Modernity - Postmodernity

While reading Baudelaire “The Painter of Modern Life” I was perplexed as to why the author was continuously ‘explaining’ beauty to the readers. Why does beauty play such a significant role? Upon reading the complete text, “Modernity – Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” followed by the discussion in class, I understood. Baudelaire used ‘beauty’ as a metaphor to describe modernity and, indirectly, postmodernity. Modernity, as Baudelaire states, is a constant transformation; like beauty, it adapts to what our philosophic thought is at the time. There are two elements of ‘beauty’/ modernity, the invariable element and the circumstantial element. The age of modernity is possessing ‘curiosity’; it is “…to extract from fashion whatever element it may obtain of poetry with in history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.” (Baudelaire 12) In other words Baudelaire is professing modernity is to take away what is everlasting from what is always changing and to create something new, different, and inspiring.

Modernity is ‘transformation’ and with transformation we create new human environments and destroy others. During modernity we seem to have lost the romanticism in life by acutely focusing on material things. With modernity came the ‘American Dream’, Marylin Monroe, and the importance of technology. A thoughtful statement to explain this all is how Baudelarie said, “And as a result of all this, we find ourselves today in the midst of a modern age that has lost touch with the roots of its own modernity.”

From modernity to postmodernity it is almost impossible to decipher where the switch happened exactly since there was never a particular date. Modernity, though, started this whole ‘culture’ of absurdity, meaninglessness, and surrealism. Before and after World War II there was a certain transition that finally led to the profoundly introspective question ‘what is the meaning in life?’ I believe the media took this question and started throwing all kinds of answers out at people to give them hope, a goal, or an answer for fulfillment. Postmodernity now shows the explosion of media, explosion of technology and speed, as well as the explosion of the word ‘re…’ Now the question seems to be “what is reality?” That, I believe, is how we slowly ended our last class.