Boundaries of Modernity: History – Nature – Society – The World

Abstract

In this article, I aim to show versions of describing modernity, in every one of which the protagonists realize the aporias of their projects and, in resolving these, face the temptation to “leave modernity.” The sketches of these versions turn to, first, in the medium of history, romanticism; second, in the medium of nature, literary criticism; third, in the society and technology medium, the theory of the reign of secondary systems; fourth, in the medium of the relationship between man and the world, the ideas of the third generation of ideas of the Frankfurt school of criticism after Habermas. The four discourses of modernity that appeared in the four sketches of the modernity aporia—the new mythology of romanticism, the recourse of cultural criticism to nature, the view of technology given through secondary systems theory, the promise of resonance with the world against alienation—balance on the boundary between the possible and the factual. It is quite obvious in the four aporia touched upon in the article (1) between the thesis of open-endedness of history and real battle of social-political and cultural-ideological constructs; (2) between the modern industrialization and glorification of nature and desire for the return of the primitive; (3) between the introduction of technical innovations and the transformation of technology from “secondary” to “primary”; (4) between the desire to control things and processes and the negative consequences of this desire. These aporias inflate when one (in trying to think within modernity) approaches the boundaries of modernity. From the perspectives of the four sketches of self-awareness, self-criticism, and self-continuation of modernity—outside social political programs and trends—I have tried to look into the aporias and battles of modernity, to whose ambivalence the protagonists of the sketches testify; the aporias of modernity in the descriptions and analyses of the sketches reveal the boundaries of modernity, which it pushes back and then again approximates.