Moderately Modern wears its thesis on its sleeve. Modern men and
women, those thoroughly imbued with modernity's ideas, hopes, and
projects, need to moderate themselves. They need to rein themselves
in, they need to think and act beyond their comfort zone. Implicit
in this claim, of course, is a slew of topics, claims, and an
argument. What is modernity? What's lacking in it? Where should its
adherents look outside and beyond it? What would they find? And
what would a conjunction of a chastened modernity and a newly
respected outside look like? It would be difficult to find someone
more equipped to raise and pursue these questions than Remi Brague.
Le regne de l'homme: l'echec du projet modern (The kingdom of man:
the failure of the modern project) already laid out his basic
views: modernity is the project of radical anthropocentrism, of man
construed as the sovereign of the world and of his very humanity.
If the traditional order of the West located man within a wider
scheme of God/world/man, with the former two providing models of
excellence for the latter, then modern thought reverses the order,
expelling God and the divine from public centrality and, by means
of technological science, aiming to make man, in Descartes' famous
phrase, "master and possessor of Nature". The Legitimacy of the
Human picks up the theme and surveys the results. Birth dearths,
looming ecological disasters, and the threat of destruction on
enormous scales testify to something having gone terribly awry. Its
concluding chapters advise a reconsideration of the rejected
premodern option: the biblical God and his providential care.
Moderately Modern brings all of the foregoing together, mixing
cultural critique with cultural restoration. It does so in
characteristically Braguean ways: attention to the meaning and
history of important terms; brilliant apercus of the contemporary
scene; enormous learning worn lightly and brought to bear deftly; a
personal tone with intellectual and spiritual gravitas. His theme
being the current condition of the West, this son of the West
brings to bear all that she has made available to her children to
live thoughtful and genuinely human lives. Let us hope that he is
not a Cassandra, but more akin to Isaiah, albeit in a philosophical
mode.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
