Topic 9. Modern Era

Modern history, or the modern era, describes the historical timeline after the Middle Ages. Modern history can be further broken down into the early modern period and the late modern period. Contemporary history describes the span of historic events that are immediately relevant to the present time. The beginning of the modern era started approximately in the 1500s. Many major events caused the Western world to change around the turn of the 16^th century, starting with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the fall of Muslim Spain and the discovery of the Americas in 1492, and Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation in 1517. Early modern European history is usually seen to span from the turn of the 15th century, through the Age of Reason and Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, until the beginning of the Industrial in the late 18th century.

The modern period has been a period of significant development in the fields of science, politics, warfare, and technology. It has also been an age of discovery and globalisation. During this time that the European powers and later their colonies, began a political, economic, and cultural colonization of the rest of the world.

By the late 19th and early 20th century, modernist art, politics, science and culture has come to dominate not only Western Europe and North America, but almost every civilized area on the globe, including movements thought of as opposed to the west and globalization. The modern era is closely associated with the development of individualism, capitalism, urbanization and a belief in the positive possibilities of technological and political progress.

The brutal wars and other problems of this era, many of which come from the effects of rapid change, and the connected loss of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to many reactions against modern development. Optimism and belief in constant progress has been most recently criticized by postmodernism while the dominance of Western Europe and North America over other continents has been criticized by postcolonial theory.

Our most recent era – Modern Times – begins with the end of these revolutions in the 19th century, and includes the World Wars era (encompassing World War I and World War II) and the emergence of socialist countries that lead to the Cold War. The contemporary era follows shortly afterward with the explosion of research and increase of knowledge known as the Information Age in the latter 20^th century and 21th century. Today’s Postmodern era is seen in widespread Digitality.

Now we shall observe main features of three periods: Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern times.

 

Renaissance

Various events have been taken as marking the beginning of the Renaissance: the crowning of Petrarch as poet laureate of Rome in 1341; the short-lived triumph of Cola di Rienzi in setting up a republican Rome in 1347, an attempt to revive Rome’s former greatness; the arrival in Italy of Greek é migré s (which actually antedated by a few years the much publicized fall of Constantinople in 1453); the opening up of new trade routes to the East.

Each choice represents the selection of a particular field as central in the history of the period: art, architecture, religion, politics, economics, trade, or learning. In certain fields it is hard to maintain any sharp break between conditions in, let us say, 1300 and those in 1350. However, few students of the history of art or of literature are prepared to deny completely the start of new trends in the fourteenth century (at least in Italy). In literature,

Petrarch’s enthusiasm for Greek antiquity must surely be accepted as inaugurating, in the eyes of men in the fourteenth century, a fresh start. In painting, there is little hesitation about ascribing a similar place to Petrarch’s contemporary, Giotto; this ascription dates from the earliest attempt at a history of art, that of Giorgio Vasari (1550). No such figures can plausibly be singled out to mark new beginnings in economic or political history.

Difficulties also surround the choice of an event to mark the end of the Renaissance: the sacking of Rome in 1527, the hardening of the Counter-Reformation via the Council of Trent in 1545, the burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600, or Galileo Galilei’s setting of experimental physics on its true path around 1600 – any of these might be selected. Once again, however, a periodization that is useful in one field may prove useless in another field.

Generally speaking, the era from 1350 to 1600 will include most of the developments commonly dealt with under the heading “Renaissance.” As for geographical limits, the shifting locale of the Renaissance presents problems similar to those of its chronological limits. Burckhardt’s description focused exclusively on Italy; he implied that the Renaissance, after it had been taken over by the Italian Volksgeist, moved on to the rest of Europe. The movement to France is usually said to have resulted from the French invasion of Italy in 1515, which gave the French nobility their first glimpse of the glories of the Italian Renaissance. No comparable event can be singled out for the bringing of the Italian Renaissance to England, unless it be the return from Italy to their native land of the classical scholars William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, and John Colet in the last decade of the fifteenth century, or perhaps Desiderius Erasmus’s arrival there about the same time. Clearly England did enjoy a renaissance, but it is not easy to fix its dates: English literary historians prefer to discuss the Elizabethan age or the age of the Tudors, thus sidestepping the question of the relation of the English Renaissance to that of the Continent. Still less clear is the coming of the Renaissance to the German lands: German historians treat the sixteenth century as the “time of the Reformation, ” and tend to discuss the Renaissance chiefly in terms of its impact upon individual reformers.

