Progress and its discontents. Notes on the sentiment of the crisis

Abstract

The idea of progress, main feature of western civilization for centuries, was subtended by a complex mood – a sense of security combined with faith in reason and trust in the future – that appears in deep crisis nowadays. The society of uncertainty and weak reason, indeed, is characterized by a lack of feeling for the future and questions any perspective of a cumulative and virtually unlimited growth. The phenomenology of affectivity shows that mood transformations disclose (or preclude) certain ways of experiencing and being-in-the-world. An analysis of the Stimmung of our times is developed here, in order to understand the deeper motives of the malaise of progress and to sketch the clues of a new experience of the world, which perhaps can be only attained through this discomfort.