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The Epochal Concept of "Early Modernity" and the Intellectual History of Late Imperial China*
ON-CHO NG
Pennsylvania State University
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One of the most revealing historiographic debates concerning the nature and meaning of European modernity is that between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg. Löwith argues that modernity is illegitimate because the dominating motif of progress is in actuality the Christian eschatological worldview cloaked in a secularized veneer. Modern thought, notwithstanding its lavish claim of possessing the true human genius, is cursed by a fundamentally inauthentic consciousness because of its inextricable entanglement with Christian theology.1 Blumenberg refutes Löwith's dim view of modernity by offering a historico-philosophical defense of the notion of progress and the self-assertion of the individual. They were, to him, historically reasonable responses to the problems generated by the overarching theme of divine omnipotence in the scholastic philosophy and thought of the Late Middle Ages.2 |
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The merit and demerit of their arguments regarding the contents of modernity need not concern us here. What is noteworthy for our purpose is that although Blumenberg and Löwith are at odds as regards the nature of modernity, both subscribe to a lineal scheme of interpreting historical movement: the former sees genuine progress; the latter discerns retrogression. Both assert that the early modern experiences that began in the seventeenth century eventually yielded modernity, whose attributes were fully exhibited in the Enlightenment. Thus, a particular time in the Western European world, a segment of the past, given historical import and meaning, becomes an identifiable epoch/ period/era—the epoch/period/era of modernity, distinct from previous (medieval, early modern) and subsequent (contemporary, postmodern) ones. |
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According to the late Michel de Certeau, beginning in the sixteenth century and especially by the seventeenth century, a new acute historical sensibility arose that demanded the substantive separation of the present from the past. The "moderns" were now set qualitatively apart from the "ancients." Moreover, the European encounter with other lands also inspired a new historical imagination, stimulated by the expansion of the physical horizons. Thus, modern historiography began with the act of temporal division, distinguishing its present time from a past. This act was then repeated, further cutting chronology up into segments; in other words, this was the act of periodization, whence emerged periods such as the Middle Ages or modernity. Each time period in turn provided the site for a discourse, which is the delineation of the lineaments of that very period.3 "Ephochocentricity," as Gordon Graham dubs it, is a hallmark of modern historiography.4 We may also point out that these historical time breakages and ruptures of medievality, early modernity, and so forth are ideological formulations by European historians to serve their teleological conception of the modern, and to denote the pasts that the modern world has transcended.5 By the late nineteenth century, there was the full-blown notion of modernity, established as the most secure point of departure of the backward glance at history; it was the yardstick whereby the achievements of the past were measured. This notion (or ideological myth) of modernity embodied the sanguine view that the momentous developments in the seventeenth century, summed up by the commitment to rationality and progress, guided Western Europe and North America onto a particular path of historical growth, so much so that peoples in those lands were far better off and freer than their forebears in medieval and antique times.6 |
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