The Renaissance is sometimes called the “age of adventure.” It is not at all clear, however, that the spirit behind men’s daring and adventurous actions was entirely new: The two chief incentives toward voyages of discovery, for instance, were commercial acquisitiveness and religious zeal—attitudes by no means foreign to medieval men. It was the shutting off of Venetian trade routes through the Mediterranean by the Turks that forced Europeans to search for new routes to the East, not a new desire for scientific knowledge of geography. The Spanish conquistadores may have thirsted for glory, but such a thirst was characteristic of medieval knights as well as of Renaissance humanists. The motives of the Franciscan missionaries were clearly religious and medieval in spirit.

Moreover, in the field of domestic trade, the resurgence of economic activity in the fifteenth century that formed the basis for the cultural developments of the Renaissance was less a matter of suddenly effective acquisitiveness than of normal recovery from the slump brought about by the Black Death in 1348.

Developments in technology and science indirectly provided material for philosophical reflection. The increased use of firearms and cannon in war, for example, made necessary the mathematical study of ballistics; and the scientific work of Benedetti and Galileo drew upon the practical experience of foundries and arsenals. However, Renaissance philosophy of science still took its cue largely from Aristotle: Francis Bacon, dissatisfied with Aristotelian logic and methodology of science, found a replacement not in the actual practices of mechanics and craftsmen but in the rhetorical method derived from Aristotle and applied to the questioning of Nature.

The most spectacular and far-reaching scientific development during the Renaissance was the heliocentric theory advanced by Nicolas Copernicus, who found hints about Pythagorean cosmology in ancient works. The Copernican theory was surely the most significant revolution ever to take place in science. Far less conspicuous, but still important, were the developments in pure and applied mathematics. Modern notation (such as the use of the “equals” sign) began to be adopted, bringing with it the possibility of greater attention to logical form.

In regards to social values, there have been many attempts, beginning with Michelet and Burckhardt, to capture the mind or spirit of Renaissance man. All such attempts seem doomed to failure, for they are bound to oversimplify complex social facts. We may, however, single out four sets of social ideals that were characteristic of various groups during the Renaissance.

The ideals of the feudal nobility, medieval in origin, persisted through the Renaissance among the ruling class, although they underwent considerable refinement. The rude military virtues of camp and field gave way to the graces of the court, which were set forth most admirably in Baldassare Castiglione’s book The Courtier (1528), one of the most influential treatises on manners ever written.

In Castiglione’s ideal courtier we may recognize the ancestor of our “gentleman.” Works of this sort are presumably also the source of the “universal man, ” a concept closely associated in modern minds with the Renaissance. In the heroic life idealized by the feudal tradition, love of glory and concern for one’s reputation were strong social motives. The humanists’ thirst for glory, which Burckhardt emphasized, merely continues this concern but applies it to the achievements of a nonwarrior class, the “knights of the pen.” The urban middle class chose, as usual, to emulate the style of life of their superiors: the modern gospel of work as a raison d’ê tre, shaping the whole of life, hardly existed during the Renaissance. Few social theorists extolled the virtues of commercial activity until Martin Luther stressed the sanctity of all callings, provided they benefited one’s fellow men.

Religion provided the second set of ideals, which centered upon moral salvation and involved a willingness to relinquish the world and all its goods. This mood, exacerbated in some individuals by the terror of imminent death or of eternal damnation, continued unabated throughout the Renaissance; and the entire Reformation movement has been called the “last great wave of medieval mysticism.” Although such a religious concern is usually associated by modern secular critics with contempt for this world and with pessimism, it is equally compatible with a cheerful resignation in the face of unavoidable misfortunes and gratefulness for such morally harmless pleasures as life affords. A genuine tension often resulted from the opposing pulls of these religious values and of secular attitudes and this-worldliness: Aristotelian philosophers as well as humanists felt this tension during the Renaissance.

A third set of ideals, that of the ancient sage (Platonic or Stoic), was consciously adopted by Renaissance humanists as an adjunct to Christian exhortation, for many of them felt that Christians could learn much from pagan expounders of virtue. Rarely, if ever, did a humanist attempt to replace the Christian ideal altogether: Burckhardt undoubtedly overstressed the “paganism” of the humanists.

