Modernism: notes toward a philosophical approach

This article proposes a philosophical understanding of modernism through the work of Stanley Cavell, bringing it into dialogue with Wittgenstein, American Transcendentalism, and traditions of moral perfectionism. Modernism is presented not only as an artistic crisis but as a cultural predicament in which inherited forms of expression lose their natural authority and must be earned anew. The essay explores how modernist thought reshapes the relation between philosophy, culture, and the ordinary, emphasizing themes of naturalness, intimacy, vulnerability, and the transformation of language. It argues that philosophy responds to cultural crises by recovering and cultivating the conditions of agreement and forms of life from within, and shows how Cavell’s later turn to Emersonian perfectionism reframes modernist concerns through a romantic recovery of the world and the ordinary.