The Modernist Problematic: The Crossing of the Rubicon

How it all originated, how could we possibly know, other than taking stealthy recourse to the old standbys of conjecture, inference, and attribution? Interpreting history, that is, delineating a coherent rationale for its momentum and trajectory, in some senses, is anyone’s problematic, parlor-room game of post-factum sapience (and, in that sense, the bold historian reveals usually just as much about herself, and her driving motivations, as any actual revealments of historical pattern). The problem is the perennial one of existential transitivity—or epistemic interference—in the wilful production of human knowledge about humans. Since there is no ideal, ontic resolution of this difficulty (the ontic circle may not be epistemically squared), despite the conceits of traditional positivism, and the nouvelle ambitions of critical realism (as inspired by the work(s) of Roy Bhaskar), this discourse will simply note that as a disclaimer before proceeding to discern, decipher, and allocate, albeit in speculative fashion, a distinctive logos (if not a telos) to the advent of modernism in its founding (and confounding) European guise.