A major role in the culture of the Renaissance was played by the humanists. All sorts of people call themselves “humanists” today, but in the early days of the Renaissance the name had a clear occupational meaning. During the fourteenth century, the traditional subjects of grammar, rhetoric, and poetry had begun to be called, after a phrase of Cicero, the studio humanitatis. The term umanista was coined (on the analogy of artista, also a product of university slang) to designate a teacher of these subjects in Italian universities. Such studies were by no means new in the fourteenth century; in fact, the humanists were the heirs of a less ambitious but old and respectable medieval profession, that of the dictator or teacher of the art of letter-writing (ars dictaminis). The Renaissance teachers of “humanities” placed a greater emphasis on ancient models than had the dictatores, but their teaching had much the same; objective. Their students often became official letter-writers or speechmakers for popes and princes. Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, two of the most influential humanists of the fifteenth century, were chancellors of Florence. The study of Greek philosophy owes much to these two men.

 

Enlightenment

 

The term enlightenment is generally used to designate a period in European history stretching from the 1680s to the close of the eighteenth century, but this usage is not without ambiguities and controversy. During the eighteenth century the word enlightenment referred not to a period but to a process, a set of activities in which individuals engaged. These activities were viewed as involving the application of what was then termed philosophy to a range of concerns in what would subsequently be classified as the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. It was not until the nineteenth century that the Enlightenment came into general usage as a designation for the historical period defined by these various projects.

Attempts to specify the character of the period have tended to spur reflection on the nature and scope of those projects and activities that are claimed to characterize the age. As a result, discussions of the Enlightenment typically slide into reflections on the nature and merits of the activity of enlightenment itself.

For some scholars the Enlightenment was a philosophical movement that emphasized the application of reason (defined for the most part in terms associated with modern science) to all aspects of life, a project that has been embraced by some (e.g., in Karl Raimund Popper’s ideal of the “Open Society”) and criticized by others (e.g., in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s The emergence of what the social theorist Jü rgen Habermas termed the public sphere – the network of institutions, including coffeehouses, salons, Masonic lodges, and reading societies in which “private people come together as a public” – is viewed by many historians as a defining feature of the period. Coffeehouses, particularly in England, provided a venue for the circulation and discussion of news, Parisian salons played an essential role in coordinating the activities of the philosophes, and the Masonic movement opened a space in which new forms of sociability, expressing the ideal of fraternal solidarity, were possible. No less significant was the emergence of an international book trade, with both legal and clandestine branches.

Kant’s suggestion that “religious matters” were central to the concerns of enlightenment and his insistence that restrictions on the public use of reason in this area were both “harmful” and “dishonorable” aptly summarized the views of those who saw themselves as engaged in efforts at enlightenment. The initial impetus behind the Enlightenment stemmed, in part, from Protestants’ revulsion at Louis XIV’s (1638–1715) campaign against the Huguenot minority (culminating in his Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685) and reservations regarding the policies of the Catholic monarch James II (1633–1701) in England (culminating in his removal in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688). Such concerns were particularly evident among the political and religious exiles from France and England who gathered in the Dutch Republic at the close of the seventeenth century, where they produced tracts on religious and political questions that ranged from such classic texts as Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration (1689) – a work that had a pervasive influence throughout Europe and the New World on discussions of the proper roles of church and state – to the infamous Treatise of the Three Imposters, a clandestine manuscript that pieced together bits of Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, and various materialists to argue that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam owed their origins to the attempts of “imposters” (i.e., charlatans or magicians) to gain political power.

Toleration was the common cause of all those associated with the Enlightenment. In England Protestant dissenters such as Joseph Priestley and Richard Price drew on the arguments of Locke in their campaign against the limitations on political participation suffered by those who refused to swear conformity to central articles of the Anglican faith (e.g., the doctrine of the trinity). Similar arguments could be found, at the end of the century, in Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783), a treatise on the relation between civil and ecclesiastical power. In France Voltaire – profoundly influenced by the diversity of religious practices he observed during his visit to England – waged a life-long campaign in support of toleration, culminating in an effort to clear the reputation of Jean Calas, a Huguenot executed under circumstances that, for Voltaire, epitomized the corruption of justice by religious fanaticism. By the end of the period the campaign for tol- eration could claim such legislative achievements as Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1786) and Article X of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789).

Projects of reform, however, easily crossed over into the advocacy of heterodoxy, with Socinian and pantheist doctrines having a broad appeal. For example, Toland’s later writings, which hailed the Druids as practitioners of a “natural” religion, articulated positions that are difficult to reconcile with any established version of Christianity.

