to know... And therefore progress depended on learning how to reject their authority... This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto "Nullius in verba" which means something like "Take no one’s word for it..."

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism... Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the gODDamn same...