The Politics of Modernities -Antimodernity; PostmodernityAn internal critique

1. The Politics of Modernities -
Antimodernity; Postmodernity
An internal critique
Michael A Peters
UIUC

2. Framing Modernities
• Frame 1: Modernities
Kant& HegelWeberHabermas
• Modernity as the ‘Progress of Reason’
• Modernity as increasingly more
differentiated cognition and moral
consciousness

3. ‘Modern’
• "of or pertaining to present or recent times," 1500, from
M.Fr. moderne, from L.L. modernus "modern," from L.
modo "just now, in a (certain) manner," from modo "to the
measure," abl. of modus "manner, measure" (see mode
(1)). In Shakespeare, often with a sense of "every-day,
ordinary, commonplace." Slang abbreviation mod first
attested 1960. Modern art is from 1849; modern dance
first attested 1912; first record of modern jazz is from 1955.
Modern conveniences first recorded 1926. Modernize is
from 1748 (implied in modernized).
• as a movement in the arts, 1929, from modern (q.v.). The
word dates to 1737 in the sense of "deviation from the
ancient and classical manner" [Johnson, who calls it "a
word invented by Swift"]. It has been used in theology
since 1901.
• http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=modern&searchmode=term

4. Hegel, ‘Progress’ & History
• Hegel’s metaphysics: only in our consciousness of
God, we come to realize his own self-consciousness
• the idea of historical development or ‘progress’:
the logically-necessitated teleological course of
history
• self-consciousness and self-actualization of God as
the “Absolute Spirit”
• On the traditional view Hegel is seen as literalizing a
way of talking about different cultures in terms of
their “spirits,” of constructing a developmental
sequence of epochs typical of nineteenth-century
ideas of linear historical progress, and then
enveloping this story of human progress in terms of
one about the developing self-conscious of the
cosmos-God itself.
• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/

5. G.W.F. Hegel
The Philosophy of History
I. Original History: Herodotus, Thucydides.
II. Reflective as Universal History : ‘It is history whose
mode of representation is not really confined by the
limits of the time to which it relates, but whose spirit
transcends the present.’
- Universal; pragmatical; critical (a criticism of
historical narratives)
III. Philosophical History - the history of the world as a
rational process – the progress of the ‘Sovereignty
of Reason’
- the essential destiny of Reason … is identical with
the question, what is the ultimate design of the
World?

6. ‘World History’
• ‘The German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were
the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free:
that it is the freedom of Spirit which constitutes its essence’ (p.
32).
• The course of the World’s History – perfectibility and ‘The
principle of Development’ (‘a capacity or potentiality striving
to realize itself’ p. 70)
• ‘The World is divided into Old and New; the name of New
having originated in the fact that America and Australia have
only lately become known to us’ (p.98).
• ‘America has always shown itself physically and psychically
powerless, and still shows itself so. For the aborigines, after the
landing of the Europeans in America, gradually vanished at
the breath of European activity’ (p. 98).

7. Kant – What is Enlightenment?
• Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his
self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the
inability to use one’s own understanding
without the guidance of another. This
immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not
lack of understanding, but lack of resolution
and courage to use it without the guidance
of another. The motto of enlightenment is
therefore: Sapere aude! Have the courage
to use your own understanding!

8. Three Modernities; Three Value-Spheres
• Kant, Weber, Habermas
“rationalization across value-spheres bears
out the Neo-Kantian conception of three
emergent domains of reason in the modern
world”
• Theoretical reason, embodied in science
and technology;
• Practical reason, embodied in law and
morality; and
• Aesthetic expressive reason, embodied in
art and self-presentation.

9. Habermas
• The cultural rationalisation from which the
structures of consciousness typical of
modern societies emerge embraces
cognitive, aesthetic expressive and moral-
evaluative elements of the religious tradition.
With science and technology, with
autonomous art and the values of expressive
self-presentation, with universal legal and
moral representations, there emerges a
differentiation of three value spheres, each
of which follow its own logic.

10. Autonomous Value Spheres
• As soon as science, morality and art
have been differentiated into
autonomous spheres of values, each
under one universal validity claim—
truth, normative rightness, authenticity
or beauty—objective advances,
improvements, enhancements
become possible in a sense specific to
each (Habermas 1984: 164-65, 176-77).

