What Is Enlightenment

This engaging and lucid book explains and assesses Kant's philosophy of Enlightenment. Including helpful chapter summaries and guides to further reading, it is ideal for anyone studying Kant or the Enlightenment, as well students of politics, history and religious studies.

This collection contains the first English translations of a group of 18th-century German essays that address the question, "what is Enlightenment?". They explore the origins of 18th-century debate on the Enlightenment, and its significance for the present.

This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant’s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.

What is spiritual enlightenment? You often hear the term "enlightenment" in deep spiritual discussions, but it is almost impossible to find anyone who can definitively say what "enlightenment," "awakening," "union," or "self-realization" actually entails. In fact, many religions differ as to their proposals for the highest state of spiritual attainment -- which is often called salvation, liberation or becoming one with God (union) -- that often do not even include enlightenment, or they may simply recognize it under a different name. Enlightenment is the direct realization of our self-nature, source essence, or true self. This awakening constitutes directly experiencing the source and essence of reality, the original dimension of equal identity where mind and matter are one because you have found the ultimate underlying, true nature of all things. Enlightenment means to directly, experientially realize that basic substance of cosmic life where matter and consciousness are the same substance, which then consequently opens up various powers and a universal visage. That transcendental source nature you discover is often called God, Ein Sof, Allah, Brahman, dharmakaya, fundamental nature, Buddha-nature, Tao, Emptiness or Self. Some of the secular designations include Pure Consciousness, pristine awareness, one mind, uncreated light, clear light or infinite universal illumination to denote the fact that It is the ultimate substratum that gives birth to the knowingness of manifest consciousness. The way to this realization is through meditation and other spiritual practices that teach you to stop clinging to states of consciousness. You must always allow consciousness to arise, but should not cling to thoughts to thus become a perfectly free, effortless, natural and spontaneous individual. As your thoughts quiet down because of this practice, your body's chakras and chi channels will open up (you will experience a kundalini awakening) and you will gradually stop identifying your body and mind as your self. In time you can attain a pristine realization of selflessness (a state absent of the ego, I-thought or sense of separate "I-amness") that constitutes enlightenment. Regardless of your religious tradition, when you diligently cultivate spiritual practice you will gradually pass through many transitional stages of progress and particular spiritual experiences. These experiences can include special degrees of one-pointed concentration (absorption) called dhyana and samadhi attainments, which prepare you for enlightenment if you cultivate far enough. Many religions, both Eastern and Western, describe these possible achievements in great detail, and many such experiences that are not enlightenment are analyzed within so that practitioners do not incorrectly assume they have actually achieved awakening when they have only experienced inferior attainments. The various achievement levels to this awakening of self-realization that are explained. This book is the first of its kind to collect not only the rare autobiographical and biographical accounts from many traditions of individuals who achieved enlightenment (because it is a non-denominational accomplishment), but also the relevant passages in each tradition's scriptures that reveal the characteristics of the original nature that everyone awakens to (such as perfect purity, changelessness, infinity, eternality, and bliss). The reader quickly comes to the conclusion that despite sectarian differences, everyone is actually awakening to the very same thing. It cannot be anything else The pathway to enlightenment is analyzed using many different religious paths and frameworks. Many common errors of spiritual practice and misinterpretations of spiritual states are also revealed to help individuals become correctly oriented so that they can attain enlightenment as well.

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.