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The Aesthetic Endeavour Today1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
Affiliation:
Brinkworth, Wilts
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Extract

I am reluctant to add to the many definitionsof modernity, or to encourage the belief that definitions matter. Nevertheless, a changecameintothe worldwhenpeoplebegantodefinethemselves as modern—as in some way 'apart from'their predecessors, standing to them in some new and self-conscious relationship. And this couldserve as a definitionof modernity:as the conditionin which people provide definitions of modernity. For there is a great differencebetween living in history—which, for rational beings, is unavoidable—andlivingaccordingtoan idea ofhistory, and of one's own place within it.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 71 , Issue 277 , July 1996 , pp. 331 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1996

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References

2 Selected Essays (London, 1932), 426.

3 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1993), 96.

4 ‘EinigenBemerkungen zum Problem des Kitsches’, in Dichten und Erkennen.