Modernism in Communication Theory

The Modern as Modern

From a European perspective, modern philosophy emerges out of war. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) combined religious battles between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists with the political designs of continental European powers such as the Hapsburg Empire, France, Sweden, and Spain. Amidst the chaos of war, René Descartes published two books that would define the modern difference about rationality. Beginning with a radical doubt about the existence of all things, including Descartes' own existence, Descartes posited the act of thinking as a means for discovering the truth about all things. For Descartes, thinking provided the means by which a set of clear and distinct ideas could be perceived by the mind, removing doubt and providing criteria for knowing what is true. What makes Descartes' philosophical intervention modern was his effort to provide a foundation for knowing about the world in and through a rational operation of the mind. In other words, the foundation for the modern idea of truth was reason or rationality and not superstition, religious dogma, or communal tradition.

Descartes' approach was not without problems, though. For example, Descartes' distinction between two types of substances, mind and body, set in motion an ontological dualism that privileged mind over body. This philosophical starting point for providing a foundation for rationality has been challenged by many, but perhaps no more comprehensively than by Baruch Spinoza's claim that reason could not be separated from the effects of the body. This idea that the body could not be removed from reasoning has been a crucial element of most feminist critiques of modern reason, especially in the 20th century. Yet Descartes' effort to separate the rationality of the mind from the body set in motion modern problems about how to understand the interaction between reason and emotion and humans and nonhumans that persist today. Regardless of how one approaches the contours of rationality, in a time of religious war, Descartes, a Jesuit-educated philosopher, attempted to provide a safe harbor for reason. In so doing, he provided an answer to the question of what makes the modern modern—namely, the effort to ground knowledge in nothing more nor less than the power of human reason.

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