Series of lectures “Modern: style of the era. Habermas Yu. Philosophical discourse on modernity, monograph

PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE ABOUT MODERNITY

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Lectures 4-6
IV. Entering postmodernity: Nietzsche as a new starting point

Neither Hegel nor his immediate students - left or right - wanted to question the achievements of modernity - everything in which modernity finds its pride and its self-awareness. The sign of the modern century was, first of all, subjective freedom. Freedom is realized in society as freedom of action, ensured in the private legal space, or the rational pursuit of one’s own interests; in the state, subjective freedom is realized in fundamentally equal participation in political will-formation; in private life - as moral autonomy and self-realization; finally, in the sphere of the public, publicity, related to this private sphere - as a process of education taking place within the framework of the development of culture, which has become reflexive. Likewise, the forms of the absolute and objective spirit, considered from the perspective of a separate, individual, acquire a structure in which the subjective spirit can be emancipated from the naturalness, the naturalness of traditional life forms. At the same time, the spheres in which an individual person spends his life as bourgeois, citoyen and homme diverge, become more and more distant from each other and become independent. The same divisions and isolations, which, if considered from the point of view of the philosophy of history, pave the way for emancipation from archaic dependencies, are also recognized as an abstraction, alienation from the totality of the moral connection of life. Once upon a time, religion inviolably cemented this totality, and the seal was broken for a reason.

Religious forces for social integration were exhausted; the reasons lie in the process of enlightenment itself, which is as difficult to reverse as it is to initiate arbitrarily. Enlightenment is characterized by the irreversibility of learning processes, which is associated with the fact that understanding comes: nothing is forgotten spontaneously, arbitrarily; such knowledge can be repressed or corrected, and another, better understanding emerges. Therefore, enlightenment is able to fill its deficits only through radicalized enlightenment; Consequently, Hegel and his disciples are forced to place their hopes in the dialectic of enlightenment, in which reason reveals its significance as the equivalent of the unifying force of religion. They developed the concept of a mind that would carry out such a program. We have seen how and why this attempt failed.

Hegel conceptualizes reason as the reconciling self-knowledge of the absolute spirit; the Hegelian left - as the liberating assimilation of productively alienated but hidden essential forces; the Hegelian right - as compensation for the pain of inevitable splits. Hegel's concept turned out to be too ambitious; the absolute spirit indifferently pays no attention to the process of history, open to the future, and to the intransigence of modernity. The Young Hegelians contrast the retreat of philosophers, who imagine themselves as preachers, from unreconciled reality with the profane law of modernity, which is still awaiting the implementation of philosophical thinking, its embodiment in reality. In doing so, however, they introduce into play the concept of practice, which they interpret too locally. This concept simply increases the power of absolutized goal-oriented rationality, but it is precisely this concept of practice that must overcome. Neoconservatives can have endless conversations with the philosophy of practice about the complexity and complexity of society; this complexity is asserted in spite of all revolutionary hopes. Hopes for revolution, for their part, change the Hegelian concept of reason in such a way that, simultaneously with rationality, the need to compensate for the [costs] of social modernity arises. But this concept is still not enough to make clear the compensatory achievement of historicism, which is designed to preserve the life of tradition through the medium of the spiritual sciences.

Speaking against this formation - compensation, fed from the sources of antiquarian historiography, F. Nietzsche used in a similar way the idea of modern time consciousness, as the Young Hegelians once did, speaking against the objectivism of Hegel's philosophy of history. In his second “untimely reflection” - “On the benefits and harms of history for life” - Nietzsche analyzed

explains why the tradition of education, far from action and removed into the sphere of inner life, has no consequences and does not affect life itself: “Knowledge, absorbed in excess not to satisfy hunger and even beyond the need, ceases to act as a motive that transforms and encourages manifestation outside, and remains hidden in the depths of some chaotic inner world... And the essence of everything modern education lies in its contents [on the cover, his bookbinder printed something like:] “a guide to internal education for barbarians in appearance.” Modern consciousness, overloaded with historical knowledge, has lost the “plastic power of life,” which allows people with a gaze directed to the future to readily “explain the past based on what constitutes the highest force of modernity.” Methodologically erroneous and imperfect sciences about the spirit follow a false (i.e. unattainable) ideal of objectivity, they neutralize the criteria necessary for life and spread paralyzing relativism: “...At different times everything was different; and therefore it doesn’t matter at all what you are like.” They block the ability to periodically “break and destroy the past in order to be able to live on [in modernity].” Like the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche senses in the historicist admiration for the “power of history” a tendency that too easily turns into real political admiration for naked success.

