Il disagio del progresso. Note sul sentiment della crisi

The idea of progress, the 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 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.