The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism

The Persistence of Modernity presents four essays by one of Germany's foremost philosophers that go to the heart of a number of contemporary issues: Adorno's aesthetics, the nature of a postmodern ethics, and the persistence of modernity in the so-called postmodern age. Albrecht Wellmer defends the general thesis that modernity contains its own critique and that what has been called postmodernism is in fact a further articulation of that critique. More specifically, his essays offer a reinterpretation of Adorno's aesthetics in the framework of a postutopian philosophy of communicative reason, an analysis of the postmodern critique of instrumental reason and its subject that becomes an argument for democratic pluralism and universalism, a discussion of the dialectics of modernism and postmodernism in the context of architecture and industrial design, and a dialogical ethics that is inspired by and yet takes issue with Habermas's discourse ethics.