"...an analytic distinction needs to be made between modernity and Enlightenment. The project of modernity entails the appropriation and transformation of the world under the aegis of instrumental reason, through a combination of technical mastery and organizational sophistication, and of the self-disciplined structure of personhood necessary to "carry" this orientation. In this schema, no ends are absolute, save that of the reproduction of that very orientation itself. Enlightenment, on the other hand, refers to the goal, the possibility of realizing a community of citizenship and the social institutions and values required to maintain it. The problems arise as soon as it is realized that Enlightenment as a project must entail a close connection with modernity as project, and that the very attempt to constitute citizens as such will inevitably raise questions about power and its consequences... John Jervis, Exploring the Modern, 233. |
Jervis makes these comments in connection with a discussion of the Holocaust, specifically whether the Nazi extermination of the Jews is a result of modernism, the Enlightenment, both or neither. He concludes that, while they were modern in the specific sense mentioned above, they were anti-Enlightenment. Notice that his version of the modern is not the same as Lyotard's.