Fernando Alcoforado *
They are considered intellectuals who dedicate themselves to letters, to the arts, to philosophy and to the sciences in general. When a person is said to be intellectual, it means to say that he is of great culture, produces literary and artistic works, as well as studies and makes reflections on philosophical and scientific ideas, which cover the most varied subjects relevant to society. An intellectual is, in short, a person who performs an activity of a mental nature related to the intellect and intelligence aiming at the production of literary and artistic works in general and of philosophical and scientific thoughts in general. Throughout the history of humanity, there have always been intellectuals who produced their works to satisfy their own ego or the interests of Maecenas who paid them for their execution, especially in the field of plastic arts. There were intellectuals who produced their works to describe or portray the world they lived through, for example, novels, paintings, sculptures, music, plays and films, but there were also intellectuals who produced their works to transform the world in which they lived. There were also conservative intellectuals who, as thinkers, produced their works aimed at maintaining the status quo and other revolutionary thinkers who brought light to offer answers to the problems of society in order to promote the progress of humanity as occurred from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century with the advent of the Cultural Renaissance, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century with the Scientific Revolution and in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment.
Cultural Renaissance is called the intellectual renewal movement in Europe between the middle of the fourteenth century and the end of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, numerous factors combined and articulated created the conditions for the beginning of the Cultural Renaissance. The commercial revolution, urbanization and the improvement of the press generated the Cultural Renaissance. On the economic front, the commercial revolution reactivated the cultural exchange between West and East, becoming the main factor of the Cultural Renaissance. With the urbanization process the conditions were created for the emergence of a new culture with the cities acting as radiating pole of the Cultural Renaissance. The social and economic rise of the bourgeoisie was also fundamental to provide support and financing for the development of the new culture. On the intellectual plane, it was important to improve the press, an invention attributed to Gutenberg in the sixteenth century, that is, at the end of the Cultural Renaissance, which contributed to disseminate knowledge throughout society.
The new culture generated by the Cultural Renaissance came first in Italy. There, the general conditions for the beginning of the Cultural Renaissance were clearly present. Italian cities monopolized the spice trade with the East, stimulating an effervescent cultural exchange through contacts with the Byzantine and Saracen civilizations. Venice, Pisa, Genoa, Florence and Rome were cities that dominated commerce in the Mediterranean. In these cities, there was a dynamic bourgeoisie that encouraged cultural transformations. In addition, classical culture in Italy was better preserved than in the rest of Western Europe. Thus, in the fourteenth century, Italy was the region where the Cultural Renaissance began.
The Cultural Renaissance should not be considered limited to Arts and Sciences, but rather as a change in the ways of feeling, thinking and acting in relation to the patterns of thought and behavior in the Middle Ages. All these transformations brought about changes in the way of thinking of many people, especially the rich ones who lived in the big cities. In this context, movements of an intellectual, scientific and artistic character were developed, which presented as main characteristics Humanism and the Cultural Renaissance from the 14th to the 16th century and the Scientific Revolution from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
Humanism was a movement of intellectuals that arose in Italy in the fourteenth century and was commonly interpreted as synonymous with anthropocentrism or appreciation of the human being. To the humanists, man was the measure of all things and was at the center of the Universe. Thus they regarded man not only as a creature of God, but endowed with reason, and author of great achievements. Inspired by humanism, Italian artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael Sanzio, Giordano Bruno and Michelangelo, among others, were protagonists of a cultural movement known as Cultural Renaissance. Others intellectuals great philosophers of the Cultural Renaissance like Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Nicholas of Cusa, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Pomponazzi, Paolo Ricci, Pico della Mirandola, Desiderius Erasmus (Erasmus of Rotterdam), Copernicus, Thomas More, Francisco de Vitória , Niccolo Machiavelli, Ulrico Zuínglio, Juan Luis Vives and William Tyndale, among others, were also protagonists of the Cultural Renaissance.
