Postmodernity

This breaking down of modernity can’t be given a precise date, as it was a long and gradual process. However, just as the Enlightenment was the period in which modernity took shape, post-modern philosophers tend to agree that the two world wars were what announced the end of modernity. Jean-François Lyotard, one of the pioneers of post-modern philosophy, says that Auschwitz “is the crime which opened the post-modern era”[1]. Not all agree on the exact point in time, some say for example that it was the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The idea, however, is the same: that modernity’s belief in human progress through technology was suddenly shattered as this technology was used for entirely negative purposes. In dialectic terms there is no possible aufhebung*, modernity is dead.

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[1] Lyotard J.-F., The Postmodern explained. p. 19