... by New German Critique, Inc. 2019 critique of modernity idea of progress eschatology philosophy of history Christianity The “postsecularism debate” has dominated various academic fields for over a decade now, and its core issue, the relation between modernity and religion, is still...

... in the history of ideas before discussing how his celebrated Philosophy of Symbolic Forms led Cassirer to reappraise the problem of history more generally. Blumenberg reads Cassirer as having tried to establish the independence of history with regard to the imperatives of the present and from this derives...

... renewal. The ideas and work of a group of architects residing in the Silesian capital city, Breslau, between 1918 and 1932 demonstrate one response to the Kultur - Zivilisation dichotomy. The group included such internationally renowned architects as Max Berg, Ernst May, Hans Poelzig, Hans Scharoun...

...Christopher Conti Walter Benjamin's great essay on Franz Kafka exemplifies his philosophical praxis, which exhumes the prehistoric substrate of modernity to expose the myth of progress in modernity's claim to epochal legitimacy. Benjamin's physiognomic thinking endows Kafka with the features of his...

... and even Germanic one. It is not only the religion of the German past, Marcus claims, but also, given its faith in the intellect and in progress, the religion of the future. His ideas do not figure in the historiography of Weimar Germany. While many of the new political notions of the future that Weimar...

...Tom Vandeputte In an unpublished fragment from the late 1930s, Walter Benjamin famously calls for a recasting of the idea of catastrophe and its relation to the progression of history. Catastrophe, Benjamin contends, is not to be understood as an exception to the regular course of history; rather...

... in his engagement with radical evil, understood as the return of the “ever-same,” seeks similarly to reground the modern regime of historicity by reconstructing the underlying logic of the modern idea of progress. Its principal function is to ward off regression toward the archaic rather than advance...

...: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 10. Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” New German Critique, no. 33 (2006): 62. Daniel Weidner  5 argued that the modern idea of progress is a secularized form of Christian salvation...

..., the object of the natural sciences (“Idea,” 262–63). But as the progress of the essay’s argument shows, first nature is actually a projection of second nature. The supposed laws of competition and survival of a nature red in tooth and claw are reflections of a capitalist modernity, not the immutable...

... the modern, and indeed that it does so in a way that concerns modernist ideas of progress, then in fact what we have here is a significant list of dates. Instead of hastily deducing—as the represen- tatives of the posthistoire thesis do—that contemporary art stands for a crisis of progress in general...

... to the idea of progress, for it is precisely the Enlightenment idea of progress through the development of reason that has been challenged by the concomitant development of the forces that make possible humanity’s annihilation. The link between Enlightenment and annihilation developed in Dialectic...

..., Blumenberg published another somewhat anti-academic and partly overlooked essay in the same year, 1974, “On a Lineage of the Idea of Progress,” in which he opposes philosophy with astronomy and argues that the latter might be favorable for understanding the concept of progress. On this essay, see Adelson...

... individualism, compromise, the idea of progress, and blind faith in technology. Strauss promoted the return to a philosophy able to transcend the modern horizon: one that is not based on the currents of seventeenth-century thought and that also avoids the vocabulary of its modern political critique...

... of progress in history illustrates, in addition, a funda- mental philosophical disagreement between the two thinkers. Ultimately, by triangulating among Schiller, Hegel, and Stein, we watch some interesting ideas in motion: ideas of history, of tragedy, of Europe and national identity, and even...

... the idea of progress. Whereas some saw in history the gradual expansion of intellectual powers, the narrator of the “Garden” attributes this progress to more banal causes, such as the consumption of different kinds of foodstuffs—“soybeans play a leading role,” he muses.66 His reference points...

... synthesis dependent on salvation as the meaning of history. When the Scholastic version of monotheism broke down under pressure from nominalist critiques, the expectations associated with the salvation story remained. The progress idea in the wings had been sufficiently validated by experiential success...

... analysis of the contradictory implications of the idea of “progress,” that “the ambiguity of ‘sublimation’ is the psychological symbol of social progress.” 16 Defenders of Freud’s notion of sublimation against his critics, such as Joel Whitebook, have therefore perhaps gone too far in identifying...

... an apocalyptic interpretation of Jew- ish messianism.15 In his view, messianism is neither an abstract hope for change in the distant future nor a gradual and immanent development, which is also characteristic of the secular idea of progress. The coming of the Mes- siah could both entail a restorative...

... idea, but blocked by the actual social circumstances that masquerade as progress. As Adorno says in his essay “Progress,” “Progress would be the very establishment of humanity in the first place, whose prospect opens up in the face of its extinction.” 54 Yet while Dialectic of Enlightenment argues...

... in June 1941, Adorno reported in an often-cited letter to Horkheimer that “none of Benjamin’s works shows him closer to our own intentions. More than anything it is about the idea of history as a permanent catastrophe, the critique of progress as domination of nature, and the stance towards culture...