Other great protagonists of the Cultural Renaissance were: 1) Michel de Montaigne who analyzed the institutions, opinions and customs of the time; 2) André Vesalius who is considered the “father of modern anatomy”; 3) Sandro Botticelli who was a famous Italian painter of the Florentine School who produced frescoes for the Sistine Chapel; 4) Miguel de Cervantes who was a novelist, playwright and Spanish poet who with Don Quixote de la Mancha, a satire on the romances of chivalry, became the precursor of realism in Spain; 5) William Shakespeare who was an English poet and playwright, regarded as the greatest writer of the English language and the most influential playwright in the world; 6) Erasmus of Rotterdam who was a theologian and a Dutch humanist (now Holland) who in his time was one of the greatest critics of the Roman Catholic dogma and the immorality of the clergy while also attacking the Protestant movement of Luther, besides having authored Praise of Madness; 7) Michelangelo Buonarroti, a painter, sculptor, poet and Italian architect, considered one of the greatest creators of Western art history, was considered the greatest artist of his time; 8) Leonardo da Vinci, described as the archetype of Renaissance man, considered one of the greatest painters of all time, an Italian polymath who stood out as a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, poet and musician; and, 9) Niccolo Machiavelli who was an Italian historian, poet, diplomat and musician, is recognized as the founder of thought and of the modern political science.
Humanism and the Cultural Renaissance also influenced great intellectuals scientists and researchers of the time who started the so-called Scientific Revolution. This movement came about by questioning the dominant retrograde knowledge imposed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages considered the Dark Ages. The scientists, valuing reason, presented a critical attitude that made them observe natural phenomena, perform experiments, formulate hypotheses and seek their proof. Several scientists were great architects of the Scientific Revolution like Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, among others. Thanks to the intellectuals scientists strugglers by the progress of mankind, the Scientific Revolution have changed the world forever, developing a new mentality, critical, rational, and active in the face of the passivity and traditionalism of the Middle Ages. From that moment, the transformations in the world would begin to accelerate and the economic, political and social structures to undergo strong shaking.
In the seventeenth century came the work of René Descartes that influenced most of the thinkers of the following centuries. Immanuel Kant classified thinkers into two schools: rationalists and empiricists. Rationalism is the doctrine that places total and exclusive trust in human reason as an instrument capable of knowing the truth. Empiricism holds that all our ideas come from our sensory perceptions (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell). The three main rationalists were René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz. Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes were precursors of empiricism. After them came the empiricists John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume.
Humanism, the Cultural Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution preceded, for some authors, the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a current of thought that was born in eighteenth-century Europe. The Enlightenment philosophers defended the predominance of reason over faith and believed that progress and happiness would be the path laid for mankind. The Enlightenment philosophers defended the freedom of expression of citizens, religious freedom, believed that everyone is equal before the law and that everyone has the right to defense against the abuse of the authorities.
The four main precursors of the Enlightenment were Descartes, Bacon, Locke, and Newton. René Descartes was considered the father of modern rationalism and his main work was the Discourse of Method. In this work, he adopted systematic doubt as a means to find the truth. According to Descartes, we should doubt everything, that is, doubt would be the premise of things. For this Enlightenment, the doubt would end through scientific proof. The second thinker, also a forerunner of the Enlightenment, was the Englishman Francis Bacon, considered the revolutionary of scientific method, who was responsible for creating scientific experimentation, in which scientific truth must be proved by experience and practice. The Englishman John Locke was considered the third vehement critic of the political theory of the divine power of the kings. Locke formulated the political theory that the ruler should respect natural rights and not exceed the limits of the representatives who chose him. He was also one of the founders of the parliamentary monarchy. The fourth precursor of Enlightenment thought was Isaac Newton. For this enlightened thinker, natural phenomena are governed by natural laws. He formulated the law of gravity and he is considered the father of Modern Physics.
The four Enlightenment thinkers described above were of fundamental importance to the changing mentality of European society. From the ideas of the Enlightenment, French thinkers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and D’Alembert deepened and spread the current of Enlightenment thought throughout the world, directly influencing the French Revolution, a break with the society of the Old Regime, monarchical Absolutism. The main characteristic of Enlightenment ideas was the rational explanation for all questions that involved society.
In his theories, some Enlightenment intellectual thinkers, such as philosophers and jurists, were concerned with political, social, and religious questions, while others, like economists, sought a way to increase the wealth of nations. In general, these thinkers advocated freedom, justice, social equality and national states with a division of powers and representative governments. They believed that these elements were essential for a more balanced society and for man’s happiness. The leading Enlightenment thinkers in the field of social liberalism were Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rosseau. And in the field of economic liberalism: Quesnay and Smith.
The Enlightenment was seen by intellectuals as a movement that illuminated the human capacity to criticize and aim for a better world. The roots of the Enlightenment lie in the Cultural Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. It can be said that the Enlightenment was to a certain extent a continuation of the Cultural Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. The Enlightenment reverberated throughout the world. Before even influencing the forthcoming French Revolution, it had influence over the American Revolution, which resulted in the formation of the United States. The Enlightenment intellectuals dreamed of a perfect world ruled by the principles of reason, without wars and without social injustice, where all people could freely express their thinking.
