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 it tended to scatter the seeds of religious skepticism around the land.
The second factor playing very big on the development of Western culture in those days was the growing interest in the immediate world around us--the physical, secular world. Somehow there was a growing sense that it was not a mere transient place--merely a staging area for eternal life. Rather, it had value, great value, in and of itself. But what is particularly notable about this intellectual movement of the 1600s was how our interest in the world around us came to have a value in and of itself, apart from how it might help us in our relationship with God. Not that this implied a diminished regard for God. It's just that a new mindset was growi...