In week one’s reading of “What is Enlightenment?”, one of the few aspects that caught my attention the most was the reason why we are still living in the age of enlightenment and not the enlightened age. After the reading, I believed the gap between the ideal and the actual, which was mentioned, is one of the biggest obstacles keeping people from becoming enlightened.
Who we are and how we live are the actual. Therefore, if people do not live by and be grateful of who they are, I believe that means they are trying to become somebody else, and that is the ideal. Often time, they cannot accomplish becoming who they want to be and as the same time, they do not want to go back being who they really are either. Having said that, they find themselves stuck in the gap between the actual and the ideal. As in the reading, the author mention that is why this gap often causes frustration and despair, which I totally agreed with.
