Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition
Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition
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现代性：一个、没有还是多个？
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发表时间：
2002
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通讯作者：
B. Wittrock
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作者：
B. Wittrock
原载：《代达罗斯》，2000年，第129卷，2001年。作者论证了一个概念，即现代性与其说是一种新的统一的文明，不如说是一种全球性的文明，它的广泛性是无与伦比的，它的侵入性和破坏性是无与伦比的。相反，现代性是一套期票，即，一系列希望和期望，这些希望和期望需要一些最低限度的适当条件，这些条件可能是对宏观社会机构的要求，无论这些机构在其他方面可能有多大的不同。因为，从文化和制度两个方面来看，正如作者所证明的，现代性从它在欧洲的基本思想一开始，就以制度形式和概念结构的高度可变性为特征。它提供了具有全球意义的参考点，并成为世界范围内机构项目的结构原则。因此，他认为，我们可以把现代性看作是一个时代，在这个时代，某些结构原则已经定义了一个共同的全球条件。这种全球性条件的存在并不意味着任何单一文化共同体的成员即将放弃他们的本体论和宇宙论假设，更不用说他们的制度了。然而，这意味着，对这些承诺和体制结构的不断解释、重新解释和转变，不能不考虑现代性的全球条件的共性。
Originally published: “Daedalus”, 2000, vol. 129, № 1. The author substantiates a concept according to which modernity is not so much a new unified civilization, global in its extensiveness, unparalleled in its intrusiveness and destructiveness. Rather, modernity is a set of promissory notes, i.e., a set of hopes and expectations that entail some minimal conditions of adequacy that may be demanded of macrosocietal institutions no matter how much these institutions may differ in other respects. For, in both cultural and institutional terms, modernity, as the author demonstrates, from the very inception of its basic ideas in Europe, has been characterized by high degree of variability in institutional forms and conceptual constructions. It has provided reference points that have become globally relevant and that have served as structuring principles behind institutional projects on a worldwide scale. Thus, he believes, we may look upon modernity as an age when certain structuring principles have come to define a common global condition. The existence of this global condition does not mean that members of any single cultural community are about to relinquish their ontological and cosmological assumptions, much less their institutions. It means, however, that the continuous interpretation, reinterpretation, and transformation of those commitments and institutional structures cannot but take account of the commonality of the global condition of modernity.