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There is little consensus on the precise beginning of the age of Enlightenment; the beginning of the 18th century (1701) or the middle of the 17th century (1650) are often used as an approximate starting point.[18] If taken back to the mid-17th century, the Enlightenment would trace its origins to Descartes' Discourse on Method, published in 1637. Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687. Jonathan Israel argues, "after 1650, everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophic reason".[19] Israel makes the detailed case that, from 1650 to 1750, Spinoza was "the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and nonabsolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority."[20] As to its end, most scholars use the last years of the century – often choosing the French Revolution of 1789 or the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804 – 15) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment.[21] Furthermore, the term "Enlightenment" is often used across epochs. For example in their work Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno see developments of the 20th century as late consequences of the Enlightenment: Humans are installed as "Master" of a world being freed from its magic; truth is understood as a system; rationality becomes an instrument and an ideology managed by apparatuses; civilisation turns into the barbarism of fascism; civilizing effects of the Enlightenment turn into their opposite; and exactly this - they claim - corresponds to the problematic structure of the Enlightenment's way of thinking. Jürgen Habermas, however, disagrees with his teachers' (Adorno and Horkheimer) view of the Enlightenment as a process of decay. He talks about an "incomplete project of modernity"[22] which, in a process of communicative actions, always asks for rational reasons. |
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