11. Framing Modernities
• Frame 2: Anti-Modernities
Literary (Thoreau), Political Economy (Marx), Religio-
Philosophical (Pope Pius X, Heidegger, Sayyid
Qutb), Ecological (Theodore Kaczynski)
“If the essence of ‘modernism’ is progress, a belief
that technological development means socio-
economic improvement, the heart of
antimodernism is a realization that ‘progress’ has an
underbelly—that technological industrial
development has destructive consequences in
three primary and intertwined areas: nature,
culture, and religion.”

12. Literary Antimodernism - Thoreau
• Antimodernism sees modernization as harmful for both
humans and the environment and represents a wide range
of critiques, including appeals to tradition, religion,
spirituality, environmentalism, aesthetics, pacifism and
agarian values.
19th
century: Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin, William
Morris, and Orestes Brownson
20th
century: T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W. B. Yeats
• Walden is a a reflection upon simple living in natural
surroundings; a mixture of philosophy & natural history that
reflected modern day environmentalism
• Cavell finds perfectionism in Thoreau; a unique American
voice that provides a mixture of poetic, philosophical and
religious insight that allows for a very broad and rich
interrogation both of ourselves and the world surrounding
us.

13. Cultural antimodernism
• T.S. Eliot’s (1922) The Waste Land
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
• "The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the
metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that
the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is
only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences
combine in peculiar and unexpected ways." (from 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent,' 1920)
• A poetic exploration of soul's - or civilization's - struggle for regeneration.
• Divided into five sections, The Waste Land is a series of fragmentary dramatic
monologues, a dense chorus of voices and culture historical quotations, that
fade one into another. In the center is the immortal prophet Tiresias. The waste
land is contrasted with sources of regeneration, such as fertility rituals and
Christian and Eastern religious practices.

14. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the
Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920
T.J. Jackson Lears
• "Transatlantic in scope and sources," Lears
discovers, "antimodernism drew on venerable
traditions as well as contemporary cultural currents:
republican moralism, which promoted suspicion of
urban 'luxury'; romantic literary convention, which
elevated simple and childlike rusticity over the
artificial amenities of civilization; a revolt against
postivism, gathering strength toward the end of
the century, which rejected all static intellectual
and moral systems, often in the name of a vitalist
cult of energy and process; and a parallel
recovery of the primal, irrational forces in the
human psyche, forces which had been obscured
by the evasive banality of modern culture." (p. 57)

15. Critiques of Industrial Labor
• Artisanal critiques of labor made by John
Ruskin, William Morris, and the Arts and Craft
Movement
• Marx's Theory of Alienation is based upon his
observation that in emerging industrial
production under capitalism, workers
inevitably lose control of their lives and
selves, in not having any control of their
work. Workers never become autonomous,
self-realized human beings in any significant
sense, except the way the bourgeois want
the worker to be realized.

16. Catholic Antimodernism
• In 1907, Pius X issued the encyclicals
Lamentabili and Pascendi dominici
gregis to combat what he called
"Modernism," a faith-corrupting force.
In 1910, Pius X's witch-hunt climaxed
with Sacrorum antistitum, an oath
against Modernist philosophy to be
taken by all Catholic clergy and
theologians.

