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Lecture VI
CULTURAL PERIOD OF THE REFORMATION AND

ENLIGHTENMENT

Plan

1. Socio-historical and general cultural preconditions of the

Enlightenment.

2. Western European Enlightenment: philosophical aspects.

3. Features of the Eastern European Enlightenment.

4. Importance of the Enlightenment for the development of the

European culture.

1. Socio-historical and general cultural preconditions of the

Enlightenment

The XVIIIth century came into the history of the world culture under the
proud name of ‘Age of Reason’, ‘Century of philosophers’, ‘Age of the
Enlightenment’. The last phrase is found in the writings of the British, French and

German thinkers and finally approved after Kant's article ‘What is the
Enlightenment ?’ The concept of light, clarity, which etymologically underlying
the words ‘education’, ‘enlightenment’ in all languages were considered the main

trend of the XVIIIth century.
The Enlightenment movement was a kind of a summary of the development
of the European consciousness of the late Middle Ages . The Enlightenment was,

on the one hand, the successor of the ideas of the Renaissance when speaking
about the human autonomy, its emancipation from the constraints of feudal
religious world. On the other hand, educators have relied on the experience of

normative classicism that stated and set out the moral and aesthetic values.
The Enlightenment was also the era of bourgeois root system of values in the
socio-economic and ideological context of the European culture. This process
began during the Renaissance and led to the rapid growth of the industry, capitalist

social and economic relations, the European bourgeois and industrial revolutions -
the processes of various degrees around Europe. A socio-political program of the
Enlightenment was the embodiment of bourgeois ideology with its requirements of

basic freedoms and the idea of bourgeois property as one of the most important

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