Linguaggi settoriali inglese

Appunti linguaggi settoriali Colombino

Modernity: 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

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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. Time, as

it is widely understood in the First World today, has its roots in the Enlightenment. This idea of

time is linked with the idea of progress and is crucial to any understanding of the modern world and

any disciplines which adopt an historical perspective.

It is probably the Judaeo-Christian concept of time which has had the greatest influence on the

modern understanding of time. This Jewish concept of time was based on the ‘linear concept of

time, founded, in their case, on a teleological idea of history as the gradual revelation of God’s

purpose’.

Roman culture also emphasized an idea of linear history, attributing the success of the Roman

Empire not to one person in the present, but to many ancestors during Rome’s past.

It was with the advent of accurate timekeeping during the latter half of the seventeenth century

that the modern experience of time developed. The idea of time as an entity in itself emerged, a

belief that there was in fact a definable context of time.

For much of the later Medieval period, time was considered to be a destructive force. ‘The typical

Renaissance image of time was as the destroyer equipped with hour-glass, scythe or sickle’.

But during the Renaissance an awareness of change through time developed, and a more optimistic

perception of time and its effects emerged. By the eighteenth century, for many people an

appreciation or new awareness of time had developed. This was a period of ‘discovery’ of