From the moment Nietzsche becomes a participant in the discourse on modernity, the argument changes radically. First, a rough sketch of reason was given as reconciling self-knowledge, then as liberating assimilation, finally as recollection, which repays and compensates; reason acts as the equivalent of the unifying force of religion and is probably capable of overcoming the schisms of modernity. Three times this attempt to adapt the concept of reason to the program of self-dialectical enlightenment failed. With such a constellation, Nietzsche could choose either to once again subject subject-centered reason to immanent criticism, or to abandon the program as a whole. Nietzsche decides on the second alternative: he abandons the new revision of the concept of reason and says goodbye to the dialectics of enlightenment. The historical deformation of modern consciousness, filled with everything, but deprived of the most essential, makes Nietzsche first of all doubt whether modernity can draw its criteria from itself - “for we, moderns, have nothing of our own.” Perhaps Nietzsche once again applies the figure of thought of the dialectic of enlightenment to historicist enlightenment, but his goal is to explode the shell of modernity as such.

Nietzsche uses the ladder of historical reason to ultimately discard it and establish himself in myth as something other than reason: “...As for the origin of historical education - and its internal, in all respects fundamental contradiction to the spirit of the “modern time” , And " modern consciousness”, then this origin must in turn be explained historically; history itself must solve the problem of history; knowledge must turn its sting against itself - this triple “duty” (must, MuB) is the imperative of the spirit of the “new time”, if indeed the latter contains elements of something new, powerful, viable and original.” At the same time, Nietzsche, naturally, has in mind his “Origin of Tragedy,” a study carried out with the help of historical and philological means, which takes him beyond the Alexandrian and Roman Christian world - to the beginnings, into the “ancient Greek world of the great, natural and human” . On this path, the antiquarian-minded “late generation” of modernity should, in general, turn into the “firstborn” of postmodern time - an attitude that Heidegger will repeat in “Being and Time.” For Nietzsche, the initial situation is clear. On the one hand, the historical era of Enlightenment only intensifies the gaps and splits that have become noticeable in the achievements of modernity; reason, appearing in the form of a certain religion of education, no longer exhibits that power of synthesis that could renew the integration potential of the inherited religion. On the other hand, the path to restoration is closed to Art Nouveau. The religious and metaphysical pictures of the world of ancient civilizations are themselves a product of enlightenment, i.e. they are too reasonable, and therefore are unlikely to be able to oppose anything else to the radicalized enlightenment of the modern era.

Nietzsche neutralizes everything that breaks out of the dialectic of enlightenment. Modernity is losing its exceptional position; he is but the last epoch in the long history of rationalization, as it begins with the disintegration of archaic life and the disintegration of myth. In Europe, this turning point is represented by Socrates and Christ, the founders of philosophical thinking and church monotheism: “As indicated by the huge need for the history of this unsatisfied modern culture, so this is the gathering around oneself of countless other cultures, the all-consuming desire for knowledge, leading to the loss of myth, the loss of a mythical homeland? True, the consciousness of the modern era prohibits any thoughts of regression, of an unmediated return to mythical origins. The horizon for awakening the mythical past is formed exclusively by the future: “The testaments of the past are all

where are the sayings of the oracle: only as builders of the future and experts of the present will you understand them.” This utopian attitude, which is addressed to the coming God, distinguishes Nietzsche’s position from the reactionary call “Back to the origins!” Theological thinking in which origin and goal are contrasted with each other loses its power altogether. Nietzsche does not deny the modern consciousness of the era, but sharpens it, so he manages to present modern art, which in its most subjective forms of expression takes this consciousness of the era to the extreme, as a sphere in which the modern comes into contact with the archaic. Historicism stages the world as an exhibition and turns hedonistic contemporaries into arrogant spectators, and only the transhistorical power of art, exhausting itself in topicality, can bring salvation from “true need and inner poverty modern people» .

Before the eyes of the young Nietzsche is the program of Richard Wagner, who opened his essays on religion and art with the following maxim: “We can assume that where religion becomes artistic, art does not abandon the intention of saving its very core; that the mythical symbols that religion wants to know in their true meaning, as truly believed, are captured by art in accordance with their meaning-forming value, so that, thanks to the ideal depiction of these symbols, the deep truth hidden in them can be known.” A religious festival that has become a work of art, together with a cultically renewed publicity, must overcome the inner essence of historical education, adapted for the private, the private. An aesthetically renewed mythology should unleash the forces of social integration frozen in a competitive society. It decenters modern consciousness and opens it to archaic experience. This art of the future denies itself as the product of an individual artist and appoints “the people themselves as the artist of the future.” Nietzsche glorifies Wagner as a "revolutionary of society" and as a conqueror of Alexandrian culture. He expects that currents of influence from Dionysian tragedies will emanate from Bayreuth, “that state and society, in general all the gaps between man and man, will disappear before the powerful feeling of unity that leads back to the heart of nature.”

