《现代性及其不满》读后感精选( 四 ) modernity|modern|debate|book|M

More disputes are associated with the coherence of modernity. It is believed by on influential opinion that we no longer have full confidence on modernity about the faith that the development of science, politics and law could serve as a model for humanity. Documents like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and Universal Declaration of Universal Human of the United Nation proposed a universal society facilitating the health, safety, and prosperity of its citizens. But nowadays it receives attacks from other thoughts. Marxism and postcolonialism regard it as a Western imperialism imposing its way of life to the rest of the world. Historicism or relativism views these claims as a disguised kind of particularism. The September 11 attacks destroyed the utopian belief that the end of the Cold War follows the period of democratic peace. The resurgent nationalism and ethnic tribalism also break the belief that we all become liberal democrats. These problems force us to return to the beginning of modernity, i.e., the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.
Machiavelli is the first author who confronts the quarrel in a systemic and comprehensive manner. Although the language of Machiavelli remains replete with biblical allusions, his realism put politics in a new foundation, free it from the illusions of the imagination, and provides a “lower” conception of human nature that better described the actual human behavior. And armed with right science or the right understanding of nature and history, we can free ourselves from dependence on fortune. And the ancient belief of endless cycle of history is altered by a program of progress. Progress involves a preference for the present over the past and demands transcendence. The scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided evidence for this belief. Science for the first time is seen as a cumulative enterprise, an accretion of knowledge that is in principle illimitable. Along the belief of progress is the critique of theological politics, the once unquestioned authority of the church over the worldly authority became the target of the attack, religion regarded as the origin of turmoil and is requested obey the guidance of the government. Later, this critique served as the presupposition of the emergence of the national states. The states are sovereign in the sense that they control their own affairs including religion, which put an end to the universal church and build the new international system. The sovereign individual also emerged, people no longer considered to be affiliated with organizations like family, polis, guild or religious order but free and equal “by nature.” The individual also becomes the source of moral and political authority. The central claim of the Enlightenment was the belief that the increase in knowledge will necessarily lead to a better condition of society. The founders of modern philosophy explained modern politics in a long struggle of ascent from the state of nature to civil society, i.e., an original condition of fear and anxiety, poverty and ignorance replaced by way of a social contract protecting person and property. Civil society, distinctive from natural society, is immersed with property, science, and commerce. The progress itself inevitably involves the revolution in the modern sense. Revolution gained the meaning as a driving force of historical development, not the ancient idea of returning.