terça-feira, 22 de novembro de 2011

Part 3 - Pendulum of History - The End of Efficiency

Philosophy, Politics, Economy, Science, Arts interact with each other through History. It is an illusion to think that Science or Politics, or any discipline could walk alone "with its own feet". They are not independent. Each of them is influenced by the others. Near the French Revolution it was a debate in the French Academy between the supporters of Ancient Art and the supporters of Modern Art. That debate shows a perception of what was coming at other levels of society, or even other areas of knowledge. So, in the begenning of XIXth century Hegel expressed a discurse about History including the mention that he was in "modern times". In the middle of that same century the french writter Baudelaire coined the therm "modernity" and then expressed "a state", a state of "transitoriness" tipycal of a time of transformations in society related to Industrial Revolution and to new technologies associated with scientific discoveries.
Scientific discoveries did not appear alone by some scientist isolated on a high mountain. Well, even the word "scientist" was coined by Whewell in 1834. So, before that maybe we can say that there were "no scientists"...
Scientific discoveries happened because there were interested scholars, but we must see that scholars were people from nobless. We must see also that in the decade of 1660 the first scientific societies were created by kings of England and France.   So, the political power of XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries understood that Science was becoming an important "tool" to keep the power, even to counterbalance the power of the Church in that days. 
In XIXth Century, at same time of the Modernity of Baudelaire, there was the Romantic Movement in Arts.
The Romantic Movement had a kind of nostalgy by the ancient origins of the communities that were becoming  nations. In a certain way, "modern" and "ancient" were mixed... But the discurse of modern is almost always "we are new", "we bring the new". 
We are not judging if modern is good or bad. We are trying to say that "modern" means more than just "new".
This phenomena reappears again and again and it can help to understand the "after postmodern"... 

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