Introduction:Post-Englightment Modernism and the experience of time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
ENLIGHTENMENT TEMPORALITY
Jürgen Habermas begins The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity with a chapter entitled “Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance,” and in that chapter he focuses on Walter Benjamin as a chief example of a person burdened by an extreme consciousness of time that helps to define, by contrast, the secular values of Enlightenment modernity. The reason and humanism of the Enlightenment, Habermas argues, are characterized among other things by a sense of the temporality of existence that is promising rather than overwhelming. “Because … the modern world,” he writes, “is distinguished from the old by the fact that it opens itself to the future, the epochal new beginning is rendered constant with each moment that gives birth to the new” (1987: 6). Hegel, he goes on, identifies the beginning of the modern with the break that the Enlightenment and the French Revolution signified for the more thoughtful spectators at the close of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth century. With this “glorious sunrise” we come, as the old Hegel still thought, “to the last stage in History, our world, our own time” (1987: 6–7). In this analysis Habermas is describing (and repeating) the Enlightenment combination of a conception of time as comprised of interchangeable parts which, taken together, accomplish universal progress.
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- Information
- Modernism and TimeThe Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930, pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000