Introduction: The Question of Modernity

Summary

The question of modernity is the fundamental intellectual issue of our time. “Modernity” means at a minimum a way of thought and life that announces our independence of arbitrary, external authorities and urges that we put ourselves under the control of our own rational faculties. The modern age began with surges of optimism about what a liberated and enlightened humankind might achieve, particularly through science and politics. There were always questions about the project, and these have increased rapidly since the end of the nineteenth century. Surveying, from our fin-de-siecle peak, the debris of the twentieth century, we are tempted to renounce the enterprise. Certainly, outside the “hard sciences”, almost every major intellectual and cultural domain has centrally engaged questions about the nature and value of the modern commitment to rational autonomy.

Analytic philosophy, which has defined the American and British mainstream for most of this century, is a prominent exception. Most analytic philosophers pursue clarity of explication and rigor of argument with no thought that there might be some fatal corruption at the heart of their projects of rational analysis. Analytic philosophy appears as an arch-modernism – a manifestation of the problems of modernity rather than a means to their solution. Among humanistic disciplines, there is no better example of wholehearted commitment to the original ideals of the Enlightenment. This explains the marginal position of mainstream analytic philosophy on the contemporary intellectual scene.