enlightenment
noun/ɪnˈlaɪtənmənt/ · /ənˈlaɪtənmənt/
Etymology From enlighten + -ment.
1
Usually An act of enlightening, or the state of being enlightened or instructed.
2
Usually A concept in spirituality, philosophy and psychology related to achieving clarity of perception, reason and knowledge.
- But the man who has attained enlightenment sees that the apparent reality is mere illusion, or, as was said a couple of thousand years later, that there is nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so.1893, Thomas Huxley, Evolution and Ethics:
- Thus Django becomes the carrier of the “public use of one's reason”—the Kantian road to enlightenment given to him by the German “Forty-Eighter” dentist–turned-bounty hunter Dr. “King” Schultz, and represents the fictive, allohistorical beginning of the battle against slavery and racism in the United States.2014 July 31, Oliver C. Speck, editor, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 25:
- Derived terms
- Enlightenment, pseudoenlightenment