ABSTRACT
All these views of the relation between modernism and post-modernism cohere. From a post-modernist perspective one may both pledge allegiance to the postmodernity of modernism, and yet refer by the term ‘modernism’ to a cultural phase that is bounded in time, that is, as far as cultural phenomena in general, and philosophical traditions in particular, may at all be bounded in time. Thus in what follows I refer by ‘modernism’ as a phase which took life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and concluded sometime around the outbreak of the Second World War. The bold and least controversial characteristics of this phase are: attention to form as expressing content, self-criticism that embarks primarily from a critical appraisal of the means of criticism themselves, and the transformation of traditional forms/contents, in particular those shaped throughout modernity – i.e. from the seventeenth century onwards. In all these respects, post-modernism is certainly modernist, that is post-modern. Yet as we shall see, modernism itself is aufgehoben by post-modernists – which is to say that these modernist characteristics, although accepted by post-modernists, are read and shaped anew, ridding them of what are now conceived traditional residues within modernism itself.
