Os caminhos e descaminhos de representar: tornar presente...
Frances Yates (1899-1981) was one of the most important historians of
science in the past century, having been engaged in a life-project that was in
many ways similar not only to that of Michel Foucault, but also Eric Voegelin,
Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau, her exact contemporaries: trying to
reconstruct the Nietzschen pudenda origo of modern science. At the same
time she had a connected interest in the history of Elisabethan theatre.
Yates offers a good introduction to her project in a Preface she wrote
in Enlightenment. She starts by voicing a ‘profound dissatisfaction with
the world of today’, felt by many, and rooted in a ‘distrust in science’, based
on the recognition that instead of being liberated and empowered, one ‘has
become imprisoned in technologies, reduced in status as a human being, enslaved
by unforeseen results of applied science’ (Yates 197: 11). This often led to a
search of scape in esoteric values. However, such attempts fail to realize that
modern science grew out just such esoteric contexts, with a particularly great
role being played by the Hermetic tradition, promoting magic and alchemy,
having affinities with Gnostic Neoplatonism, and becoming combined with Cabala,
producing the Renaissance mage. A particularly important tool of alchemy,
‘always called a Hermetic science’, was the Esmerald Table (Tabula
Smaragdina), the ‘bible of the alchemists’, as it gave Hermetic philosophy
a ‘mysteriously compact form’. The idea of empowering man to dominate nature
was central to such an undertaking, so ‘[t]he Renaissance
magus in the immediate ancestor of the seventeenth-century religious scientist’
– a thinly veiled allusion to Newton.
According to
Yates, the modern vision concerning the role and modalities of knowledge has
roots not only in esoteric undertakings, but also in the theatre.
(HORVATH & SZAKOLCZAI 2018, p. 42-43)
LIVRO
Agnes HORVATH
and Arpad SZAKOLCZAI (2018): Walking into the Void – A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking
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