The Enlightenment And Non-European Culture

The traditional view of men being dependent on the church for guidance or the state deciding what was right was challenged with Kant's idea of freedom of thought and freedom of religious ideas. Kant defined enlightenment as man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Men could be fully autonomous and in charge of their own life without the church becoming involved as was required before the Enlightenment. Therefore, the traditional views of maturity violated the ideas of the Enlightenment.
During the Enlightenment, philosophes believed that there needed to be new knowledge of non-European culture because in their discoveries, explorers saw cultures that weren’t tainted with Christianity. Therefore, Diderot, a dedicated atheist, developed the Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia helped with intolerance from religion. He said that people could live in peace knowing the facts of science. The Encyclopedia helped with the new knowledge of non-European culture because folks could read about other cultures that weren't tainted with Christianity and have the freedom to choose which culture they wanted to follow. Diderot gave people the freedom to explore their world.
Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations which established political economy as a science for the first time and defended the fundamental …show more content…
Adam Smith, a philosophe of the Enlightenment, developed the four-stage theory to explain Europe’s contact with the rest of the world. He said they discovered new lands in the 17th century then created mercantile empires to trade between the motherland and the colonies. Europe traded with the New World up until the 1820s. They turned the conquered areas into markets for products and the goal of the mercantile empires was to export more than import, to create a profit for the mother country who the colonies traded with. However, they were more profitable with other