/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18211562]

>The absolutistic state as a guardian of peace and order fulfilled a functional role. However, as peace was gradually normalised, the sovereign lost its legitimacy. The indispensible nature of the state became disposable. It even went further, because “protection by the state was replaced by protection from the state”.

>The personal sphere increased and changed character. Innocence disappeared. It could be private and involve the shaping of the individual or it could be collective. It was moral and moralising. Morals – the critical moral, the moral critique – came to consider itself superior to the explicitly morally neutral state. Morality and critique became the art that taught people that princes and states are disposable – it became a challenging art and competing politicum.

>The secret was the location of morals. It was here that new ideas regarding freedoms and rights developed: “in his private world man was free; there alone was he human.” And: “Freedom in secret became the secret of freedom.” The hidden was the essence of the existence for the Illuminati and Freemasons. The Freemasons expressed the social interests of the new bourgeois, but more importantly they expressed the ideas of the enlightenment. The Masonic Lodge expressed a moral verdict of the sovereign prince both through its critique and its mere existence; in contrast, the prince saw a reduction in his area of control and appeared despotic.

[Anonymous No.18211568]

>Koselleck’s portrayal of the genesis of modernity is dense. Critique and crisis are constituent, controlling, significant and typical elements. The genesis is “pathogenic”, not because it would be about a story of deterioration, but rather because it is marred with suffering – from religious and revolutionary wars, from the loss of experience and experience of losses which becomes reality once modernity is in motion. Koselleck writes that modernity is in “a state of permanent crisis”, crisis is the “signature of the modern era”, “the elastic paradigm of the modern era”. Koselleck also writes that “because of its diagnostic and predicative meaning, the term “crisis” became the indicator of a new awareness”, which in turn corresponds to a society essentially characterised by Herrschaftslosigkeit, the absence of legitimate political and social order.

>The modern awareness of crisis, or the modern consciousness as crisis consciousness, is the consciousness that, latently or overtly, is critical to the world. The critique sweeps and makes everything disposable to critique, to the possibility of understanding and doing things differently. If everything can be understood and done differently, then the crisis is real. Then the critical mindset is once again necessary and possible. The dialectic between critique and crisis determines modernity, not only in terms of its pathology but also its freedom. Freedom expresses and presupposes that everything could have been different, that everything could be understood in a different way. The freedom of modernity is always a possibility. However, it also manifests coercion. The modern human being must transform freedom to meaning – a meaning that always can be different. The outcome- modernity – is a society that is characterised by less order and reality, truth and meaning, and more regimes and realities, truths and meanings.

[Anonymous No.18211572]

>Critique and crisis should be understood from a historical or historical-sociological perspective. They are created in specific historical and social contexts as experiences and dispositions. Similarly, they cannot be conceived of and experienced separately, beyond the historical dialectic that they express. This is a focal point in Koselleck’s argument. Historical contexts are also subject to the theoretical concepts and fantasy of the historian. They cannot necessarily be proven, but their nature can be made plausible.

>The transformation of time, human beings and society into concepts with historical meaning is characteristic of the period that Koselleck examines, i.e. the early modern era and the beginning of modernity. Time is conceived as a force, as historical time, as history, it accelerates and encompasses differences, expresses progress and development and occasionally some calmness. Different cultures and ways of life can be found in the same place, at the same point in time. The present time is a permanent shift, “horizons of expectations” are emancipated from the “space of experience” in which they were previously enclosed. Knowledge loses its absolute, eternal, timeless properties in favour for the historical, subjective perspective.

[Anonymous No.18211581]

>>18211562
>absolutistic
Stopped reading here. Absolutely unnecessary.

[Anonymous No.18211813]

tl;dr he's right wing?