포스트모던의 정신(1): 합리주의 신화의 수정

Abstract

It was when people of the Middle Ages had dreamt about freedom from their religious shackles that the modern spirit began its inward excursion to the shore of humanism. As Unberto Echo demonstrates in The Name of the Rose, the modern humanistic myth had been fathered by the impulse of the Renaissance man to be a human rather than to be a Gods servant. Succinctly speaking, the Renaissance man wanted to be a human who can think of, feel, and create the world for himself. Michaelangelos marble sculpture David was a prime example. To the 18th-Century Europeans, however, to be a human was to think. More than anything else, they valued the rational capacity of human beings. Descartes who declared I think, therefore I am and Newton who formulated the theories of universal gravitation was acclaimed as their light that could lead them to anywhere and everywhere. Their legacy was quite clear: it was the belief that reason is the highest good. In the age, reason became a general antidote to all that was immoral, imperfect, enthusiastic, and superstitious. Despite its extraordinary feat in the materialistic history of human beings, rationalism in the 19th-century Europe became so absorbed in its own products — industrial capitalism, democracy, and scientific discoveries — that it just failed to see what else it could cause. Romanticists, Realists, Communists altogether began to speak with scathing hardness about the inner decay of the rationalistic myth, trying to see the world beyond — the better world or the higher world. Kant, arguing that the pure reason is only the means by which the phenomena of experience are translated into understanding, was their forerunner who vindicated the validity of the transcendental reason. Romanticism, Communism, and Realism were respectively a revisionary swerve away from the 18th-Century precursor of rationalism.