Modernitāte starp vēsturi un dabu: nākotnes un atgriešanās paradokss

Modernity (18th-20th centuries) is an epoch, in which from late Enlightenment and the French Revolution there has been a constant struggle both for this epoch’s legitimacy and it’s continuation. Constantly (and sometimes especially intense) there have been talks about the end of modernity, of “exiting” or “leaving behind” modernity. This discourse can be seen and evaluated as both the critique of modernity from pre-modern, anti-modern or un-modern positions, and as modernity’s self-critique. Various projects of modernity have similar visions and similar curves of self-criticism. In this paper two sketches of the perspectives, self-critiques and recessions of modernity are offered. They show two approaches to understanding modernity as a project, which entails both overcoming, and continuing it. These approaches reveal aporias which modernity possesses (as well as do the approaches, themselves being the self-critical continuations of modernity). Two sketches focus, firstly, in the medium of history, on romanticism; secondly, in the medium of nature, on cultural criticism. Modernity’s legitimization, cancellation, overcoming, “convalescence”, continuation, twists and turns, “other modernities”, anti-modernity, post-modernity etc. - the spectrum of various attempts of reflected possibilities, the vast potential for self-criticism is one of modernity’s highest achievements. Losing exactly this height of thought would mean losing the possible future. The greatest enemy of self-reflexive modernity is not at all the reflections of overcoming or leaving modernity behind, but the unthinking surrender to modernity’s “and so on and so forth” whirlwind of social, ideological, economical and political complications.