ABSTRACT
In his work on Nietzsche, the ‘first’ of the ‘postmodern’ thinkers, Heidegger writes: ‘That period we call modern . . . is defined by the fact that man becomes the center and measure of all beings.’1
The ‘modern’ world begins, in the story I want to tell aboxut the West, with the Renaissance. It is to the people of the Renaissance that we owe the beginnings of modern science and technology, an unprecedented expansion of trade and commerce, the glorious vision of humanism, and a mighty challenge to the mediaeval authority of faith, announced in the name of a selfvalidating rationality. The spirit of the Renaissance continued for two hundred years, eventually coming to light in the rationality of a mechanical vision: Hobbes, Descartes. In Descartes, humanism assumed a distinctively subjective character, proclaiming its triumph even in the passage where it demonstrates the existence of God. The triumph of Cartesian subjectivity is to be seen in the objective rationality it empowered and imposed. Thus, it is in the seventeenth century that the machine appears as paradigm, partly in a dream of power, partly in a vision of divine glory which was slow to die out. There is ambiguity and paradox in the proof Descartes set down for the existence of God: what the proof really celebrated was the power of human reason, the priority of ‘Man’ before God, the independence, self-determination, and self-affirmation of the subject. The gaze of these moderns finally turned away from heaven, away from the sky; vision returned, but with a power stolen from its god, to the projects of its life-world.
