Linguaggi settoriali inglese

Appunti linguaggi settoriali

ColombinoModernity: a brief definition

Modernity has its origins in the Renaissance and the emergence of modern science (discovery of truths and facts) and explications about the world and the place of man in it. This is the period of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Marx’s analysis of capital and possibilities of representing reality and defining eternal truths.

The idea of progress

An essential proposition of modern thought is the idea of progress thanks to the Enlightenment thinking related to the ideas of discovery, voyages, world-wide training and especially to the idea of society. The idea of human progress deals with the idea of a society which could overcome any problem thanks to the advance of science and technology and moral and political improvement. In fact, the belief in progress was in part based on Newtonian physics and the rationalized lifeworld of modernity.

Pessimistic views of history began to disappear during the 1730s and in Britain the idea of progress in history was fundamental to the way people thought about the past and was undeniably more important than the previously pessimistic outlooks. By the turn of the century, it would seem that the idea of progress was widely accepted amongst the educated classes of the First World.

During the eighteenth century, the Christian vision of history developed, with an emphasis on the correlation of past events with scriptural predictions: ‘the eschatologists of high eighteenth century Britain gave the Biblical prophetic programme a concrete chronological order and made it amenable to their historical understanding’.

The wider conceptions of history tended to articulate frameworks which were essentially concerned to promote the idea of progress, or during the later nineteenth century, a form of progressive evolutionism. Such an understanding of the world gave justification to the idea of the ‘white man’s burden’: the duty of the European to colonize and educate those who were perceived as being less fortunate. It was such a belief in progress, and the rationality of the European economic and political system, which gave rise to the myth of the ‘struggling savages’. The idea of progress is an idea which has underpinned the teleological nature of many representations of the past, an ordering of the past which came about through a new conception of time and history, both of which can now be considered.

Time in modernity

Time is a culturally specific construction, although years and months are based on natural cyclic periods. The week is in fact a purely cultural unit of time, as are hours, minutes and seconds. Despite this, humans often seem to consider time as a universal or absolute phenomenon.