Key Concepts of Enlightenment

The key concepts of the Enlightenment are critique, freedom, and experience: Enlightenment consists in the critique of institutions, practices, habits, and opinions in order to make possible a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom than that currenly on offer -- and this freedom is experiential, insofar as it is perceived through an enriched awareness of possible ways of experiencing. Thus there is an experience of freedom.

The realization that freedom is experiential and not only institutional is one of the key insights of the third Enlightenment (James, Dewey, Adorno, Foucault).