Animismo, teocracia, democracia: o processo de “desencantamento do mundo” como referencial ambíguo da modernidade

Four thinkers have been chosen to guide us in this study: Jacques Monod, Max Weber, Marcel Gauchet and Peter Berger. Through them and the intersection of their respective ideas, we enter a scenario that is dense, confused, multiconceptual and ambiguous, which straight away defies any attempt at descriptive rigor and unanimous reading. From the outset we see a rough track that follows an unclear and uncertain line, through which we will try to enter into the movement of ideas and of representations of the world, with the objective of describing a point of view of this movement: “the disenchantment of the world” as a referential of modernity. This is an audacious endeavour but not an arrogant one. We will try to enter into the conjunction of multiple concepts, in the hope of reaching a point of intersection that gives us access to a renewed vision. The conceptual hotchpotch – animism, desenchantment with the world, theocracy, secularisation, democracy, modernity desecularisation – makes the dynamic of the miscigenation of the elements appear in incessant combinations and recompositions; it is not concerned with the algorithm of a laboratory experiment; it is concerned with the history of our life and with the history of the ideas that make us live. Ideas and ideas which, by coming into touch with one another, forge a new earth and a new heaven in the image of the Moderns, where it is possible to live and to believe.