The same is true for the work of Lessing, especially his Education of the Human Race (1777), a text that influenced Hegel’s early writings. While explicit endorsements of atheism remained a minority position within the Enlightenment (Holbach’s System of Nature (1770) was the famous notorious exception), Spinoza’s writings held a particular interest for more radical free-thinkers, and various pantheist and materialist doctrines lent support to formulations in which references to the deity contributed rather little to the argument.

Modern philosophy is construed as beginning sometime in the Renaissance. A philosophy that seeks new foundations for knowledge was offered as an alternative to that provided by the ancient philosophers. Modern philosophy was presented as starting afresh from new beginnings – turning to nature directly (Francis Bacon), turning to the mind directly (René Descartes), turning to experience directly (Thomas Hobbes). The “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” resulted from this basic disagreement as to the sources of philosophical

knowledge.

Modern philosophy turned away from the past and toward the future, toward the advancement of knowledge, toward human understanding, and toward progress through method or through experience. With the break between the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Benedict de Spinoza) and the British empiricists (Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume) at the end of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, a new formulation in modern philosophy was called for. Immanuel Kant brought together in his “critical” philosophy the commitments to the analytic exercise of the mind, on the one hand, and the empirical reception through the senses on the other.

With Kant, modern philosophy combined the “transcendental unity of apperception” with the “manifold of experience.” Modern philosophy was no longer based on a theory of representation –representation to the mind through reason or representation to the mind through experience – but on the linking of transcendental subjectivity

and empirical objectivity. This “doublet, ” as Michel Foucault came to name it, accounted for a whole new way of philosophizing.

Modernism is distinguished from modern philosophy in that it is linked to certain movements in art and literature that began sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. While drawing upon some similar characteristics of “modern philosophy, ” modernism in art, literature, and philosophy involved novelty, break with tradition, progress, continuous development, knowledge derived either from the position of the subject or from claims to objectivity, and concomitantly the crisis in knowledge produced by this very dichotomy.

Hence in modernism, at the same time that certain theories based knowledge on a centered, transcendental, interpreting subjectivity, and others based knowledge on certain, atomistic, analytic, empirical objectivity, the crisis in knowledge created a sense of uncertainty, paradox, incompleteness, inadequacy, emptiness, and void. Modernism in art and literature involved a shift away from the dichotomies of romanticism and realism to the stream of consciousness, lived and internal time-consciousness, transcendental subjectivity, narrated remembrance and awareness, portrayed speed, mechanisms, objects, and abstractions. Latent content was allowed to penetrate through the surfaces of manifest content. Understanding would have to delve more deeply than surfaces and mere appearances.

A phenomenology would be needed in order to inventory the contents of consciousness (Edmund Husserl) or a psychoanalysis to delve the depths of what the mind was really thinking (Sigmund Freud), or a logical positivism would take the alternative tack by excluding all knowledge that cannot be verified logically and empirically (Bertrand Russell, early Ludwig Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer). Modernism in philosophy involved at each stage the Kantian combination of the empirical and the transcendental, the objective and the subjective, the material and the intellectual – but each time measuring the doublet with weight on one side or the other.

One of mainstream ideologies of the Enlightenment was Deism The first interpretation of deist in both French and English as a euphemism for atheist was not followed by Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, in his Dictionary (1755), defined deist as “a man who follows no particular religion but only acknowledges the existence of God, without any

other article of faith.” The situation is complicated by a late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technical metaphysical interpretation of deism, in which the meaning is restricted to belief in a God, or First Cause, who created the world and instituted immutable and universal laws that preclude any alteration as well as divine immanence – in short, the concept of an “absentee God.”A further complication has been the acceptance of natural religion (religion universally achievable by human reason) by many eminent Christian theologians throughout

the course of many centuries. Such theologians also believed in revelation and in personal divine intervention in the life of man, a position that had been made clear and authoritative by St. Thomas Aquinas. No sharp line can be drawn between the doctrines of such rationalistic theologians and those of deists, especially those who termed themselves “Christian deists.”Nor is it accurate to maintain that the historical deists (mainly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), like the philosophical deists, altogether denied the immanence of God, even though they did tend to become more and more critical of the necessity of any revelation and of the Hebraic-Christian revelation in particular. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the two types of deists.