Nietzsche later famously rejected the world of Wagnerian operas with disgust. More interesting than the personal, political and aesthetic reasons for such a separation is its philosophical driving reason; it is this that stands behind the question: “...What should music be like that would no longer be of romantic origin, like non-

German, but Dionysian? The idea of a new mythology has a romantic origin, and the appeal to Dionysus as the coming god is also romantic. Nevertheless, Nietzsche is against the romantic use of this idea and declares its clearly radical version, which goes beyond the ideas of Wagner. What, however, is the difference between the Dionysian and the Romantic?

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We encountered the expectation of a new mythology, which defines poetry as a teacher of humanity, in Hegel’s “First Program of the System German idealism"(1796-97). Already here a motive is noticeable, which was later emphasized by Nietzsche and Wagner: in the forms of renewed mythology, art inevitably takes on the character of a social institution and develops efforts to restore the moral totality of the people. In the same sense, Schelling, at the end of his “System of Transcendental Idealism,” says that the new mythology “will be the discovery not of an individual poet, but of a certain new kind, as if embodying a single poet.” A similar idea is pursued by F. Schlegel in his “Speech on Mythology”: “Our poetry lacks a middle point, which was mythology for the ancients, and everything essential in which modern (moderne) poetic art is inferior to ancient art can be summarized in the words: We have no mythology. But... we are close to getting it." Both publications date back to 1800, in different versions they are based on one idea - the idea of a new mythology.

As a further motive, the “First Program of the System of German Idealism” contains the idea that, together with the new mythology, art will replace philosophy, because aesthetic contemplation is the “highest act of reason”: “Truth and goodness are united family ties only in the beautiful." This position could become the motto for Schelling’s “System of Transcendental Idealism” (1800). Schelling finds the solution to the riddle of how the identity of freedom and necessity, spirit and nature, conscious and unconscious activity can be brought to the consciousness of the Self in a product created by himself in aesthetic contemplation: “Art is the highest for the philosopher precisely because it opens to his gaze the holy of holies , where, as it were, there burns in eternal and primordial unity what is divided in nature and history, what in life and in activity, as well as in thinking, must eternally avoid each other.” In modern (modernen) conditions, when reflection goes to extremes,

it is art, and not philosophy, that preserves the fire of that absolute identity that was once kindled in solemn cults religious communities believers. Art, if in the form of some new mythology it again acquires its social character, is no longer just an organon, but turns into the goal and future of philosophy. After its completion, philosophy could return to the ocean of poetry from which it once emerged: “What will turn out to be that intermediate link that will return philosophy to poetry, in general, is not difficult to foresee, since such a link already existed in the form of mythology... But how can such a mythology arise... this is a problem, the solution of which depends only on the future fate of the world..."

The difference from Hegel's concept is striking - not speculative reason, but exclusively poetry can, as soon as it becomes publicly effective in the form of a new mythology, replace the unifying force of religion. Of course, Schelling builds an entire philosophical system to reach this conclusion. It is the speculative mind that transcends itself through the program of the new mythology. Schlegel thinks differently, who advises the philosopher to “[throw away] the warlike garb of the system and (share) housing with Homer in the temple of new poetry.” In Schlegel's hands, the new mythology transforms from a philosophically based expectation into a messianic hope, inspired by historical omens - signs that speak of "that humanity is struggling to find its center. It must perish... or be rejuvenated... Hoary antiquity will come to life again, and the most distant future of enlightenment and education is already announcing itself in harbingers.” The messianic transformation into time, the modernization of everything that Schelling had as a justified historical expectation - such a change is caused by a change in the meaning that Schlegel attached to speculative reason.

Of course, already in Schelling this shifted the center of gravity of the mind; the mind no longer comprehends itself in its own medium of self-reflection, it again finds itself only in the sphere of art. However, what Schelling can ultimately contemplate in works of art is still reason, which has become objective, a close union of the true and the good in the beautiful. However, it is precisely this unity that Schlegel calls into question. He insists on the autonomy of the beautiful in the sense “that it is separated from the true and moral and that it has equal rights with the latter.” The new mythology should owe its connecting power not to art, in which all moments of reason are closely united, but to the prescient gift of poetry, which is directly different from philosophy and science, morality and morality: “For this is the beginning of all things.”

what kind of poetry is to abolish the course and laws of the rationally thinking mind and again transport us into the beautiful disorder of fantasy, for which I still do not know a more beautiful symbol than the motley crowd of ancient gods.” Schlegel no longer perceives the new mythology as something that makes the mind visual, as an aestheticization of ideas, which along this path should unite with the interests of the people. On the contrary, poetry, which has become independent, autonomous, purified from the impurities of theoretical and practical reason, opens the gate to the world of primordial mythical forces. Only modern art can communicate with the archaic sources of social integration that have dried up in modernity. According to this version, the new mythology requires a fractured modernity to treat the “primordial chaos” as different from reason.

But if the creation of a new world does not reveal the power of the dialectic of enlightenment, if the expectation of “that great process of universal rejuvenation” can no longer be justified in terms of the philosophy of history, then the romantic messianism of a different mental configuration is in demand. In this regard, it is worthy of attention that Dionysus - the mischievous god of intoxication, recklessness and incessant transformations - experiences an amazing elevation during the period of early romance, his image acquires special value.

