Philosophical Misreading Of Modernity And Its Sociological Interpretation

Chinese discourses on modernity include several modes of thoughts: holism, historical evolutionary, stage theory of history, historicism, philosophy-worship, all of them are not Chinese traditional thoughts but imported from western thoughts. Western modern philosophies include four important paradigms: philosophy of mind, speculative philosophy, practical philosophy, philosophy of life, whose common"family resemblance"is self-identified subjectivity. In modern philosophies, subjectivities repeat the movements of returning to itself, including reflection of mind, awareness of"absolute spirit", objectified labor, monologue of self-expression, etc. Philosophically interpreted modernity inevitalbely has defects of self-dilating, rejection of others, cultural colonialism, etc. Interpretation of modernity by modern philosophies must be misreading, so we need to introduce sociological paradigm. There is already a paradigm shift to sociology in Marx's critique of German classical philosophies. Weber's studies on"rationalization"have become a standard interpretation of modernity, in which"modernity"gets a strong connection with"rationalism","subjectivity","legalized rule","bureaucracy"and"calculative reason". After Weber,"post-modernist"sociologies, Simmel, Foucault, Beck, Bauman, provide some new kinds of modernity language. They re-constructe grammatic relations among"modernity","rationalism","subjectivities","legalization","individuality", re-produce meanings of these concepts. Chinese studies on modernity should break away from modes of modern western thoughts and adopt philosophy of culture as paradigm.