《现代性及其不满》读后感精选( 五 ) modernity|modern|debate|book|M

Paradoxically, while the modernity is considered related to the ancient-modern quarrel, another side of the debate, if the debate exists, is not the ancient, but the counter-enlightenment. Historians have shown that modern concepts and categories are dependent on earlier Christian ideals. The counter-enlightenment, the term usually associated with Isaiah Berlin about the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, here describes the movement of reconsideration and deepening of the idea of modernity itself. Each moment of modernity confronts its following counternarrative. The secularization of institutions give rise to fears about the rationalization and “disenchantment”; the market economy and the commercial republic is accompanied with an antibourgeois mentality; the idea of individuality and free subjectivity give rise to concerns about homelessness, anomie, and alienation; the achievements of democracy are together with fear about conformism, the loss of independence, and the rise of the “lonely crowd”; even the idea of progress faces the antithesis of the decadence, degeneration, and decline. The aim of counter-enlightenment, however, is not the restoration of the old order but the creation of a new order. They started as a reaffirmation of the nation as something higher than cosmopolitanism, the particular conceived as something greater than the universal.
The origin of the counter-enlightenment is also the subject of the debate. One convenient landmark is the Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. The aim of the First Discourse is not to condemn the development of the sciences and the arts, but to protect them from the inevitable vulgarization that uses them serving for the public education.
The enlightenment began with the ancient-modern quarrel, while the counter-enlightenment began as a movement of opposition or reaction against the two core ideas of modernity—science and commerce. Science is asserted to limit the power of the imagination in metaphysical affairs and commerce to tame and pacify the passions and appetites. The new commercial regimes are believed to provide a safe and fair alternative to the ancien régime. At the core of the Counter-enlightenment was a critique of a new kind of civilization, the bourgeois civilization.
The bourgeois itself presented a contradiction. It is between the natural man and the citizen, between desires and duties. Marx introduced the Bourgeois into the political vocabulary and told his story about the modern history of its struggle with the proletariat, but Marx did not hold a completely negative opinion on the bourgeois because of its early heroic struggle against the feudal aristocracy. It is Nietzsche who brought the hatred toward the bourgeois. Nietzsche traced the bourgeois civilization to its philosophical origin, the British philosophy. His portrait of “the last man” in the mass democracies fulfilled only with the passion for comfortable self-preservation. Nietzsche and his last man got great disciples among European philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, regarding the democratic world and the parliament government filled with superficial opinions and meaningless chatter.