The cult of Dionysus may have been attractive to the self-disillusioned times of enlightenment because in the Greece of Euripides and sophistic criticism it preserved ancient religious traditions. But as a decisive motive, M. Frank names the fact that Dionysus, as a coming god, as a god who will come, could attract hopes of salvation. Zeus impregnated Dionysus with Semele, a mortal woman; Hera, the wife of Zeus, pursued Dionysus in divine wrath and eventually drove him into madness. Since then, Dionysus, accompanied by a wild crowd of satyrs and bacchantes, has been wandering through North Africa and Asia Minor - a “foreign god,” as Hölderlin said, a god who plunges the West into a “divine night” and leaves behind only the gifts of intoxication. But one day Dionysus, revived through the mysteries and freed from madness, must return. From everyone else greek gods Dionysus is distinguished as a god who is absent, his return yet to come. Parallels with Christ naturally arise: he died, leaving behind him, until the day of his return, bread and wine. True, Dionysus also has an originality, a peculiarity - in his cult excesses he seems to preserve the foundations of social solidarity, which disappeared in Christian Western Europe along with archaic forms of religiosity. So Hölder-

Lin connects his way of interpreting history with the myth of Dionysus, which may carry a messianic expectation; and right up to Heidegger it remained effective. Western Europe from its very origins froze in the night of remoteness from the gods, in the oblivion of existence; the god of the future will return the lost powers of the source; and God, who is already close, makes his coming tangible thanks to a painfully aware absence, thanks to “remoteness”; More and more urgently, he makes abandoned people feel what they are deprived of; Thus, God foreshadows his return more and more convincingly: in danger is the source of salvation.

Nietzsche is not original in his Dionysian assessment of history. Historical thesis about the origin of the chorus of Greek tragedy from ancient cult Dionysus finds its acuteness in terms of criticism of modernity, the context of which, perhaps, was already formed in early romance. This is why it is so important to explain why Nietzsche distances himself from the romantic background. The key to this is given by the equation of Dionysus and Christ, which is present not only in Hölderlin, it also occurs in Novalis, Schelling, Kreuzer, and in the perception of myth by early romance in general. This identification of the god of wine, who is unsteadily on his feet, with Christian god salvation is possible only because romantic messianism is aimed at rejuvenation, and not at seeing off the West. A new mythology would have to restore the lost solidarity, but not abandon the emancipation that entailed for individuals, individualized in the face of a single God, to distance themselves from the mythical primordial forces. In romance, the appeal to Dionysus was simply supposed to open up that dimension of social freedom in which Christian vows would certainly be fulfilled in this world; Thus, this principle of subjectivity, thanks to the Reformation and Enlightenment, became more profound, but also authoritarianly endowed with power, endowed with the right to dominate, could lose its limitations.

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The mature Nietzsche realizes that Wagner, who directly “summarizes” modernity, shared the Romantic view of the expected realization of the modern age. It is Wagner who pushes Nietzsche to “disappointment in everything that remains for us, modern (modern) people, to be inspired by,” because he, Wagner, a despairing decadent, “suddenly ... fell prostrate before Christian cross". Wagner remains captive to the romantic connection of the Dionysian

with Christian. Just as little as the romantics, he values in Dionysus the demigod who radically delivers from the curse of identity and sameness, who abolishes the principle of individuation, uses polymorphy against the unity of the transcendental god, anomie against the rule. In Apollo, the Greeks deified individuation, respecting the boundaries of the individual. But Apollonian beauty and Apollonian endowment with measure hide the subsoil of the titanic and barbaric, which breaks through in the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian holidays: “The individual, with all his boundaries and measures, drowned here in the self-forgetfulness of Dionysian states and forgot the Apollonian laws.” Nietzsche recalls that Schopenhauer drew attention to the “horror that seizes a person when he suddenly doubts the forms of knowledge of phenomena, and the law of sufficient reason in one of its ramifications turns out to be subject to exception. If we add to this horror the blissful delight that rises from the depths of man and even nature when the same violation of the principii individuationis occurs, then this will give us an idea of the essence of the Dionysian principle.