The ideas of the Enlightenment were based on rationalism, that is, the primacy of human reason as the source of knowledge. In the eighteenth century, several intellectuals began to mobilize around the defense of ideas that guided the renewal of practices and institutions in force throughout Europe. Considering philosophical questions that thought about the condition and happiness of man, the Enlightenment movement systematically attacked everything that was considered contrary to the pursuit of happiness, justice and social equality. The Enlightenment was a global, philosophical, political, social, economic and cultural movement that advocated the use of reason as the best way to achieve freedom, autonomy and political emancipation. The Enlightenment was the great Intellectual Revolution in the history of mankind. The eighteenth century saw several revolutions: the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution and the Intellectual Revolution promoted by the Enlightenment intellectuals.
The Enlightenment was characterized by the intense productivity of intellectuals (artists, men of science and philosophers), and collaborated decisively to change mankind’s ways of thinking, feeling and acting. The elites, more and more, believed in reason, defined as the ability to understand the world through systematic reasoning. This new way of thinking, based on inductive and deductive knowledge and the use of controlled experience, should illuminate human actions and replace the world’s religious explanations. With the Enlightenment one begins to have an optimistic view of the world that could not interrupt its progress insofar as man had the full use of his rationality. Natural rights, respect for diversity of ideas and social justice should promote the improvement of the human condition. Offering these ideas, the Enlightenment motivated the bourgeois revolutions in France and throughout the world in the eighteenth century that brought the end of monarchical Absolutism and the installation of liberal doctrines that prevail until today in the world.
The political theses of the Enlightenment failed since the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789) because its promises of conquest of freedom, equality, brotherhood and human happiness were not fulfilled. This failure paved the way for the advent of Marxist ideology throughout the world, which proposed to take a step forward in relation to the Enlightenment, seeking the end of the exploitation of man by man with the elimination of economic inequalities between social classes and, in the future, its complete abolition with the implantation of socialism and communism. The facts of history demonstrate that the Enlightenment theses that guided the bourgeois revolutions in the eighteenth century and the Marxist theses on which the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century were held failed to fulfill their historical promises to conquer human happiness.
Since the twentieth century, we have been living in a single catastrophe, as Walter Benjamin, an essayist, literary critic, translator, philosopher and German Jewish sociologist, associated with the Frankfurt School, affirmed that hell is not what will arrive, but it is this life here and now [THIELEN, Helmut. Além da modernidade para a globalização de uma esperança conscientizada (Beyond Modernity for the Globalization of a Conscientious Hope). Petrópolis: Vozes, 1998]. We are living an era whose main characteristic is the deepening of barbarism: 2 world wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945) with 187 million deaths; a third world war (the Cold War) with at least 200 wars and 20 million deaths from 1945 to 1989 and the proliferation of conflicts in all quarters of the Earth between the great powers in the struggle for global dominance and the escalation of terrorism in the contemporary era.
In addition to the conflicts between the major powers and the escalation of terrorism, we are living in the present era of another barbarism that is the permanent war against nature that contributes to its destruction, global warming and consequent catastrophic climate change on the planet that can threaten the own survival of humanity. Graeme Maxton states that humanity is moving backwards because it is destroying rather than building. In each year, the world economy grows approximately US$ 1.5 trillion. But every year, humanity devastates the planet at a cost of US$ 4.5 trillion. Humanity is generating greater losses than the wealth it creates. Maxton states that mankind experienced rapid economic growth but also created an unstable world. According to Maxton, in many countries, for the first time in centuries, we are faced with declining life expectancy and the prospect of declining food production and water supply, as well as the depletion of the planet’s natural resources (MAXTON, Graeme: The End of Progress – How modern economics has failed us. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
We also live in an era of barbarism where social inequality has reached alarming levels and technological unemployment threatens workers around the world. Thomas Piketty has shown in his book Capital in the twenty-first century that there has been continuous growth in wealth inequality since the 1970s, contrary to the trend of the previous 60 years and much more pronounced and socially relevant than rent inequality. From 1970 to 2010, the richest 1% (dominant classes) held half of the world’s wealth, while the poorest 50% (popular classes) had a mere 5%. The number of billionaires, according to Piketty, increased from 1,011 with a total wealth of 3.6 trillion in 1970 to 1,826 with an aggregate value of 7.05 trillion in 2010. In 2010, this group had practically the same as the poorest half of humanity. Five years later, he owns more than triple (PIKETTY, Thomas. Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). In addition, Martin Ford asserts that there is a threat of deepening global mass unemployment as 47% of current jobs are at high risk of automation in the coming years and decades and another 19% at medium risk (FORD, Martin. Rise of the robots. New York: Basic Books, 2015).
