Realism as Contramodern Critique

Abstract

In “What Is Enlightenment?” Michel Foucault introduces two important concepts. The first of these concepts is that one needs to recognize that we are to some extent historically conditioned by modernity as a process that has determined how we view the world. The second concept is that of an attitude, which orients itself against the progressive teleology and certainties of the modern mindset. Foucault characterizes this contramodern attitude as “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”²

Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity as an attitude rather than as a period of history. And by “attitude,” I mean as a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way too of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relations of belonging and presents itself a task…[R]ather than seeking to distinguish the “modern era” from the “premodern” or “postmodern,” I think that it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of “countermodernity.”

Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”¹