How Did The Enlightenment Influence Western Society

The Enlightenment was a period in European culture and thought characterized as the “Age of Reason” and marked by very significant revolutions in the fields of philosophy, science, politics, and society (Bristow; The Age of Enlightenment). Roughly covering the mid 17th century throughout the 18th century, the period was actually fueled by an intellectual movement of the same name to which many thinkers subscribed to during the 1700s and 1800s. The Enlightenment's influences on Western society, as reflected in the arts, were in accordance with its major themes of rationalism, empiricism, natural rights and natural law or their implications of freedom and social justice. The Enlightenment began or could be said to have been propelled by the scientific revolution of the earlier centuries, particularly the Newtonian universe, as modernizing science gradually undermined the ancient Western geocentric idea of the universe as well as accompanying set of presuppositions that had been constraining and influencing philosophical inquiry (Bristow; Lewis; Mattey). This has led to the promotion of philosophy that of natural science included, emerging from the

The change towards the Enlightenment style or trends was gradual but it certainly led to art works that significantly such. For example, French painter Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin's 1740 “Grace at Table” reflected the abandonment of the played-up/erotic rendition of the classics, the Rococo style. The art work, showing a woman setting up a dining table, with two children around and with all subjects in unaffected, natural pose, reflects a style moving towards one that was natural instead of ornamentalized in style, with more natural, simple subjects in natural settings. In other words, painting such as these show how Enlightenment artists were empiricists in the sense of having derived inspiration from