I'm not sure I can approach this from a fully historical perspective, but if you read post-Enlightenment theorists there are a few main ideas about this:

• Adorno says something to the effect that we are all caught within the Enlightenment's tyranny, and the Enlightenment has become the perversion of reason in the present day (I am interpreting him very very very loosely here). He doesn't mean that we should reject the Enlightenment as detrimental per se - it is an irrevocable part of human history and development; rather, critical theory must examine and understand the continuing implications of the Enlightenment.

• Foucault, Althusser, Derrida etc critique the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous, rational self capable of submitting to a social contract by destabilizing the notions of agency and power.

This is, obviously, very Western-centric. Thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak would probably argue that the 'we' that inherits the Enlightenment is a western male subject and that the post-colonial project is a kind of counter-enlightenment project.

Please let me know if I should give more historically-grounded evidence!

I am more interested in straight answers for my questions. I would really like to know how we are inheritors of the ideas and how is Enlightenment still a part of our present?