On The Messianic Thought In Modern Philosophy

Although the positive aspects of modernity are obvious,but the disaster and evil brought by modernity to our world are also equally clear.In the modern world,after "disenchantment",the absolute truth and the value standard provided by the traditional society completely lost their certainty and legitimacy.Hegel had revealed that modern society is self-contradictory and self-divided.Similarly,Kant also touched on the plight of enlightenment itself and understood it as a self-paradox duality of modern world — the binary opposition between natural causality and freedom of will,between facts and values,between epistemology and ethics,etc.In the case of Weber,the inner connection between such a modernity process and reasonableness is self-evident,despite the obvious tragical trait;however,other thinkers such as Heidegger and Bataille stressed the oppressive side of the instrumental rationality to expose the dominance of the will of the power in order to call forth a source of the mysterious rescue power.Thus,there emerged a split between modernity and reasonableness,and the basic conceptual system of self-understanding of European modernity was also called into question.This article mainly concentrate on the four most representative thinkers-Nietzsche,Heidegger,Benjamin and Derrida to analyze and comment on its review and reflection on the process of western modernity.Nietzsche made a refutation of the dialectics of enlightenment by the ancient Greek tragedy of Dionysus,then carried out a deep attack on the rationality of modernity itself and finally based on the mythology;Benjamin made a comprehensive and profound critique toward the " progressive myth" of the industrial society in the famous artical "On the philosophy of history",dismissed it as a tool for the self-righteous blind trust of rational power.By deconstructing the subjective metaphysics from the inside,Heidegger exposed its "forgetting of existence" and explored the basic concepts of the philosophical ontology of consciousness in order to reveal the objectizing technique in the whole process of western philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche.Derrida in the same time continued and abandoned Heidegger's theory of the deconstruction of existence,and summoned a "forthcoming Messiah".