Imaginative Origins of Modernity: Life as Daydream and Nightmare
March 17, 2011 by 1 Comment
Claes G. Ryn
by Claes G. Ryn
Intellectuals of very different persuasions relate many of society’s present troubles to so-called “modernity.” In that respect, traditionalists and postmodernists are in broad agreement. A problem with both groups is that they typically define “modernity” in a reductionistic manner, as if the modern world were moving in a single general direction. They exclude from the definition whatever is appealing to them. Modernity actually contains opposing potentialities, encompassing, among other things, lingering and evolving ancient beliefs and practices. Sometimes modernity is arbitrarily assumed to be ending or to have been superseded, yet what is called postmodernism is easily shown to share important elements with what it is believed to be supplanting. It has much in common, for example, with a seminal figure like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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