Thinkpiece I - Modernity

The first session of the semester tackled the issue of modernity and the implications this era has towards the discipline and development of political theory. As explained in the lectures, the notion of modernity has ultimately led to a redefinition of political space. In classical political antiquity, for example, we could see the distinguished characteristics of the political life and the theoretical life. It was from this analogy that we can say the entirety of political theory was derived from; a clear and precise demarcation between what constitutes the public space and the private one. Prior to modernity, political theory developed around the notion that certain things were to be understood as highly political matters, but at the same time it recognized that certain things were to be studied as something distinct from politics, something that was beyond public life and apolitical. This distinction between public and private spaces provided a facet for human development that was free from the individual-member conflict. This was the triumph of classical political antiquity; the understanding of human life as something pluralistic. That human life, according to Hannah Arendt, operated upon three fundamental human activities, each with corresponding conditions. The first is Labour, which aspires for life itself. The second is Work, which attempts to stamp humanity’s finite identity in an infinite universe. The third is Action, which seeks to establish plurality within society, to recognize “…that Men, and not Man, live in the world.”

Modernity, however, has sought to repudiate this notion of plurality in human life. We find this in Marx as he replies to The Jewish Question by Bauer, where he presents us with what I find to be the perverse objective of modernity; the singularity. Marx proposes in his response to The Jewish Question a narrative of a world without religions, without race or social divides, a form of human existence that is unified. In the paradigm of modernity, the once demarcated spaces of public and private agenda clash against each other, and the notions of freedom, morality and knowledge are suddenly redefined and reclassified. There is an inherent danger in this re-politicization, because these are the notions that form the bedrock of political theory. I find that the aura that modernity emanates towards political theory is that of sheer panic and fear. Arendt states in The Human Condition that the beginning of the modern age for politics began at the first atomic explosions. Perhaps this is the paradigm that modernity forces upon us; that human existence is merely a subject to the laws of nature, and it is out of this omnipresent fear that Man must now attempt to escape the world. Modernity, for all of its demagoguery about a unification of worlds, cultures, classes and religions is faced with the irony of the medium it practices, either intentionally or unintentionally, towards humanity. What we find then, in modernity, is not an evolution from the Athenian concept of citizenship, rather we find a perversion of it. Man does not seek to be a member because he seeks betterment for his fellow and his society, but because he is fearful that his individual life is threatened. Due to this fear, the fundamentals of political theory – freedom, justice, morality etc. – then cease to become something relatively corporeal and are in turn reduced to nothing but words that incite a primeval drive for us to simply work and not think. It is here that we then stumble upon the most sickening aspect of modernity; the destruction of the discipline of thinking. The Modern Man no longer thinks, but merely obeys. His betterment is no longer determined by society, but by genetics, delivered no longer by his fellow man, but by science. And it is here that Kant’s paradox best defines the Modern Man; a man who is fully aware of what happens in his environment, and knows that he is capable of breaking free to redefine it, but at the same time blindly obeys the very system he abhors.

posted by:

Leiron Conrad T.Martija