This article explores and compares the two perspectives on modernity> the humanitarian and the anti-humanitarian. The former employs such metaphysical concepts as freedom, equality, repression and emancipation, while the latter prefers such sociolo...
This article explores and compares the two perspectives on modernity> the humanitarian and the anti-humanitarian. The former employs such metaphysical concepts as freedom, equality, repression and emancipation, while the latter prefers such sociological terminologies as secularization, differentiation and systems. Those two perspectives provide a fundamentally different understandings of the relationship between man and modernity, which eventually leads us to have a conflicting view on the relationship among man, society and history. According to the humanitarian perspective, man has always longed for the paradise lost. In contrast, the anti-humanitarian perspective argues that what was lost is the paradigm able to grasp the society as a whole, not the paradise.