Man must constantly destroy himself in order to construct himself all over again.
Modernity is an exclusively western concept that has no equivalent in other civilizations. The reason for this lies in the view of time that is peculiar to the West, by which time is regarded as being linear, irreversible, and progressive. It refers to the typical features of modern times and to the way that these features are experienced by the individual: modernity stands for the attitude toward life that is associated with a continuous process of evolution and transformation, with an orientation toward a future that will be different from the past and from the present. It is characterized by an irreversible emergence of autonomy in the fields of science, art, and morality, which must then be developed “according to their inner logic.” On the other hand, however, modernity is also seen as a project: the final goal of the development of these various autonomous domains lies in their relevance for practice, their potential use “for the rational organization of everyday social life.”
Critical reason, by its very rigor, accentuates temporality. Nothing is permanent; reason becomes identified with change and otherness. We are ruled not by identity, with its enormous and monotonous tautologies, but by otherness and contradiction, the dizzying manifestations of criticism. In the past the goal of criticism was truth; in the modern age truth is criticism. Not an eternal truth, but the truth of change.
In the celebrated definition of Charles Baudelaire: “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.” Modernity provokes on all levels an aesthetics of rupture, of individual creativity and of innovation that is everywhere marked by the sociological phenomenon of the avant-garde . . . and by the increasingly more outspoken destruction of traditional forms. . . . Modernity is radicalized into momentaneous change, into a continuous traveling, and thus its meaning changes. It gradually loses each substantial value, each ethical and philosophical ideology of progress that sustained it at the outset, and it becomes an aesthetics of change for the sake of change. . . .
The counter-pastoral view is based on the idea that there is a fundamental discrepancy between economic and cultural modernity, and that neither can be achieved without conflicts and moments of fissure. It regards modernity as characterized by irreconcilable fissures and insoluble contradictions, by divisions and fragmentation, by the collapse of an integrated experience of life, and by the irreversible emergence of autonomy in various domains that are incapable of regaining their common foundation.
What makes modernity so fascinating is the relationship between all these divergent aspects - programmatic and transitory. Marshall Berman argues that for the individual the experience of modernity is characterized by a combination of programmatic and transitory elements, by an oscillation between the struggle for personal development and the nostalgia for what is irretrievably lost: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.
Modernity has often been described as a condition of “homelessness.” The pluralistic structures of modern society have made the lives of more and more individuals migratory, ever-changing, mobile. In everyday life, the modern individual continuously alternates between highly discrepant and often contradictory social contexts. Not only are an increasing number of individuals in a modern society uprooted from their original social milieu, but, in addition, no succeeding milieu succeeds in becoming truly “home” either.
Modernity frees people from the limitations imposed on them by their family or clan or by their village community, offering them unheard-of options and often material improvements as well; there is, however, a price to pay. The renunciation of the traditional framework of reference for their lives means a loss of certainties and of meaning. For many people it is far from easy to learn to live with this.