But Nietzsche was not only a student of Schopenhauer, he was a contemporary of Mallarmé and the Symbolists, a champion of l"art pour l"art. Thus, the description of the Dionysian - as an intensification of the subjective to the point of complete self-forgetfulness - also includes the experience of modern art (once again radicalized in comparison with romance). What Nietzsche calls the “aesthetic phenomenon” is revealed in the concentrated communication of liberated subjectivity, decentered from the everyday conventions of perception and behavior, with itself. Only when the subject loses himself, when he is pulled out of the pragmatic experience of space and time, struck by the sudden, sees himself overwhelmed by the “passionate desire for true presence” (Octavio Patz) and loses himself in the moment; Only when the categories of rational behavior and thinking are destroyed, the norms of daily life are broken, the illusions of learned normality have disintegrated - only then does the world of the unexpected and completely astonishing open up, the realm of aesthetic visibility, which neither hides nor reveals, which is neither a phenomenon nor an essence, but nothing more than a surface. Nietzsche continues the romantic purification of the aesthetic phenomenon from all theoretical and moral impurities. In aesthetic experience, Dionysian reality, through the “chasm of oblivion,” is obscured from the world of theoretical knowledge and moral action, from everyday life. Art opens access to the Dionysian only at the cost of ecstasy - at the cost of painfully overcoming the boundaries of the individual, merging with the amorphous nature both inside and outside oneself.

Habermas Yu.

Philosophical discourse about modernity. Per. with him. - M.: Publishing house “Ves Mir”, 2003. - 416 p.

The book by the greatest philosopher of our time, Jurgen Habermas, includes twelve lectures given by the author at a number of Western European universities. For the first time she went to German in 1985 and had an unusually large resonance in the circles of the intellectual elite of the most different countries. The book has not lost its relevance and is one of the most cited works in the philosophical discussion of the problem of modernity (discourse about modernity). The author managed to connect together the arguments of supporters and opponents of postmodern philosophy and culture and show the real significance of the “modern-postmodern” paradigm as a key one for analyzing the situation in modern humanitarian knowledge. The book is published in Russian for the first time.

DER PHILOSOPHLSCHE DISKURS DER MODERNE

Zwolf Vorlesungen

Jurgen Habermas

PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE ABOUT MODERNITY

Translation from German

ISBN 5-7777-0263-5

Translation from German by M.M. Belyaeva, K.V. Kostina, E.L. Petrenko, I.V. Rozanova, G.M. Severskaya

This publication was published within the framework of the Translation Project with the support of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) - Russia and the Open Society Institute - Budapest

Printed in Russia

The page number precedes the page - (scanner's note)

Preface........................................................ 5

Lecture I. Modern: awareness of time and self-justification....... 7

Excursion. Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History........ 23

Lecture II. Hegel's concept of modernity.................................... 31

Excursion. F. Schiller “Letters on the aesthetic education of man”............................................ . 50

Lecture III. Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche.................................... 59

Excursion. Is the manufacturing paradigm outdated? ......... 81

Lecture IV. Introduction to postmodernity: Nietzsche as a new starting point.................................................... .93

Lecture V. The interweaving of myth and enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno.................................................. ... 117

Lecture VI. Criticism of metaphysics and the decomposition of Western rationalism: Heidegger.................................. 143

Lecture VII. Overcoming the temporalized philosophy of origin: Derrida and his critique of phonocentrism........... 173

Excursion. On the elimination of genre differences between philosophy and literature.................................... 194

Lecture VIII. Between eroticism and general economics: Bataille......... 223

Lecture IX. The Critique of Reason and the Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Foucault........................249

Lecture X. Aporia of the theory of power.................................... 279

Lecture XI. Another way out of the philosophy of the subject: communicative reason versus subject-centered reason.................................................... 305

Excursion. About the book “Fictional Institutions” by K. Castoriadis.................................................... 337

Lecture XII. Normative content of modernity................... 347

Excursion. On the appropriation of the heritage of the philosophy of the subject (the installation of N. Luhmann’s system theory)....... 376

J. Habermas reflects on modernity. E.L. Petrenko............ 395

Name index................................................... 411

Rebecca, who introduced me to poststructuralism

Preface

“Modernity - an unfinished project” was the title of the report that I read in September 1980 when receiving the Adorno Prize. This controversial and multifaceted topic has not let me go since then. Its philosophical aspects became even more firmly entrenched in the consciousness of society during the assimilation of French neostructuralism - as, in particular, the fashionable word “postmodern”, which was heard in connection with the publications of J.F. Lyotard. It is the challenge posed by the neostructuralist critique of reason that creates the perspective in which I attempt to reconstruct, step by step, the philosophical discourse on modernity. In this discourse, modernity - from the end of the 18th century - was raised to the level of a philosophical topic. Philosophical discourse about modernity repeatedly comes into contact and intersects with aesthetic discourse. But I have to limit the topic - the lectures do not discuss modernism in art and literature.

After my return to the University of Frankfurt, I lectured on this subject in the summer semester 1983 and winter semester 1983/84. Additionally included, and therefore in a certain sense fictitious, is the fifth lecture (its content is a text already published once), as well as the twelfth, the text of which was compiled in the last few days. I gave four lectures for the first time at the Collège de France in Paris in March 1983. The remaining fragments were used at the Messinger readings at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) in September 1984. I also discussed the most important theses at seminars at Boston College. The lively discussions that could be had each time with colleagues and students gave me more impulses and thoughts than those that I was able to retrospectively store in notes.