17. The Motu Proprio:"Sacrorum Antistitum"
Given by His Holiness St. Pius XAnd first of all, I profess that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the
created world (see Rom. 1:90), that is, from the visible works of creation, as a cause from its effects, and that, therefore, his existence
can also be demonstrated.
Secondly, I accept and acknowledge the external proofs of revelation, that is, divine acts and especially miracles and prophecies as
the surest signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion and I hold that these same proofs are well adapted to the understanding of
all eras and all men, even of this time.
Thirdly, I believe with equally firm faith that the Church, the guardian and teacher of the revealed word, was personally instituted by
the real and historical Christ when he lived among us, and that the Church was built upon Peter, the prince of the apostolic hierarchy,
and his successors for the duration of time.
Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly
the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve
and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously….
Fifthly, I hold with certainty and sincerely confess that faith is not a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the
subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; but faith is a genuine assent of the intellect
to truth received by hearing from an external source. By this assent, because of the authority of the supremely truthful God, we
believe to be true that which has been revealed and attested to by a personal God, our creator and Lord.
Furthermore, with due reverence, I submit and adhere with my whole heart to the condemnations, declarations, and all the prescripts
contained in the encyclical Pascendi and in the decree Lamentabili, especially those concerning what is known as the history of
dogmas.
I also reject the error of those who say that the faith held by the Church can contradict history, and that Catholic dogmas, in the
sense in which they are now understood, are irreconcilable with a more realistic view of the origins of the Christian religion.
I also condemn and reject the opinion of those who say that a well-educated Christian assumes a dual personality-that of a believer
and at the same time of a historian, as if it were permissible for a historian to hold things that contradict the faith of the believer, or to
establish premises which, provided there be no direct denial of dogmas, would lead to the conclusion that dogmas are either false or
doubtful.
Likewise, I reject that method of judging and interpreting Sacred Scripture which, departing from the tradition of the Church, the
analogy of faith, and the norms of the Apostolic See, embraces the misrepresentations of the rationalists and with no prudence or
restraint adopts textual criticism as the one and supreme norm.
Furthermore, I reject the opinion of those who hold that a professor lecturing or writing on a historico-theological subject should first
put aside any preconceived opinion about the supernatural origin of Catholic tradition or about the divine promise of help to
preserve all revealed truth forever; and that they should then interpret the writings of each of the Fathers solely by scientific principles,
excluding all sacred authority, and with the same liberty of judgment that is common in the investigation of all ordinary historical
documents.
Finally, I declare that I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists who hold that there is nothing divine in sacred tradition;
or what is far worse, say that there is, but in a pantheistic sense, with the result that there would remain nothing but this plain simple
fact-one to be put on a par with the ordinary facts of history-the fact, namely, that a group of men by their own labor, skill, and talent
have continued through subsequent ages a school begun by Christ and his apostles.

18. Heidegger’s Antimodernism
• Sources:
1. Catholic theological antimodernism
2. ideas of völkisch movement
(German interpretation of the populist movement, with a
romantic focus on folklore and the ‘organic’ – Fichte –
Volk=ethnic. The dream was for a self-sufficient life lived with a
mystical relation to the land ).
3. Nietzsche’s Will to power
• The Heideggerian singularity of focus legitimates a narrowing
of place relationship to a special place, in a way that
supports a concept of the home property of a (national) self
that is strongly set apart from and above other places, in
terms of care and priority.
• Antimodernist radical ecology and the critique of modernity’s
nihilistic ‘enframing’ of everything as raw material (‘standing
reserve’)

19. Antimodernist Environmentalism
• Ecofascism: ‘Only through a re-integration of humanity into
the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is
the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age.’
• Radical ecology & scientific antimodernism – appeals to
Romantics, to organicism, to a transcendentalist creed a all
based on ecosystem theory
• Deep ecology considers human beings an integral part of its
environment. Deep ecology places greater value on non-
human species and processes in nature than established
green movements. Deep ecology has led to a new system of
environemntal ethics where the core principle of deep
ecology as originally developed is Arne Naess’s doctrine of
biospheric egalitarianism — the claim that, like humanity, the
living environment as a whole has the same right to live and
flourish

20. Sayyid Qutb & Radical Islam
• Turned from secular reformism in the 1930s to radical
Islamism in the 1950s.
• Criticized the selfish and materialistic nature of
American life and argued that extreme measures,
including deception and even violence, could be
justified in an effort to restore shared moral values to
Islamic society.
• Qutb had influence on Islamic insurgent/terror
groups in Egypt (Muslim Brotherhood) and Al
Qaeda.
• a profound contempt for modern Western industrial
consumerism, and a desire to assert in its stead a
projected “earthly paradise” imposed by force, one
that is free of the “polluting taint” of modernity.

21. Framing Modernities
• Frame 3: Postmodernities
Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida
– post·mod·ern ; Date: 1925
• 1: of, relating to, or being an era after a modern one
<postmodern times> <a postmodern metropolis>
• 2 a: of, relating to, or being any of various movements in
reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a
return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or
by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)
• 2 b: of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical
reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity,
history, or language http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/postmodernism

22. Foucault: How Much Does it Cost
to Escape Hegel?
• The history of French Hegelianism –
existentialist interpretation of The
Phenomenology (Wahl, Hyppolite, Kojevé)
• Substitutes Nietzcshe’s critical genealogy for
Hegel’s world system approached via
Nietzsche, Blanchot, Bataille
• Already evident in Deleuze’s (19620
Nietzsche & Philosophy

