enlightenment

plural enlightenments · alternative enlightment

1. uncountableusuallyAn act of enlightening, or the state of being enlightened or instructed.
2. uncountableusuallyA concept in spirituality, philosophy and psychology related to achieving clarity of perception, reason and knowledge.

   But the man who has attained enlightenment sees that the apparent reality is mere illusion, or, as was said a couple of thousand years later, that there is nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

   1893, Thomas Huxley, Evolution and Ethics

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   Thus Django becomes the carrier of the “public use of one's reason”—the Kantian road to enlightenment given to him by the German “Forty-Eighter” dentist–turned-bounty hunter Dr. “King” Schultz, and represents the fictive, allohistorical beginning of the battle against slavery and racism in the United States.

   2014 July 31, Oliver C. Speck, editor, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 25

alternative rare Enlightment

1. historyA 17th- and 18th-century European intellectual and cultural movement emphasizing rationalism. The period during which it flourished is called the Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason.

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   He first presented a complementary thesis on the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in which he used the term “archaeology” for the first time, and which indicated the period of history to which he was constantly to return. The Enlightenment: the intellectual, philosophical, cultural and scientific spirit of the 18th century. A belief in reason, progress, man’s “maturity” and a general rejection of tradition, religion and authority.

   1997, Chris Horrocks, Introducing Foucault, page 36 (Totem Books, Icon Books; →ISBN)

   Perhaps it helped that many of the Founding Fathers – think of it as a powdered-wig book club – were reading some of the same 17th and 18th century European philosophers of the Enlightenment, writers such as John Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, who praised scientific advances, and preached that human beings had “natural rights” of life, liberty, and property, ideas that were already rippling through intellectual circles around the globe.

   2026 May 9, Scott Baldauf, Colette Davidson, Whitney Eulich, “America at 250: A declaration of ideals reset the world – and still resonates today”, in The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, Massachusetts: Christian Science Publishing Society, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 09 May 2026

   Synonyms: European Enlightenment, Euro-American Enlightenment, Western Enlightenment, Aufklärung

2. Synonym of Age of Enlightenment.

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   What is enlightenment? In a 1784 essay with that question as its title, Immanuel Kant answered that it consists of “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity,” its “lazy and cowardly” submission to the “dogmas and formulas” of religious or political authority.¹ Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech. […] What is the Enlightenment?⁴ There is no official answer, because the era named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or creed. The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century and spilled into the heyday of classical liberalism of the first half of the 19th.

   2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 1: Dare to Understand!”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Penguin, →ISBN

   Synonyms: Age of Enlightenment