The barbarism that is registered today throughout the world is the product of the crisis of modernity and the eclipse of Reason, in the midst of the terminal crisis of capitalism that is approaching, when the myth of Progress dies. It should be emphasized that modernity is the set of transformations that begins from the sixteenth century and extends until the eighteenth century, involving social, cultural and scientific aspects (The Humanism, the Cultural Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution), political (the emergence of Absolutist National States) and economic (Commercial Capitalism). Modernity has as its characteristics the belief in the comprehension of totality, the conception of history as emancipation, man as dominator of nature and thought according to the categories of unity and totality. In fact, for both Descartes and Bacon, nothing should oppose the exercise of rationality to the realization of human happiness, since in the very sense of the rational organization of knowledge the objective of human well-being in all aspects would already be included.
The project of modernity based on Reason failed because the history of modernity showed the incompatibility between the two parts of the Enlightenment project: the autonomy of Reason and the conquest of happiness. Today, some claim that Reason becomes unnecessary. The attempt to destroy Reason is fairly recent. This is how the project of postmodernity came into being as an antithesis to the project of modernity, as a characteristic of post-industrial society, marked by the crisis of reason, loss of confidence in technical and scientific progress, disbelief in metanarratives and all totalizing discourse . Such transformations have been observed since the 1950s and predominantly since the 1990s with the advent of neoliberal capitalism. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard defined the postmodern project as “unbelief over metanarratives”. An example of a metanarrative is Enlightenment philosophy, which believed that reason and its products – scientific progress and technology – would lead man to happiness, emancipating mankind from the dogmas, myths, and superstitions of primitive peoples [LYOTARD. Jean-François. A condição pós-moderna (The postmodern condition). São Paulo: José Olympio, 2002].
In the postmodern project, absolute truth has collapsed because there are many truths and it is not possible to impose a single discourse. The postmodern project approaches the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche who states that “the only truth that exists is that there is no truth”. Today we live in a world where the postmodern project and, economically, the religion of market capitalism are almost unchallenged. The great value that imposes itself is money. The maxim adopted in all quarters of the Earth is: “each one for himself and God for no one”. If humanity loses sight of the project of individual and collective autonomy, abandon its critical capacity for resistance and fail to fight for the emancipation (intellectual, spiritual and affective) of the human being, will be at the mercy of the domination exercised by the neoliberal capitalism that has been assuming the physiognomy of true totalitarianism. We are living nowadays the decline of the myth of Progress and the emergence of modern totalitarianism. This is the pitiful picture in which the world lives. Intellectuals committed to the progress of humanity need to rescue the project of modernity in its foundations.
It is an immense challenge for contemporary progress-loving intellectuals to establish new paradigms and new values of rational behavior to be formulated for human society in the present era in order to defeat the nefarious political and ideological influence of postmodernity which, political view, ideologically supports neoliberal capitalism and contemporary globalization. Contemporary thinkers need to mobilize themselves urgently in the reinvention of the Enlightenment project as did eighteenth-century thinkers who faced the despotism of European monarchies in order to build a new world that brings to an end the Calvary suffered by mankind.
Just as in the eighteenth century, when several intellectuals began to mobilize around the defense of ideas that guided the renewal of practices and institutions in force at the time, contemporary intellectuals must reinvent the Enlightenment to systematically attack everything that is considered contrary to pursuit of happiness, justice and social equality. The Enlightenment of the twenty-first century must maintain its faith in science that must be socially controlled so that it does not become a blind force in the service of war and economic domination. The Enlightenment of the twenty-first century must take as its most valuable banner the doctrine of human rights, without ignoring that in most countries of the world only profound economic, social and political reforms can ensure its effective fruition. It must combat illegitimate power. It must fight without quarter for freedom and against oppression of any kind. It must build a new world order that is capable of ending wars and terrorism and providing social welfare for all human beings. It must draw up a planetary social contract that enables economic and social development and the rational use of natural resources for the benefit of all mankind.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 78, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is the author of 13 books addressing issues such as Globalization and Development, Brazilian Economy, Global Warming and Climate Change, The Factors that Condition Economic and Social Development, Energy in the world and The Great Scientific, Economic, and Social Revolutions that Changed the World.
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