ABSTRACT
The spirit and discipline of aesthetic modernity assumed clear contours in the work of Charles Baudelaire. Modernity then unfolded in various avant-garde movements and finally reached its climax in Caf Voltaire of the Dadaists and in surrealism. Neo-conservatism shifts onto cultural modernism the uncomfortable burdens of a more or less successful capitalist modernization of the economy and society. Independently from the consequences of societal modernization and within the perspective of cultural development itself, there originate motives for doubting the project of modernity. Max Weber characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. The project of modernity formulated in the eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic. Neo-Aristotelianism enjoys a certain success today. In view of the problematic of ecology, it allows itself to call for a cosmological ethic.
