THE RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL UNDERPINNINGS OF MODERNITY
THE RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL UNDERPINNINGS OF MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: The modern world understands itself as being something entirely new in the history of mankind. Modernity describes itself as the age in which mankind reaches adulthood and in which man becomes free and emancipates itself from external constraints and determination. The present-day world was born due duet o a new understanding of man, world, society, and due to the development of technology and afterward sciences. This development is presented as a continuous march toward inescapable progress, and as asteadly increase in rationality which will lead to the complete and total emancipation of man. But modernity is not the product of only reason and technical and supposed moral progress. The tools to understand the real forces behind this development that created modern world can be find in the works of Pierre-Andre Taguieff and in the sociology of Jacques Ellul. The first offers a deep analysis of a concept that undergirds modernity, the concept of emanicpations, and the other author describes the development of modernity as amounting to the total suversion of reality through the technological system. The forces fueling this state of affairs are greed and lust for power. The wish of total emancipation can be seen as another expression of what psychoanalysis called the infantile wish to omnipotence.

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