Enlightenment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Enlightenment - Essay Example Three modernists, Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafla, will show how personal feeling or interpretation dictated the modernist period in contrast to an enlightenment point of reality. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher. Nietzsche promoted nihilism by proclaiming â€Å"God is dead† (Morgan, 36). Instead of interpreting God as an all powerful creator, Nietzsche believed God was used to create a society of morality without a purpose. While an individual from the enlightenment might reason that God and morality must exist for society to function smoothly, Nietzsche believed morality needed to be examined without the excuse of God. Nietzsche’s reality was looking into philosophical arguments that are still up for debate to this day. Unlike the reasoning of the enlightenment age, Nietzsche’s views are debatable. They cannot be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Franz Kafka was a modernist writer. He was born in Germany. Instead of using reasoning in reality, Kafka wrote stories that today would be considered science fiction. An example is The Metamorphosis. In this story, Kafka had a traveling salesman turn into a huge insect (Kafka). An Enlightenment influenced thinker would never think of this plot, because humans cannot turn into huge insects. Kafka would have probably responded to this line of thinking by replying â€Å"not yet†. Modernists believe that not everything can be explained by human reasoning yet. The modernist keeps theorizing until the day their thoughts are proven. However the modernist does not stop thinking just because they cannot prove their theories. Sigmund Freud was a German doctor that pioneered psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. He theorized that every human has an id, ego, and superego. Freud also laid out different theories about human development like the anal complex, Oedipus complex, penal envy, and so forth. All of these theories, at the time, could not be proven. Today they cannot be proven, but the