The Enlightenment And Enlightenment: Romanticism And The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was an intellectual revolution through 17th century to 18th century. Caused by the monopoly of knowledge and belief from the Roman Catholic Church, the Enlightenment dominates the way of rational thinking and separate to different field such as art, science, literature, music and economics. Romanticism, which happened after Enlightenment, was caused by the disappointing of the result of the enlightenment. Romanticism is a literary movement which originated in Europe from the end of 18th century to the mid 19th century. Opposed to rational thought, Romanticism put the value of emotion and nature at a very high status. Although both of them are important event in human history, enlightenment seems more scientific and essential.

Instead of making progress, they prefer to return to the old form of society. While Romanticism concentrated on the unique individuality, the Enlightenment focused on the relationship between individual and group which are more realistic for whole world. Different from the passive escaping, the great pioneers in the Enlightenment are brave to challenge the feudal society. For example, Baron de Montesquieu argued that the power needs to be divided in to 3 which could be restricted by each other. Also, John Locke, one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, founded his social contract. This talks about the relation between state and individual. He suggested that state have authority over individual. Additionally, because of the differences in causes and people’s attitude toward the society, the effect of the Enlightenment is more influential than that of Romanticism. Although Enlightenment didn’t fully change the form of society, it make a huge progress in the development of human being and set the basic theory for the future revolution in American, French and many other countries. For example, in American, the American Revolutionary War broke out. The influence of

While rationality is put at the top in Enlightenment, many scientific theories are developed and become the base of the modern industry. For instance, the famous scientist Newton who found gravity through a falling apple developed Newton’s laws of motion and calculus which are still useful subjects now. His theories effectively challenge the old belief to the god and broke the control from the church. His scientific product accelerated the progress of human development like industrialization. Beyond that, he also got accomplishment on philosophy. His ancient naive materialism argues that the origin of the world is material but not