TL;DRAbstract
In an age in which the intellectual life of the West as expressed in its art, culture, spirituality, and philosophy identifies itself as incurably postmodern, it is perhaps wise to heed Charles Taylor's warning that “understanding modernity aright is an exercise in retrieval.” In order to cast our minds back to the seventeenth century when the modern period was born, the student of modernity must excavate through many layers of thought in the subsequent history of ideas; that is, dig through assumptions about the philosophical meaning of history, culture, and material forces that have long since hardened imperceptibly over time into fundamental ideological commitments. To rediscover modernity as it first appeared in the world brash and confident, it requires that in some respects we forget who we are, or perhaps whom we think we are.
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In an age in which the intellectual life of the West as expressed in its art, culture, spirituality, and philosophy identifies itself as incurably postmodern, it is perhaps wise to heed Charles Taylor's warning that “understanding modernity aright is an exercise in retrieval.” In order to cast our minds back to the seventeenth century when the modern period was born, the student of modernity must excavate through many layers of thought in the subsequent history of ideas; that is, dig through assumptions about the philosophical meaning of history, culture, and material forces that have long since hardened imperceptibly over time into fundamental ideological commitments. To rediscover modernity as it first appeared in the world brash and confident, it requires that in some respects we forget who we are, or perhaps whom we think we are.
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