to look into it further and see if anyone actually uses the word 'modernism' to describe developments from the enlightenment, I did a search using the terms Locke and modernism, and I found that Locke, Bacon, Descartes, the enlightenment, etc are definitely associated with modernity, but not with modernism.
On the website, encyclopedia.com, it says this: 'Modernism is distinguished from modern philosophy in that it is linked to certain movements in art and literature that began sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. While drawing upon some similar characteristics of "modern philosophy," modernism in art, literature, and philosophy involved novelty, break with tradition, progress, continuous development, knowledge derived either from the position of the subject or from claims to objectivity, and concomitantly the crisis in knowledge produced by this very dichotomy. Hence in modernism, at the same time that certain theories based knowledge on a centered, transcendental, interpreting subjectivity, and others based knowledge on certain, atomistic, analytic, empirical objectivity, the crisis in knowledge created a sense of uncertainty, paradox, incompleteness, inadequacy, emptiness, and void. Modernism in art and literature involved a shift away from the dichotomies of romanticism and realism to the stream of consciousness, lived and internal time-consciousness, transcendental subjectivity, narrated remembrance and awareness, portrayed speed, mechanisms, objects, and abstractions.'
I was only going to quote the first sentence because that's the main point I wanted to make - that modernism and modern mean different things - but I really liked the description of modernism, so I included the whole passage.
the book that I have that is a Christian critique of post-modernism, doesn't use the term modernism - it talks about modernity and uses the term 'modern' - but the more purely academic text (which I don't have but have previewed) uses 'modernism' to describe the movement associated with the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, etc, which I think is quite problematic. That brings me to one of the main issues I have with a lot of the critics and criticism of post-modernism.....
My interest is literature and literary theory, so I relate movements and approaches to those. And critical theory has a lot of very cogent things to say about literature. I think I can say that that's a fact, or at least it's a fact that people like me, who are interested in language and literature, are also interested in critcal theory (or whatever you want to call it...I don't really like using the term 'critical theory' because it seems to be the term favoured by those who hate theory). So anyway, nearly all the people (at least that I've come across) who are stridently opposed to critical theory and post-modernism are philosophers or scientists, not literary theorists, and their criticism of post-modernism is based on it's ideologial aspect, which is a different issue from the theorys' application to literature.
I think this highlights a more general problem in our world, including the academic realm. We tend to think that someone who is an expert or successful in a particular area can speak authoritatively about other areas. For example, we're generally quite receptive to the views of successful writers about social issues. We tend to think that they're somehow wiser or smarter or their views are more valid because.....*checks notes*....they are good at writing novels. I'm not saying that that's necessarily wrong, but it's not necessarily right either.
Anyway, I still want to read the book about post-modernism that calls the enlightenment modernism because I'm interested in the ideas. Another book I want to read, which engages with these ideas is The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (2004) by Alister McGrath. McGrath too seems to use modernism and modernity interchangeably. He writes this about the relationship between modernism (the enlightenment type, I think) and post-modernism:
Postmodernism is a cultural mood that celebrates diversity and seeks to undermine those who offer rigid, restrictive, and oppressive views of the world. Modernism - which tried to reduce everything to a uniform set of ideas - is excoriated by postmodern writers as a form of intellectual Stalinism, a refusal to permit diversity in our readings of the world. Postmodernity celebrates diversity of belief, seeing any attempt to coerce individuals to accept the viewpoints of another as being oppressive. (p 227)
I think that's a pretty good description of the dynamic between modernism and post-modernism. McGrath goes on to talk about how, on the face of it, it would seem that postmodernism, as defined in the quote, would lend itself to an atheistic world-view. He brings up deconstruction - a type of post-modern analysis that considers the power relationships manifested in but not explicitly mentioned in texts - and talks about how, surely that approach too would lead to a rejection of God because the idea of God as represented in the great texts of Western culture could be read 'as a powerplay on the part of churches and others with vested interests in its survival.' But then he writes that that's not how deconstruction is meant to work, at least according to Jacques Derrida, who devised it. According to Derrida, deconstruction was about openness to 'the other', and decentring.
There are social and polical implications of these ideas. There are moral dilemmas. I think part of the answer to those dilemmas is the realisation that complexity and nuance is not the enemy.
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