Modernidade, racionalização e natureza

Abstract

Max Weber has outlined, in several works, that modernity is characterized by six processes: the disenchantment and intellectualization of the world; the emergence of an ethos of impersonal and secular realization; the growing importance of technical knowledge, specialized in economy, administration and education; the objectification and depersonalization of right, economy and the political organization of the State; the progressive development of technically rational means to control man and nature; and the tendency of dislocating the orientation from traditional to purely instrumental action. In spite of the different historical roots, these processes are connected by the fact that all of them favor the formal rather than the substantive rationality. In order to develop this study we have assumed the postulate which affirms that the comprehension of a phenomenon is found in the meaning that the individuals attribute to their actions. Besides, we intend to understand how this process of rationalization generated a framework of values which contributed to establish a new basis to the relation man versus nature.