The Age of Enlightenment is the heyday of the intellectual life of mankind, the emergence of new ideas, a new philosophy that focuses on the value of life and personality of each person and the recognition of the human mind as the main value. According to the saying of the great German philosopher I. Kant, "enlightenment is a person’s exit from a state of minority in which he was at his own fault."
The Age of Enlightenment is the philosophy and basic tenets of the doctrine .
The foundation was laid back in the era of geographical discoveries, when the horizons of a person who had just emerged from the dark Middle Ages began to expand rapidly. Geographical discoveries, new lands, expansion of trade - all this contributed to the development of science, enrichment of culture and philosophical ideas. The advanced people of the era could no longer be content with religious dogmas, the tenets of faith and ancient philosophy. The science of the new time - the discoveries of Copernicus, I. Newton and others gave rise to a new caste of people who had a special worldview that was different from the general one. In their picture of the world, the main place was occupied by the concepts of “natural law”, “reason”, “nature”. The world seemed to the advanced minds as a kind of perfect mechanism, once debugged and acting exactly with a certain law. The role of God was reduced only to the "beginning of everything", he was recognized by force, having come up with the order of things, but not directly interfering in life. This teaching was called "deism" and was very popular among philosophers of the 17-18th century.
Human society was considered only a small cast from nature. The philosophers of the enlightenment - Voltaire, Diderot, Russo, Locke, Lomonosov and others believed that it was only necessary to "find" those natural laws on which human society is based and make them binding. They proclaimed the natural right of man freedom of faith, conscience and choice of occupation, human dignity, equality of estates. Relations between the rulers and the people should have been built on the basis of a natural agreement between them, which would limit the extreme despotism of the rulers. This approach was truly revolutionary - before that, the power of the monarch was considered given from above, and the sovereign, crowned by the highest church hierarchs, was considered the viceroy of God on earth. That is why most philosophers addressed their messages, first of all, to the monarchs.
Philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment mercilessly criticized the then way of life - unlimited royal power, bonfires of the Inquisition, the dominance of the church, the miserable and powerless position of the third estate and working people - all this seemed to them a wild relic of the past. Philosophers argued that all this is the result of non-observance by monarchs of their duties in relation to subjects and abuse of power. They proposed as an example to follow the "enlightened monarch", who would rule the state, ensuring compliance with natural law.
Many figures of the Enlightenment experienced the persecution of the authorities and the church, their works were burned, subjected to severe censorship, the authors often did not know whether they would wake up tomorrow free and alive. So, one of the first signs of the Enlightenment - the Didro Encyclopedia was banned from publication in France, and the author was forced to look for rich enlightened patrons. However, these persecutions did not stop philosophers and writers. The Age of Enlightenment became a harbinger of a new time, showing people a worthy role model and further development path.
The Age of Enlightenment brought one of the richest contributions to modern culture, many of its postulates formed the basis of modern law of European countries, UN global declarations and other documents.