ABSTRACT
Modernity was that mode of organising experience so that constructing a grand future on this world was the goal. This future society would be the place where the Enlightenment project would be realised; its foundations were to be the scientific knowledge gained from analysis of the physical and human worlds, its methodology the commitment to following the knowledge project through instead of non-rational forms of calculation. Progress was assured if one only kept to the task. Modernity is destruction and construction, scepticism and commitment to knowledge – everything must be subjected to the scrutiny of critical thought – all forms of social life examined and replaced if necessary. The good will survive and new forms of social existence will be allowed to rise up into permanence. In the midst of this the true will stand out:
But we have not found certainties, only the continual production of perspectives. For Alisdair MacIntyre (1981) the great projects stand exhausted: socialism, communism and liberalism, all are intellectually discredited. To Lyotard The Postmodern Condition is characterised by an incredulity towards meta-narratives, that whole spectra of understandings which lay outside science but which legitimated not only science but all forms of social co-operation and purposive activity.
