Foundations of postmodernity: history of modern from Spengler to Foucault

Abstract

The article undertakes a comparative analysis of the concepts of modernity that emerged in the works of Oswald Spengler and Michel Foucault. A comparative examination of the positions of the two authors serves as the basis for a larger analysis of the foundations of the form of thought that makes discourse about modernity possible, regardless of the explicit or implicit intentions of the subject behind it. The author demonstrates that the similarity between the concepts of Spengler and Foucault is primarily external; the style of thinking, goals and theoretical platform do not allow us to talk about deep and significant similarities between these thinkers. However, there is a very obvious point of convergence between these two types of discourse — the idea of modernity not as an eternal “now”, shifting along a chronological scale over the course of historical time, but as a unique historical moment that occurs under certain conditions. Despite the fact that Foucault retains an implicit idea of universal history, Spengler has a completely absent one, despite Foucault’s radical subversion of the subject of history, which Spengler preserves under the name of culture, and finally, despite Spengler’s dynamism and the statics of Foucault’s transversal analyses, which is related to morphology history and historical epistemology, the desire to build a picture of history based not on metaphysics and ontology, but on epistemology and a structural approach to objects, two such dissimilar authors must meet at this common point.