Marshall Berman describes the experience of "modernity" in the following way: "to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." To explain this state of ambiguity and anguish, Berman refers to the quote made by Marx: "all that is solid melts into air".Berman divides the history of modernity into three phases: (1) The first phase goes from the start of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, in which people begin to experience modern life; (2) The second phase starts with the revolutionary wave of the 1790s and ends in the twentieth century. This stage is characterized by a public that "shares the feeling of living in a revolutionary age" but also "remembers what it is like to live materially and spiritually in a pre-modern age"; (3) The final phase is our own age, in which the process of modernization is so rapid and the achievements of modernism in art and thought are so spectacular that the individuals shatter into a multitude of fragments as the experiential possibilities expand.
Berman considers Nietzsche and Marx as the two most distinctive voices of the nineteenth century modernism. Both share a modernist faith. For example, Nietzsche asserts his faith in a new kind of man: "the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow" who, "standing in opposition to his today," will have the courage and imagination to "create new values." Berman suggests that the twentieth century modernists have substituted the open visions of their predecessors by flat totalizations. The twentieth century critics of modernity (Weber, Maurras, Marcuse) did not share the faith in their fellow modern men and women. Finally, Berman argues that the view of an affirmative and life sustaining force interwoven with disruption and revolt of the nineteenth century modernists must be recalled to give us back a sense of our own modern roots.
The following questions arise from reviewing this essay:
(1) Why Marx considers that life is radically contradictory at its base? Can Marx be considered a modernist?
(2) What is Nietzsche's dialectical motion perspective of modernity? How is this view related to the traumatic events that Nietzsche called "the death of God" and "the advent of nihilism"?
(3) Can the inner tensions of modernism be the primary source of its creative power? Should individuals struggle to reduce the contradictions and ambiguity of modernism?
(4) Why can the view of the nineteenth century critics, such as Nietzsche, Marx, Tocqueville and Kierkegaard, be considered as open ended?
(5) In what does the "One-Dimensional Man" paradigm consists? Do you agree with it?
(6) According to Berman, what is the main flaw of pop modernism?
(7) How do we reconcile our desire for clear and solid values to live by with our desire to "embrace the limitless possibilities of modern life and experience that obliterate all values"?
Berman's book All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity can be found in the following Amazon's link:
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