Similarities Between Enlightenment And Neoclassicism

The Enlightenment period in literature overlapped with the beginning of the Neoclassical period. Beginning around the second half of the 18th century, it was a period of time during which the philosophical theory and political revolution had exceptional global significance. Even though different, the neoclassical and the enlightenment currents intertwined. While Neoclassicism focused on expressing aesthetic and cultural ideals, the Enlightenment promoted a broader philosophical and political movement having the human condition at its main focus.

Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason should govern within all layers of social existence and not the principles written in sacred texts and traditional values. The widely accepted belief that the sovereign ruled the country by Divine Right was questioned. The belief of the Divine Right was substituted by the belief that both the government and the sovereign ruled by the people’s agreement, an agreement which both the government and the current sovereign had to respect. The diminishing of the value of the sacred texts and refuting the already established moral

norms brought about the atheism.
The fundamental aim of the Enlightenment was to remodel the structure of society, placing the rudimentary needs and desires of the people at its center. Consequently, the already established moral values, mainly set by the Church, had to make way for the new social reforms. The power of the Church had to be diminished by neglecting all its teachings, from the creation of the world and the 10 Commandments to the salvation of the soul through redemption and resurrection. The issues concerning human life, welfare, existence and co-existence were interpreted in the light of “reason”, thus casting a shadow of doubt over the existence of God, absolute truth and moral values. God as a designer of moral value was replaced by the “reasonable” man.
The teachings of the Enlightenment were a direct opposite from that of the Bible.

The ecclesiastical thought conveys a message of self-sacrifice in the name of humanity and wellbeing. It teaches people to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek when pressured and neglected, to set aside the personal needs and to sacrifice personal happiness for the general wellbeing. The Enlightenment, acting in a radically nihilistic manner, casts away all these teachings and provided a poor replacement which put the egocentric and atheistic human on stage. The “enlightened” and “reasoned” thinkers of the period promoted the era as an age of freedom. Instead, they created a society governed by mediocrity, triviality and false pluralism. These seeds from the Age of Reason have now enrooted deeply into every aspect of the 21st century’s

life.
David Hume (1711-1776), was Scottish essayist, philosopher, diplomat, historian and zest defender of empiricism and skepticism. In his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume struggled to build a pure naturalistic "science of man" based on the basic psychological strives of human nature.
According to Hume, human behavior is governed by desire, and the awareness only of those things that people might have personally experienced. Thus, the moral values should be extracted from the core of personal sentiments. Hume is considered as the founder and radical defender of compatibilism and of the concepts of freedom and determinism. His compatibilism struggles to fuse the ideal of human freedom with the mechanist teaching that human beings are part of a universe in which all activities are predetermined and governed by physical laws.
His early deterministic view resulted in his later religious skepticism. In his The Natural History of Religion he reduces religion to a simple “dread of the unknown." In order to explain the creation of the world he offered his mechanical theory where the creator of everything is called a “stupid mechanic”.