Enlightenment In Western Secular Tradition
Enlightenment broadly means wisdom or understanding enabling clarity of perception. However, the English word covers two concepts which can be quite distinct: religious and spiritual enlightenment (German: Erleuchtung) and secular or intellectual enlightenment (German: Aufklärung).
In religious use, enlightenment is most closely associated with South and East Asian religious experience, being used to translate words such as (in Buddhism) bodhi or satori, or (in Hinduism) moksha. The concept has parallels in the Abrahamic religions (in the Kabbalah tradition in Judaism, in Christian mysticism, and in the Sufi tradition of Islam).
In secular use, the concept refers mainly to the European intellectual movement known as the Age of Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason referring to philosophical developments related to scientific rationality in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Read more about Enlightenment In Western Secular Tradition: Age of Enlightenment
Famous quotes containing the words western, secular and/or tradition:
“trying to live in the terrible western world
here where to love at all’s to be a politician, as to love a poem
is pretentious,”
—Frank O’Hara (1926–1966)
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—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)