Notes on modernity through the Western canon: the rise of rationality, scientific method, technological power, bureaucracy, progress, nihilism, freedom, and the problem of the good life.
The aim is not to reject modernity from a distance, nor to celebrate it uncritically. It is to read the thinkers who made its tensions visible and use them to ask better questions about the world we inhabit.
Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Weber, and Heidegger on a question that becomes harder as modernity becomes more capable: what happens when optimization becomes our default language for living?
This is a blog about modernity. I am interested in the intellectual history behind the world we now take for granted: why calculation became a model of reason, why progress became an expectation, why technological power became entangled with the idea of human advancement, and what may be lost when those categories become unquestioned.
The route into those questions is the Western canon—especially Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Kafka, and the thinkers in conversation with them. They disagree profoundly. That disagreement is part of the point.