Robinson Crusoe's Contradictions to Enlightenment Thinking
Robinson Crusoe's Contradictions to Enlightenment Thinking Robinson Crusoe, which was written by Daniel Defoe, was published in 1719. At the time of its publish, a revolution was taking place all across Europe known as the Enlightenment period. The Enlightenment period was a time of conflict, suffering, and also a time of growth for society. This revolutionary time period gave birth to such terms as deism, rationalism, skepticism, and empiricism. The period also saw an uprising in a new ideology towards human thought. This revolution started around the mid 1600's. Some of the ideas expressed by Robinson Crusoe contradicted some of the more common ideas of the time. To understand the contrasting principles in Robinson Crusoe as compared to the Enlightenment, you must fully understand how it began and what exactly it was.It is impossible to overstress the importance of two factors that played heavily in the lives of Westerners by the year 1650. One of these was a growing sense of relativism about revealed or divine truth. Watching Protestants and Catholics slaughter each other in the name of the true Christian faith did nothing beneficial for the cause of "revealed truth" in the long run. Instead
An idea soon sprang out that the world "out there" was essentially a mechanical device that worked according to fixed rules of motion. Later, Crusoe describes his resolution:. The great innovation of this view for Western religion would be the Enlightenment insistence that religion itself be rational. This type of thought is common to Crusoe. It was the age of mechanical instruments. But when Crusoe begins to explain to Friday about the Devil (which is a Christian belief), and how he is evil, Friday questions why God just doesn't overpower the Devil. Crusoe later undergoes a deep thought process of trying to understand the religious morality of the actions of the savages. I found it was not so easy to imprint right notions in his mind about the devil as it was about the being of a God. In chapter 13, he imagines himself as something of a king in the following quote:How can He sweeten the bitterest providences, and give us cause to praise Him for dungeons and prisons! What a table was here spread for me in the wilderness, where I saw nothing at first but to perish for hunger!This isn't to say that being a king was against Enlightenment ideas. Here I was run down again by him to the last degree; and it was a testimony to me, how the mere notions of nature, though they will guide reasonable creatures to the knowledge of a God, and of a worship or homage due to the supreme being of God, as the consequence of our nature, yet nothing but divine revelation can form the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and of redemption purchased for us; of a Mediator of the new covenant, and of an Intercessor at the footstool of God's throne; I say, nothing but a revelation from Heaven can form these in the soul; and that, therefore, the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I mean the Word of God, and the Spirit of God, promised for the guide and sanctifier of His people, are the absolutely necessary instructors of the souls of men in the saving knowledge of God and the means of salvation. First of all, Crusoe thinks in the traditional monarchist view that he was raised in. This ideology swept powerfully through the philosophical circles of Europe in those days, and so the Enlightenment period was born.
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