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- Isenberg, Bo, et al.
(author)
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Postmodernity and its Archive. The Principle of Insufficient Reason Revisited
- 2001
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In: The Transformation of Modernity. Aspects of the Past, Present and Future of an Era. - 0754617637 ; , s. 71-82
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this essay, I discuss two major theoretical discourses of modernity, namely, of classical modernity and postmodernity. Moreover, I aim at a proposition of a possible historical relation between those two discourses of crucial importance to modernity’s intellectual history. This historical connection is founded on what I call the principle of insufficient reason. The principle of insufficient reason tells us that a historical process, an event, an action could have been otherwise since it lacks a sufficient, an absolute reason, such as God, tradition, myth, or reason. From what we learn from the discourses of classical modernity and postmodernity, the principle of insufficient reason may be used when outlining the logics of transformation of the modern epoch. In fact, postmodern understanding of modernity appears as a recurrence of classical modern theory and philosophy. Classical modernity - represented by figures like the early Lukács and Kracauer, Simmel and Weber, Freud and Musil, and above all Nietzsche - continues to constitute the horizons of contemporary philosophy and theory. In it, we discover the archive of postmodern thinking, to use an image first outlined by Foucault. In consequence, postmodern theory does not break off that cultural self-understanding expressed and indeed heightened by classical modernity. Rather, it varies themes already discussed.
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