23. The Question of Modernity
• the question of modernity has been posed in classical culture
according to an axis with two poles, antiquity and modernity;
it had been formulated either in terms of an authority to be
accepted or rejected . . . or else in the form . . . of a
comparative evaluation: are the Ancients superior to the
Moderns? are we living in a period of decadence? and so
forth. There now appears a new way of posing the question of
modernity, no longer within a longitudinal relationship to the
Ancients, but rather in what one might call a `sagital' relation
to one's own present-ness. Discourse has to take account of its
own present-ness, in order to find its own place, to pronounce
its meaning, and to specify the mode of action which it is
capable of exercising within this present. What is my present?
What is the meaning of this present? Such is, it seems to me,
the substance of this new interrogation on modernity.
(Foucault, 1986: 90)

24. Foucault (1984) on ‘What is
Enlightenment?’
• The critical ontology of ourselves has to be
considered not, certainly, as a theory, a
doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of
knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be
conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a
philosophical life in which the critique of
what we are is at one and the same time
the historical analysis of the limits that are
imposed on us and an experiment with the
possibility of going beyond them (WE, 50,
emphases added).

25. Derrida & Hegel
• For Hegel, the world in its historical dimension is the dialectical
revelation of consciousness to itself. In his curious idiom, the end of
history comes when Spirit achieves awareness of its identity as Spirit,
not, that is to say, alienated from itself by ignorance of its proper
nature, but united to itself through itself: by recognizing that it is in this
one instance of the same substance as it subject, since
consciousness of consciousness is consciousness.
Arthur C. Danto. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 15-16
• ‘There has never been The Subject for anyone…. The Subject is a
fable’.
• There is a simple story to be told about Derrida’s relation to Hegel. He
develops his core concepts such as différance and trace through an
essentially negative relation to the central notions of the idealist
tradition. Derrida has been particularly concerned to undermine
what he takes to be the heart of the idealist project—the self-present
subject. (Simon Lumsden, 2007)
• The attack on logocentrism is simultaneously an attack on the history
of philosophy (Hegel’s philosophical history) as a history of
consciousness or Spirit achieving awareness of its own identity.

26. Nietzsche’ critique
• Nietzsche criticizes the historicism of the nineteenth
century in the 1874 essay, “On the Uses and
Disadvantage of History for Life” (Nietzsche 1983, 57-
123).
• There is no question of reaching a standpoint
outside of history or of conceiving past times as
stages on the way to the present. Historical
repetition is not linear, but each age worthy of its
designation repeats the unhistorical moment that is
its own present as “new.” In this respect, Nietzsche
would agree with Charles Baudelaire, who
describes modernity as “the transient, the fleeting,
the contingent” that is repeated in all ages

27. Poststructural Readings of
History?
• Modernist thinkers like Kant and Hegel held that history is cumulative and
progressive and man is progressing inevitably toward a ‘perfect constitution’,
a maximally free civil society.
• Foucault Derrida and others see history, like God, as ‘ending’ in the sense of
‘dying’, and think faith in the progressive character of history is lost. They
criticize the anthropocentrism of Enlightenment humanism and science that
postulates Man as Lord of Nature
• There is no overall pattern in history and modern society is not necessary
better or enlightened in comparison to the pre-modern or the primitive
societies.
• Foucault attacks Marxism because it believes that it has explore the secret of
historical development, while for him history is discontinuous. There is no
rational course to history, nor any gradual triumph of human rationality over
nature, nor is there any over-arching purpose or goal to history.
• Our past is always an invention of our present. History, knowledge and the
human subject are fundamentally rooted in contingency, discontinuity and
iniquitous origins.
• Lyotard regards Hegel and Marx as the ‘philosophes’ who believed in the
progressive journey of history but now the Enlightenment philosophy of history
as a systematic project has failed. Post-modern thinkers thus believe in the
irreducible contingency and indeterminacy.

28. “What is Postmodernism?”
• a work can become modern only if it is first
postmodern, for postmodernism is not
modernism at its end but in its nascent state,
that is, at the moment it attempts to present
the unpresentable, “and this state is
constant” (Lyotard 1984, 79). The
postmodern, then, is a repetition of the
modern as the “new,” and this means the
ever-new demand for another repetition.