Agnes Heller - Logics of Modernity

The modern world is based on freedom, but freedom cannot become a foundation. It must necessarily stand on freedom, because it is the product of destruction and deconstruction of all foundations, accordingly modernity in itself has no foundations.

In both Hegel and Heidegger the 'Grund' is not a foundation, for it only opens the 'Abgrund', that is the abyss. Freedom cannot found, therefore the modern world must reinvent itself constantly. The constructed models of the modern world are abstract in the Hegelian sense therefore the narrative that realizes them does not ring true for more than a few decades.

The two constituents of modernity which together constitute the essence of modernity are the dynamics of modernity and the modern social arrangements. The dynamic created the social arrangement - this dynamic consists of the constant and ongoing querying and testing of general concepts; the true, the good, the just.

Modernity, according to Hegel is the only world that is not destroyed, but maintained and revitalized by negation. For this reason it constitutes the end of history. Going against Hegel, Heller argues that in the 20th century modernity can break through the limits of the modern social arrangement and negate modernity itself. The dynamics of modernity can run as nihilism and even end up as fundamentalism.

The paradox of freedom cannot be solved.

The two binds of the modern imagination: the technological and the historical.

The age of technological revolutions is also the age of hermeneutics.

The three logics of modernity:
-Logic of Technology
-Logic of the Functional Allocation of Social Positions
-Logic of Political Power

Logic of Technology: technological imagination is future-oriented, it includes faith in progress.

Logic of Functionality: "There's a gap between the life of modern man and his world" (H. Arendt). In order to have a world one needs to become dettached from the technological imagination, not to abandon it but to create a distance from it.

Arendt would have said that animals have life but no world. In the modern 'animal-kingdom' (Hegel), however, men have become specialized just like animals, but very much against their essence, their spiritual nature. When human beings have lives but no world, they are not living up to their spiritual potential.

Culture is the most accesible contemporary institution of the modern imagination.

Logic of Political Power: Historical imagination appears here as both tradition and ideology.

Modern life, anymore than life in general is not a problem to be solved. Many representative conflicts of modern man do not revolve around the allocation of resources. They emerge from the general malaises of modernity, from the loss of meaning in life, of a secure life path, of faith, of spirituality. The dominating role of the technological imagination itself resucitates the historical imagination.

Men in search for meaning turn to the historical imagination, they restore ancient customs, they discover ancient enemies, recollect ancient wounds which seemed to have sealed.

If one were to approach the limits (of modernity) closely in politics chaos would ensue... for fear of the total destruction of tradition one either establishes limits (in constituting liberties) or turns to fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a reaction to the paradoxicality of freedom and of truth.

The modern world needs ideologies, yet it also needs critiques of ideologies because ideologies can bring about a closure, in which a world of the historical imagination becomes isolated from the others and also from other logics of modernity. The abscence of ideology would mean that actors, in particular political ones, are left to be enframed by the technological imagination alone.

The double bind of modernity is also a double pull. There is a constant tension between the two imaginary institutions of modernity, the future-oriented and the past-oriented, the problem-solving oriented and the interpretation-oriented, the thing-oriented and the world-oriented, the infinite and the finite. It is in this tension - by means of this tension - that the paradox of freedom is maintained as a living paradox.

Among all the political forms that the moderns have invented totalitarianism exemplified the most extreme form of the double bind. The paradox of freedom disappears, together with freedom itself, in the attempt to unite both forms of the imagination, to totalize them. These attempts failed, at least in Europe. But the totalisation of the imagination is still being attempted.

The double bind is both the greatest danger and the saving power of modernity.

To blame the technological imagination alone for the totalitarian extermination machinery follows from one-sided view of Heidegger's concept of enframing. For something other than the technological imagination must set the task of eliminating a group of people. The problem becomes technological as a result of the translation of an ideological system, an ideologically constructed world of the historical imagination. It is perhaps true that the technological imagination on its own can also become lethal for modernity. The historical imagination on tis own, however, can scarcely threaten modernity.

The double bind is one of the major manifestations of the modern paradox of freedom, the paradox of truth included. The danger of totalitarianism looms large whenever the two binds are united and pointed in one direction. Liberalism and democracy if joined together can perhaps offer spaces in which they can coexist in tension. This is not a goal, but a practice to be kept alive.

From:
Agnes Heller
"The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern Imagination"
Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study
2000