Simultaneously with this book, the Suhrkamp publishing house is publishing a volume of my works containing politically accentuated additions to the philosophical discourse on modernity.

Frankfurt am Main,

December, 1984

I. Modernity: time consciousness and self-justification

However, from the point of view of rationalization, Max Weber described not only secularization Western culture, but also development modern societies. New structures of society were created through the demarcation of two functionally interconnected systems, as they took shape around the organizational core of the capitalist

production and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Weber understands this process as the institutionalization of purposeful, rational economic and managerial action. As cultural and social rationalization took over everyday life, traditional (in the early modern period - primarily professionally differentiated) life forms disintegrated. Of course, the modernization of the lifeworld is determined not only by the structures of goal rationality. In the opinion of E. Durkheim and J. G. Mead, rationalized life worlds are created rather through the reflection of traditions that have lost their originality; through the universalization of norms of action and generalization of values, liberating situations of “wider possibilities” and communicative action from limited contexts; finally, through such patterns of socialization that are designed to form abstract self-identities and force the individuation of the younger generation. This is, in general terms, the image of modernity as the classics of social theory painted it.

Today main topic Max Weber appeared in a slightly different light - thanks equally to the work of his followers and critics. The word "modernization" as a term was only coined in the 1950s; Since then, it has characterized a theoretical approach that, taking the formulation of the question from Max Weber, develops it with the scientific and theoretical means of social functionalism. The concept of modernization refers to a whole bunch of cumulative and mutually reinforcing processes: the formation of capital and the mobilization of resources; to the development of productive forces and increased labor productivity; to the exercise of central political power and the formation of national identities; to the expansion of political rights of participation, the development of urban forms of life, formal schooling; to the secularization of values and norms, etc. Modernization theory gives Weber's concept of "modernity" the character of an abstraction that has great consequences. She separates modernity from its origins - modern Europe - and stylizes it as a model for the process social development generally neutralized in spatiotemporal terms. In addition, the doctrine of modernization breaks the internal connections between modernity and the historical context of Western rationalism, so modernization processes are no longer perceived as rationalization, as a historical objectification of the structures of reason. James Coleman sees a certain advantage in this: the concept of modernization, generalized in the spirit of the theory of evolution, is free from the idea of the end, the completion of modernity, i.e. about a state posited as a goal, after which ideally “postmodern” development begins.

True, it was precisely the studies of modernization in the 1950-60s. created the prerequisites for the term “postmodern” to spread among representatives social sciences. In the face of an evolutionarily isolated, self-developing modernization, an observer from the field of social sciences will most likely say goodbye to the abstract and abstract world of Western rationalism in which modernity arose. But if the internal connections between the concept of modernity and self-awareness, the self-understanding of modernity, as achieved within the horizons of Western European ratio, are one day destroyed, then from the distanced position of an observer from postmodernity, the processes of modernization, apparently automatically reproducing, can be relativized. Arnold Gehlen expressed this in a memorable formula: the premises of the Enlightenment are dead, only its consequences continue to operate. From this perspective, self-righteously progressive social modernization differed from the impulses of cultural modernity; it simply set into motion the functional laws of the economy and the state, technology and science, which seemed to be combined into a single system that was not subject to any influence. The acceleration of social processes in this case turns out to be the other side of an exhausted culture that has passed into a crystalline state. Gehlen calls modern culture “crystallized” because “the possibilities inherent in it, in the order of their principles, are all developed. Counterpossibilities and antitheses are also open and accepted, so that from now on changes in premises become increasingly incredible... If you adhere to these ideas, you yourself will discern crystallization... in such a surprisingly mobile and variegated field as modern painting. Since “the history of ideas has ended,” Gehlen can state with a sigh that “we have entered posthistory.” Along with Gottfried Benn, he advises: “Reckon with what you have.” The neoconservative farewell to modernity, therefore, does not refer to the dynamics of social modernization, but to the shell of an outdated, as it may seem, cultural self-understanding of modernity.

In a completely different political form - anarchist - the idea of postmodernity appears among theorists who do not take into account the fact that there has been a separation of modernity and rationality. They also talk about the end of the Enlightenment, they step over the horizon

traditions of reason, the horizon from which European modernity once understood itself - they, too, are settling in and going to live in posthistory. But unlike the neoconservative farewell to modernity, the anarchist farewell refers to modernity as a whole. While the continent of basic concepts, bearing Western rationalism in the understanding of Max Weber, disappears, drowns, reason reveals its true face - a subjugating and at the same time enslaved subjectivity, a desire to instrumentally master the world, is revealed. The destructive force of criticism a la Heidegger or Bataille, having thrown back the veil of reason that hides the pure will to power, inevitably explodes the steel shell of the armor in which the spirit of modernity was objectified on the social plane. Social modernization, if viewed from this point of view, may not survive the end of cultural modernity from which it arose; it will probably not be able to withstand the “terry” anarchism under the sign of which postmodernity begins.

