Micah Tillman

^{[ What Is Modernism? | Examples | What Is Postmodernism? | Examples ]}

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After teaching PHIL202, “The Modern Mind,” for a few semesters now, I’ve come to the following conclusion:

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Modernism is an attempt to undercut a current, oppressive authority by returning to an “older” authority, so as to make way for something new.

Or, to put things more generally, modernism looks like this:

Modernism is a revolution, a turning of a wheel.  (So, I guess, it’s a rotation, rather than a revolution?)

Each new modernist thinker gives the wheel another turn, displacing the current authority or priority by framing something else as prior to that authority (as “older” or “more fundamental”), and rolling things toward some new arrangement/organization/future.

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Every modernist undercuts a current priority by “returning” to something prior, so as to make way for something new.

But “prior” and “priority” are ambiguous.  They both have to do with “coming first,” or “coming before.”

But they mean different things, depending on what kind of “order” you’re talking about.

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1. If the order is temporal, then “what is prior” means the same as “what occurred first, before everything else,” and to “have priority” is to “have occurred (or ‘been around’) first, before everything else.”
2. If the order is causal, then “what is prior” means the same as “what occurred first, in the sense of causing or leading to everything else”; and to “have priority” is to “be the cause or source of everything else.”
3. If the order is logical, then “what is prior” means the same as “what you have to believe first, before you can believe other things,” and to “have priority” is to “be that of which everything else is the logical consequence,” or to “be the fundamental postulate/assumption.”
4. If the order is moral, then “what is prior” means the same as “what is more important than all other things,” or “what has the most value,” or “what is the source of the goodness of all other things,” and to “have priority” is to “be that relative to which the importance, value, and goodness of everything else is judged.”

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The implicit assumption for every modernist, however, is that what is prior in one of the various orders is also prior in the moral order.

To be prior means to come first (in time, in causality, in reasoning), and therefore to be of first importance, to deserve consideration before all else.

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So, to repeat:

Modernism is an attempt to undercut a current, oppressive authority (why would they want to get rid of it if they didn’t find it oppressive, if they didn’t think it was standing in the way of something?) by returning to an “older” authority, so as to make way for something new.

Or, more generally:

Modernism is a reprioritization of the prior.  Every modernist thinker sees her- or himself as reprioritizing a prior (though ultimately derivative, secondary, symptomatic, illusory) prioritization of the prior.

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^{[ What Is Modernism? | Examples | What Is Postmodernism? | Examples ]}

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Tags: Modern, Modern Philosophy, modernism, Modernist Philosophy, Modernists, Philosophy, Prior, Priority, What Is Modernism?