 

Modern Times

 

In the mid-1960s philosophy came to look at its epistemological

formations and to ask whether the humanisms and anthropologisms of modern philosophy had not circumscribed themselves. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interrogations were reformulated in Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. The human sciences placed the optimisms and pessimisms of modern philosophy in question by circumventing the theory of “man.” Knowledge formations were articulated in terms of multiple spaces of knowledge production and no longer according to a central source or position, or ego, or self, or subject, nor according to a multiplicity of sense-data, objective criteria, material evidence, or behaviors. Knowledge formations crossed disciplines and operated in multiple spaces where questions of structure, frame, margin, boundary, edge, limit, and so on would mark any discursive practice. In other words, knowledge was no longer produced from a center, foundation, ground, basis, identity, authority, or transcendental competency.

Knowledge was dispersed, multiple, fragmented, and theoretically varied. Knowledge was no longer based on continuity, unity, totality, comprehensiveness, and consistency. Knowledge began to be understood in terms of discontinuity, difference, dissemination, and differends.

By the early 1970s postmodernism – a term that Daniel Bell used in connection with postindustrial society in the 1950s, that architects appealed to in the 1960s, and that art and literary historians invoked in the 1970s – had still not been invoked in connection with philosophy. Jacques Derrida’s grammatology and theory of “difference” in 1967 (building upon Martin Heidegger’s account of “the end of philosophy and the task of thinking”) turned into a full-fledged deconstruction in

the 1970s. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of rhizomal thinking (as opposed to hierarchical, authorizing arborescent thinking) marked a move against psychoanalytic theories based on Oedipal authority and paternal insistence. Their idea of nomadism placed emphasis on knowledge, experience, and relations that were not organized around a central concept.

J. Kristeva’s account of the revolution in poetic language marked the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. Where symbolic — scientific, theoretical, phallic, paternal – thinking had pervaded philosophy and science, Kristeva invoked the semiotic as the poetic, fluid, receptacle-like, maternal thinking that has been hidden in modern thought. Yet postmodern was hardly the term that was invoked to

describe this kind of philosophizing.

Correspondingly, the more restricted study of phenomenology and existentialism in philosophy gave way to the more multiple and diverse theories implicit in Continental philosophy: deconstruction, archaeology of knowledge, semanalysis, schizoanalysis, feminist theory, and so forth. Yet, while poststructuralism (in connection with Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, et al.) was hailed as the successor to structuralism (Claude Lé vi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser), and existential phenomenology (Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir), postmodernism was still not a relevant category in philosophy until well into the 1980s.

As time passed, postmodernism and postmodern thought came to take precedence over poststructuralism as the prevalent theoretical formulation. Postmodern thought means the appeal to differences –

differences in theories, differences in formulations, differences in identities. Postmodern thought rejects hierarchies and genealogies, continuities and progress, resolutions and overcomings (Ü berwindungen).

Postmodern thought, in fact, cannot operate outside of the modern, for it is itself what can be called an “indecidable.” The postmodern signals the end of modernity, but it operates at the same time necessarily within the modern.

To claim that the postmodern is outside the modern is to identify it as other than the modern, but that which is outside or other reinscribes the identity of the modern and therefore the postmodern inscription within it. Hence the postmodern both marks places of difference within the modern and calls for an alternative to the modern. The postmodern in any case does not call for the destruction of the modern, not does it seek to deny the modern, since it is necessarily part of the modern.

The postmodern involves the question of the end or limit or margin of what is in question. History, man, knowledge, painting, writing, the modern – each is posed in terms of its end. The end is not a matter of termination or conclusion any more than a matter of goal and aspiration. The postmodern involves, as G. Vattimo notes, a Verwindung of modernity – a getting over, a convalescence, a recovering from modernity. This means that modernity is itself placed in question and no longer taken as an unquestioned given. The cracks and fissures in

modernity, the places where modernity cannot be fully aware of itself, the moments of unpresentability in the modern – these are the concerns of postmodern thought. As J.-F. Lyotard has noted in his famous The Postmodern Condition (1984), the postmodern involves the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself – that is, in modernity, the concern was to present something new, something unheard of, something unique, something shocking, something unpresentable. The postmodern involves the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself – the formulation of the moments of unpresentability as they mark what is presented. Lyotard calls attention to the role of the “differend” as the place of conflict between two alternative positions. The differend does not belong to either side. It belongs only to the place between, to the gap between the two presentations on either side. This is the postmodern moment – such moments or events with which the modern is distinctively scarred and animated.