Koselleck shows how historical consciousness, which expresses itself in the concept of “modernity” or “new time,” constituted a certain view from the position of the philosophy of history - a reflexive idea of its own location, conditioned by the horizon of history as a whole. And collective noun singular“history” (Geschichte), which Hegel uses as a matter of course, is a product of the 18th century: ““Modern time” gives the entire past as a whole a certain world-historical quality... The diagnosis of modern time and the analysis of a bygone era correspond to each other” . Associated with this is a new experience of forward movement and acceleration of historical events, as well as an awareness of the chronological simultaneity of historically non-simultaneous development processes. An idea emerges of history as a single, heterogeneous, problem-generating process; at the same time comes an understanding of time as a limited resource that can be used to overcome emerging problems, i.e. speech

is about the power and authority of time. “The spirit of the times” - one of the new terms coined by Hegel - characterizes modernity as a transitional period that suffers, reflecting on acceleration, expecting the otherness of the future: “It is not difficult to see,” Hegel writes in the preface to “Phenomenology of Spirit,” “that our time is the time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit broke with the hitherto former world of its existence and his idea of himself and is ready to immerse him in the past and work on his transformation... Frivolity, like boredom, spreading in the existing, a vague premonition of something unknown - all these are harbingers that something else is approaching. This gradual grinding... is interrupted by the sunrise, which immediately, like a flash of lightning, illuminates the picture of the new world.”

Since the new world, the world of modernity, differs from the old in that it opens itself to the future, then in every moment of modernity, which generates the new from itself, the process of the birth of a new era is repeated and acquires the character of continuity, this happens again and again. Therefore, the historical consciousness of modernity includes the delimitation of “modern time” from the new: modernity as a manifestation of time in history within the horizon of modern time acquires especially important significance. Hegel also understands “our time” as “ modern times" He dates the beginning of modernity to the boundary that, for thinking contemporaries of the ending 18th and beginning 19th centuries, is designated by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. With this “magnificent sunrise” we arrive, as Hegel believed in his late work, “to the last stage of history, to our world, to our days.” Modernity, which understands itself from the horizon of new time as the actualization of modern time, must realize, realize in the form of continuous renewal the break of new time with the past.

For this purpose, concepts are suitable that denote movements that arose in the 18th century along with the term “modern time” or “new time” or received their own at that time new and before today actual meaning - revolution, progress, emancipation, development, crisis, spirit of the times, etc. These concepts became key in Hegelian philosophy. In the aspect of history, they make it possible to clarify the problem that appeared along with the new historical consciousness of Western culture, highlighted with the help of the opposition-creating concept of “new time”: modernity can no longer and does not want to form its guidelines and criteria on the model of some

or another era, he must draw his normativity from himself. Modernity sees itself as uniquely self-referential. This explains the instability of self-awareness and self-understanding; the dynamics of the attempt to “define” oneself have not been exhausted even today. Just a few years ago, H. Blumenberg was forced, at great historical cost, to defend the legitimacy, or the proper right of the New Age, from arguments that declared its cultural guilt before the heritage of Christianity and antiquity: “Not necessarily every era faces the problem of its historical legitimacy; that it is generally aware of itself as an era. The internal problem of modern times is its claim to a radical break with tradition, to the very possibility of such a break, and that such a claim is just a misunderstanding in relation to real history, which can never begin from scratch.” As confirmation, Blumenberg cites the statement of the young Hegel: “If we do not take into account some earlier attempts, it has fallen to our day for a long time to defend, at least in theory, the right of ownership of people to those treasures that were wasted in the name of heaven; but which era will have the strength to present this right and take possession?”

The problem of modernity’s self-justification began to be recognized primarily in the field of aesthetic criticism. This is revealed if we trace the conceptual history of the word modern. The process of changing the model, which was ancient art, was initiated at the beginning of the 18th century. famous Querelte des Anciens et des Modernes ["dispute between ancient and modern"]. The “new” party rebelled against the self-awareness of the French classics, likening the Aristotelian concept of complete fulfillment to the concept of progress inspired by the natural sciences of modernity. The “new” ones, with the help of historical-critical arguments, questioned the meaning of imitation of ancient models, developed, in contrast to the norms of absolute beauty, which seems detached from time, the criteria of time-conditioned, or relative, beauty, thereby formulating the self-understanding of the French Enlightenment as the beginning of a new era. Although the noun modernitas (together with a pair of antonymous adjectives antiqui / moderni) in the chronological sense has been used since late antiquity, in European languages of modern times the adjective modern was substantivized very late, approximately from mid-19th century, first in the field of fine arts. This explains why the terms Moderne and Modernite, modernity have retained the aesthetic core of their meaning to this day, created in the process of self-understanding of avant-garde art.

