On The Culture Of Modernity And The Antinomies

The problem of modernity has been one of the most important issues during the 20th century. The culture of modernity became a major subject of philosophical theories and sociological theories. Because of the distinct background and original standpoints, Eastern European Neo-Marxism contributed a lot to the critique of culture in the 20th century. Gyorgy Markus as the representative of the Budapest School from Hungary devoted last thirty years of research towards a theory of the culture of modernity, and the great depth of his knowledge of the history of culture and philosophy inform all his writing. Generally, Markus investigated the cultural crisis in modern world in his critique of culture. He discussed no less serious a matter than the fate of the project of modernity, In his opinion, culture was used today in two senses which at the first glance were so distinct and different. They were anthropological concept of culture and value-marked conception of culture. They were interlocked constituents of one and the same project which was the Enlightenment. The semantical "confusion" of the two notions of culture, so completely different, and nevertheless inseparable, was only the outward sign of the genuine antinomies of our cultural situation. However, Markus could not agree with the idea of overcoming the contradictions of modernity. He thought that conflicting, agonistic pluralism was the basic source of modernistic dynamism. So, Markus formulated his critique of metaphor of base and superstructure, the critique of the notion of ideology and the critique of paradigms. The critical theories of Markus denied the sense of a unidirectional causal thought and claimed that the development of cutural modernity ought to be the continuous process of an uninterrupted dialogue between different cultures and different forms of life. Thus, self-reflection upon culture acquired the character of critique.