ENLIGHTENMENT AND KNOWLEDGE

Relationship between Enlightenment and Development in History

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Relationship between Enlightenment and Development in History

Introduction

In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the protagonist Marlow encounters “a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch,” which has been painted by Mr. Kurtz. The painting in the novella represents that even in the age of darkness there is a hope for enlightenment. Heart of Darkness, though a short novella, has inspired over a century of scholarly criticism and the patterns of that criticism have varied greatly over the years. Upon publication in 1899, Heart of Darkness was generally praised by reviewers and critics, but largely fell into obscurity for the next several decades. In the 1930s and 1940s, however, Conrad enjoyed a sort of revival when M.C. Bradbrook and F.R. Leavis proclaimed Heart of Darkness to be one of the great works of the Western literary canon, and Conrad's novella has maintained this lofty position. In fact, in the 1960s, Lionel Trilling regarded Heart of Darkness as the “quintessentially modern text”. Besides the literary criticism the novella is still acknowledged as the modern literature. While Heart of Darkness continued to gain critical momentum later in the twentieth century, a new type of critical perspective on the novella arose, one which denounced the racism and imperialism that Conrad's work seemed to espouse. Postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist critics alike joined in disparaging the text's treatment of Africans and women (and, of course, African women). This study would mainly attempt to describe the relationship of between enlightenment and development/knowledge and how the relationship has been described in the novella from the painting by Kurtz.

Enlightenment and Knowledge

The Enlightenment can be most conveniently defined as the principal intellectual event of eighteenth century Europe, at once the cause and effect of a dramatic and sweeping rethinking of the nature and aims of philosophy, politics, and religion. Predominately Western European in its scope (from Scandinavia on the north to the Mediterranean on the south, and from the British Isles on the west to Russia on the east) and eighteenth century in its period (from the 1680s of the English Glorious Revolution to the 1790s and the French Revolution), the Enlightenment has been largely defined in scholarly and popular imaginations as an “age of reason,” its many strains unified by a core commitment to the use of reason for the promotion of happiness via the amelioration and improvement of the practical conditions of human life.

For political theorists, the Enlightenment has come to represent a project to promote values characteristic of liberal modernity: freedom, progress, opulence, and humanitarianism. More specifically, political theorists have found in the Enlightenment the origins of several institutions that define our political landscape today, from liberal individualism and global capitalism to constitutional democracy, value pluralism, human rights recognition, and religious toleration. On each front, the Enlightenment has been regarded as a self conscious attempt to break from classical and medieval orders and, in keeping with the metaphor from which it derives its name, to bring new light ...