Modernity (n.) is an attitude (or mode of relating, thinking, feeling, and acting) rather than a period of history. It is an attitude that heroizes the present and is an ethos of perpetual critique.
Modernity (n.) is distinguished not from the premodern or the postmodern, but with countermodernity.
Modernity (n.) is equated with that spirit of perpetual transformation, that 'feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment' which alone enables us to grasp what is authentic in our experience of contemporary art-forms and life-styles alike.
Modernity (n.) is not a period in time, but an ethos.
Modernity (n.) is not a specific historical event, but a historical conjunction which has happened differently several times in our history... with socrates, with the decline of the hellenistic world, and with kant.
Modernity (n.) is not about recognizing or accepting perpetual movement, but in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement consisting of recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.
Modernity (n.) is shaped by the renunciation of the 'spiritual' dimension of truth, that is, of the idea that truth has a relation to the practical conduct of the self.
Modernity (n.) is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment it is the will to heroize the present.
Modernity (n.) is the philosophical ethos of permanent critique practiced upon our historical era.
Modernity (n.) is the will to 'heroize' the present.