For Baudelaire, the aesthetic experience of modernity then merged with its historical experience. In the primary experience of aesthetic modernity, the problem of self-justification is acute, because here the horizon of the experience of time is reduced to decentred subjectivity, going beyond conventions Everyday life. Therefore, a modern work of art, according to Baudelaire, occupies a special place at the intersection of the axes of relevance and eternity: “Modernity is transient, disappearing, accidental, it is half of art, the other half of which is eternal and unchanging.” The starting point of modernity is relevance, which absorbs itself, frees itself from the transits of transitional and modern times that have developed over decades, and is constituted in the center of modernity. The actual present, modernity, is not allowed to seek self-awareness in opposition to the rejected and overcome era, to the form of the past. Actuality can constitute itself only as the point of intersection of time and eternity. With this direct contact between actuality and eternity, modernity, however, gets rid not of its instability, but of triviality: in Baudelaire’s understanding, the nature of modernity lies in the fact that the passing moment will find confirmation as the authentic past of some future present. Modernity manifests itself as something that will one day become classical; “classical” is now the “lightning” of the beginning of a new world, which, however, will not have any permanence, but along with its first appearance it already confirms its disintegration. This understanding of time, once again radicalized in surrealism, substantiates the kinship of modernity with fashion.

Baudelaire starts from the conclusions of the famous “dispute between ancient and modern,” but characteristically shifts the relationship between absolute and relatively beautiful: “Beauty is formed from an eternal, unchanging element... and from a relative, conditioned element... which is represented by a certain period of time, fashion, spiritual life, passion. Without this second element as a kind of funny shiny icing that makes the divine cake more digestible, the first element would be harmful to human nature. As an art critic, he emphasizes in modernist painting the aspect of “the fleeting, transient beauty of present, modern life,” “the character of what the reader has allowed us to designate as ‘modernity’.” The word “modernity” is placed in quotation marks; Baudelaire realizes the new, terminologically pro-

its free use: an authentic work is radically captured by the moment of its emergence; precisely because it is spent in actuality, a work of art can stop the uniform flow of trivialities, break normality, everyday life and satisfy the immortal need for beauty in the moment of a fleeting connection of the eternal with the actual.

The eternally beautiful allows itself to be seen only in the robe of time that hides it - Benjamin later consolidated this feature in the concept of “dialectical image.” A work of art from the Art Nouveau era stands under the sign of combining the authentic with the ephemeral. The nature of belonging to the present time also justifies the kinship of art with fashion, with novelty, with the optics of a slacker, a genius, as well as a child, who lack the protection from external stimuli provided by the conventional way of perception brought to automatism, and who are therefore open to the attacks of the beautiful, the transcendental. irritants hidden even in the most everyday things. The role of the dandy in this case is to take the hard-won extra-everyday as a model, arrogantly go on the offensive and demonstrate this extra-everyday by provocative means. The dandy combines the idle and fashionable with entertainment in order to surprise, amaze - but he himself is never surprised. He is an expert in the fleeting pleasure of the moment, from which new things flow: “He is looking for that Something that, with your permission, I want to designate as “modernity,” for I cannot find a better word to express the idea in question. The point for him is to separate from fashion what it could contain that is poetic in the historical, eternal in the fleeting.”

This motif was adopted by Walter Benjamin; he needed it to find another solution to the paradoxical problem: how the random nature of modernity, which has become absolutely transient, can acquire its own scale and criteria. While Baudelaire was reassured by the idea that the union of time and eternity is achieved in an authentic work of art, Benjamin wants to translate this primary aesthetic experience back into the language of historical conditions. He forms the concept of time “now” (Jetztzeit), into which fragments of messianic or completed time are interspersed with the help of the subtlest motive of imitation that can be found in manifestations of fashion: “The French Revolution understood itself as the return of Rome. She quoted Ancient Rome just like fashion quotes blankets-

PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE ABOUT MODERNITY

Habermas Yu. Philosophical discourse about modernity. Per. with him. - M.: Publishing house “Ves Mir”, 2003. - 416 p. http://www.krotov.info/lib_sec/22_h/hab/haber_1.htm

Jurgen Habermas

PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE ABOUT MODERNITY

Seehistory of philosophy course .

Habermas Yu.

Philosophical discourse about modernity. Per. with him. - M.: Publishing house “Ves Mir”, 2003. - 416 p. The book by the greatest philosopher of our time, Jurgen Habermas, includes twelve lectures given by the author at a number of Western European universities. It was first published in German in 1985 and had an unusually large resonance in the circles of the intellectual elite of various countries. The book has not lost its relevance and is one of the most cited works in the philosophical discussion of the problem of modernity (discourse about modernity). The author managed to connect together the arguments of supporters and opponents of postmodern philosophy and culture and show the real significance of the “modern-postmodern” paradigm as a key one for analyzing the situation in modern humanitarian knowledge. The book is published in Russian for the first time.