Modernity As a Conversation — Investigating Chinese Modernity

The investigation of this paper focuses on the question of how to understand modernity between all different instances called modern. Understanding modernity as a universal might only acknowledge a European modernity, while there are non-western countries like China, that have also become modern countries, without having had a trajectory of thinking towards modern concepts. Where modernity as an inherently European way of thinking has set foot, it adapts and evolves into a variant of modernity being influenced by the certain grounds of ideas that it falls upon. Modernity is established by habituation with technological artifacts and their inherent values as manifestations of technological thinking. Yet, the initial thinking that is present in the context which is entered by modernity is relevant for the paradigm into which it will evolve. The values carried by modern technological artifacts can set foot in contexts and cultures that they were not part of initially. Presenting the example of China — a modern country without a tradition of modern thought - the idea of an adaptable modernity will be elaborated, a concept of modernity that is able to be appropriated and eventually exist in multiple variants. China had a rich and thriving cosmotechnics of knowledge, technical inventions and thought of its own, long before modern China came into place. Traditional Chinese thinking was not focused on progress, growth, or optimization. It had to meet the challenge of modernization, when it was already defining European science and economy. The awareness of modernity’s accidentality might pose an important stepping stone for overcoming modernity in Europe as well as other contexts.