In 1784, German Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote an article for a popular audience explaining the meaning of the word “Enlightenment” as, “man’s emergence from nonage”. This nonage was caused not by lack of intelligence, but lack of determination and courage to use that intelligence without another’s guidance.
Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence.
It was in the 17th century that science finally broke loose from the moorings traditions. The coalition of science and philosophy was of decisive importance to the Scientific Revolution, it lead to the best minds of the age into scientific inquiry and gave science the sanction of reasons of reason. It made the work of great scientists not a series of accidental discoveries but steps in a cumulative process and also provided the underlying principle for the whole Enlightenment.
The greatest 17th century scientific philosophers were Descrates, Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon. Descrates was French, a brilliant mathematician and imaginative theorizer about the nature of man and the universe. His most important contribution lies with his intellectual method known as Cartesian Thought. He developed certain revolutionary rules of reasoning which he claimed could be used for solving any complex problem. He began with the famous words: ‘I think, therefore I am’. His emphasis on the abstract character of science and because of his personal efforts it became customary to think of scientific inquiries as mathematical in nature, and of scientific laws as mathematical in form.
Galileo, Descrates’ Italian contemporary, emphasized observation: he preferred looking to abstract speculation. He advised professors of natural science to give up Aristotle’s method of propagating theories and urged them to look through his perfected telescope and see themselves; the Universe was not to be understood from theories; but from observing the thing itself. He wisely added that man should not trust sense impressions alone but should be directed by facts.
Compared to Galileo, Francis Bacon seems curiously one sided. Bacon as moralist and saint; his scientific writings are studded with aphorism and he was mainly concerned with guiding men in the right scientific procedures. He said that for centuries philosophers had acted like ‘ants’ diligently but stupidly gathering little useless bits of knowledge or like ‘spiders’ spinning out intricate, unsubstantial theories from their own insides. The true philosopher, he said, must be like a ‘bee’; he must go to nature for his raw material and absorbs nature’s lessons, and then through exacting labour, transform these lessons into sound theories.( we must read this in the background of Quaran’s continuous insistence on working of a bee)
Bacon considered that “the true and lawful goal of the science is none other than this; that human life be endowed with new discoveries and power”
In this way we see that European intelligentsia played a pivotal and crucial role in development of the process where reason held sway. Undenying fact is that interaction among classical philosophers, Muslims thinkers and European educated class created an atmosphere in Europe, where human thinking based on reason rather contaminated faith got dominance, ascendancy and control and
(It is abridged and edited version of the article that I wrote two years ago on the insistence of Late Jawed Murtaza and read in a meeting of our Organisation)
