On Literary Worlds by Hayot Eric;

Author:Hayot, Eric; [Hayot, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199926695
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2014-09-20T03:36:34+00:00

Chapter 7

Universalism as a World View

So: modernity. I assume it exists, and that it is characterized as the social condition and world view produced by a collocation of events and forces occurring from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, which include capitalism, imperialism, religious reform, and the scientific, philosophical, and political revolutions, each of which has been intertwined with each of the others, and each of which spins out a series of sub-events and sub-forces (the printing press, enlightened monarchy, vaccinations) that cross-pollinate and interact in turn.1 Whether there is a modernity outside of the rhetoric or discourse of modernity seems to me immaterial. What matters is that since the early nineteenth century (beginning with Hegel) “modernity” has named the period of the political, cultural, economic, and military dominance of the globe by this alleged social condition, which runs from roughly the seventeenth century to the present.2

Any explanation of what modernity is and why it occurred must attempt to answer the question of universal history with which Max Weber prefaces his collection of essays on the sociology of religion: “What chain of circumstances led to the appearance in the West, and only in the West, of cultural phenomena which—or so at least we like to think—came to have universal significance and validity?”3 Weber’s most famous answer to that question appears in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in whose 1920 edition Weber significantly added the prefix “modern” to the words capitalism, the capitalist spirit, and capitalist enterprise.4 The change restricts the “universal significance and validity” of Western rationalism to a particular historical period, whose name it then sets alongside capitalism as a kind of historicizing modifier. Weber’s addition of “modern” thus directs us to the appearance of the universal in history—the arrival of the universal as a history-making event—that lies at the core of the philosophy of modernity expressed a century earlier by Hegel. The name “modern” invokes more than capitalism, more than just a single process or dimension of the lifeworld; it constitutes rather an attempt to grasp the wholeness of the world as the function of the arrival of the universal in it. In subsequent arguments the appearance of “modernity” is therefore always a signal that the discussion has been dominated by a theory of historical periodization and by the self-composing logic of an “era” that grasps itself as a totality and a world in its own right. For this reason the various attempts to rescue the possibility of the universal located in modernity, by resolving the problem of the totalizing subject (as in Habermas), by returning to it an abandoned early modern humanism (as in Toulmin), or by imagining modernity’s various successors (Giddens, Castells, Hardt and Negri), will reproduce the historicist categories of the modern, “tak[ing] us back to the paradoxes and aporia of ‘modernity’ at a higher conceptual level.”5 Modernity is, for these reasons, both despite and because of the conceptual difficulties it presents, the essential horizon of “universal” thought.6

That paradox need not detain

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