It's because when we moved to a system of law that was on the principles of the enlightenment, the effort was to get at the truth.
Bolzano hoped that, following the Great Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert, the ideal of the Enlightenment, the effort to spread scientifically organized useful knowledge would again find its finest expression in the completion of an encyclopedia.
It generated some enthusiasm (a slope of enlightenment) but the effort stalled again (the plateau of productivity) and from that point on it slowly died (the cliff of obsolescence).
Not surprisingly, "The Majesty of Spain" is the centerpiece -- if not the alpha and omega -- of the Jackson Convention and Visitors Bureau's current promotional efforts, "The Enlightenment Series 2001".
Arkanar isn't as retrograde as it is because its people simply haven't reached their own Enlightenment yet, because any efforts to bring about progress have been violently halted.
Part atavistic race riot, part religious disputation and part earnest effort at enlightenment, the expansive commentary is fast becoming a full-blown novel of world religion, one that dramatizes the fascinating and often shocking preoccupations of today's desk-chair ideologues.
Of these men he asks not just that they run the Church without getting strangled but that they comply with the values of the Enlightenment, whereas the whole effort of the Vatican from the eighteenth century onward has been to oppose those values: democracy, reason, freedom, evidence.
The true story of the medical doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee's efforts to promote Enlightenment ideas in eighteenth-century Denmark is the premise for Nikolaj Arcel's costume drama "A Royal Affair" (Nov. 9).
He describes the process as something of a search for enlightenment, but like the most fruitful efforts to find something bigger than yourself, the resulting work suggests desperation, anxiety, a Sistenean stretch for the God or something like it.
