Industrialism, scientific progress, and technological progress were defining characteristics of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. This unstoppable process coincided with and fueled a visceral and sincere sense of trust in science in general; its ability to serve and amaze, revealing the archaic mystery that life and nature had always been, even guaranteeing a secure and unquestionably usable future, thanks to the seemingly exponential growth of the economy and productivity. This process was marked by a hidden two-facedness.
Disenchantment: Early Stages
While it's true that the modernization brought by industrialism has brought undeniable improvements to humanity and the quality of life, providing us with tools that until recently would have been unthinkable, it has also brought about dire consequences, such as the loss of freedom and growing widespread poverty.
It was precisely in this period of change that social science emerged, born from the observations and proposals of crisis and choice theorized by Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim , and Max Weber ; effectively concretizing, with methodological and epistemological choices, sociology as the social science that studies the phenomena of human society, investigating their effects and causes, in relation to the individual and the social group of reference.
In this context, Max Weber dissects with surgical precision the condition of man in capitalist society: a steel cage [i] , in which formal or instrumental reason prevails over the purpose of action, coinciding with a mere and sole interest in the means useful for achieving the goal.
In this unstoppable decline of myths and beliefs in industrialized society, where science presents itself as the sole method of truth and knowledge, where technology is the ultimate fetish for achieving social well-being, Weber captures the affirmation of a formal rationality that privileges useful means rather than ultimate values.
Disenchantment: Reason Becomes Irrational
The process of modernization brings about an insidious intellectual rationalization that Weber understands as the domain of instrumental or subjective reason , offering food for thought that will be taken up again a few years later by one of the major exponents of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, who in The Eclipse of Reason outlines the substantial and structural differences of a society permeated by the characteristics of subjective reason, where ends must respond to the subject's interest in self-preservation and their achievement at any cost, in opposition to objective reason, whose achievement of ends is accompanied by ideal values and goals.
Furthermore, for Horkheimer, at the height of the rationalization process, reason becomes irrational , since the Self, which must be preserved, has lost all content. Contemporary, rationalized man faces multiple possibilities, but his concrete expectations are limited, since he has become and has been rendered incapable of fully enjoying his intellectual-cognitive functions, which are instead absorbed and fulfilled by the great economic-social powers. [ii]
According to Weber, moreover, the growing intellectualization and rationalization inevitably leads man and society to a state of disenchantment with the world [iii] . It is no longer necessary to resort to rituals to dominate spirits and shadows as does the savage, the non-Westerner, excluded from this process of modernization for which the unknown still exists; in fact, technical means provide for this, coming to the aid of modernized man with the rational calculation born of the Enlightenment doctrine. After the decline of holy men and necromancers, therefore, in this perspective of subjective and instrumental reason, modernized man must no longer question the motivations of his actions, free from any archaic and metaphysical precept or fear.
Modernization and rationalization
Industrialized man is driven by Gesinnungsethik [iv] , an absolute ethic, of those who operate only by following principles deemed right in themselves, regardless of their consequences; in fact burying in the depths of his conscience the Verantwortungsethik [v] , the ethic of responsibility, of consequences, of choices and of behaviors implemented.
The increased availability of resources thus corresponds to the eclipse of the goals of social action, giving rise to a de-responsibility of the individual towards the common good; the fruit of this attitude is clearly visible in 21st- century society.
Modernization and rationalization have thus led Western man into a state of profound disenchantment , since, although capable of shaking up ancient narratives with the exasperation of reason and calculation, science and technology have not succeeded in filling the existential void of which they were the advocates, proving incapable of giving a moral, philosophical and social meaning to the human being.
DONATO SERGI
Bibliography
[I] Max Weber, The Method of the Historical and Social Sciences, Einaudi, cit., p. 185.
[ii] Mr Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, Einaudi, Turin 2000.
[iii] Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf, München und Leipzig, Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1918.
[iv] Max Weber: Politik als Beruf (Vortragsmitschrift mit Nachwort von Ralf Dahrendorf). Reclam, Stuttgart, 1992.
[v] Ibid.
