ABSTRACT

If, from the point of view of modernity, the pre-modern milieu is interpreted as dominated and defined by the rigours and restrictions of natural artifice, then modernity initially appears to itself as an artificial, deliberately constructed world (and therefore the history of modernity becomes one of a story of the forgetting of the artificiality). In other words, in relation to the natural or God-given house for humanity which is held to prevail in the pre-modern condition, the house for humanity which is constructed in the relationships and processes of modernity is, so to speak, a fabricated dwelling.