Alienation

Modernity is marked by an extreme fear of relativism that Bernstein (1983:18) calls Cartesian Anxiety. It takes many forms — religious, metaphysical, epistemological and moral. At the heart of the objectivist's vision, and what makes sense of his or her passion, is the belief that there must be some permanent, secure constraints to which we can appeal. In contrast, relativism casts us adrift:

At its most profound level the relativist's message is that there are no such basic constraints except those that we invent or temporally (and temporarily) accept. Relativists are suspicious of their opponents because, the relativists claim, all species of objectivism almost inevitably turn into vulgar or sophisticated forms of ethnocentrism in which some privileged understanding of rationality is falsely legitimated by claiming for it an unwarranted universality. The primary reason why the agon between objectivists and relativists has become so intense today is the growing apprehension that there may be nothing—not God, reason, philosophy, science, or poetry—that answers to and satisfies our longing for ultimate constraints, for a stable and reliable rock upon which we can secure our thought and action (Bernstein 1983:19).

With the increasing variety and pace of change in worldviews we Moderns question all frameworks. The frameworks from which our predecessors took their meaning have lost their foundations. We must seek meaning from our inner resources, yet when we look inside ourselves we find uncertainty because we have been cut off from everything that once supplied the resources we are seeking. This is what Weber meant by disenchantment — the dissipation of our sense of the cosmos as a meaningful order:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental (Weber 1919).

Hegel (1966:215) called Christianity the agent of disenchantment:

Christianity has depopulated Valhalla, hewn down the sacred groves, and rooted out the phantasy of the people as shameful superstition, as a diabolical poison.

Ultimately, Modernity disenchanted Christianity as well. This disenchantment altered the framework in which people had lived their spiritual lives. Nietzsche, in his "God is dead" passage used the term 'horizon' to characterize such constructions:

How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? (Nietzsche 1887:paragraph 125).

Though Modernity questions all frameworks, we nonetheless can not live our lives without some framework. To have no source of meaning, no values, and no context within which to define our world would render us inhuman or insane.

 Though frameworks change as societies change, we cannot dispense with them altogether. Like language, they are a fundamental constituent of who we are, how we think and why we act. We come to full expression of our selves through our frameworks and cannot exist without them. Any social science which purports to understand what we are about must take account of them and the anxiety that occurs when they clash with others' worldviews.

The solution to this tension lies not in searching for firmer foundations, but in finding modes of expression that give us clearer insight. 

Our understanding differs between competing philosophies of science — empiricism, pragmatism, idealism, realism — all have different 'takes' on what constitutes theory, knowledge, and the contents of the universe. Choosing one perspective shapes possible questions, acceptable answers, and comes freighted with metaphysical assumptions about the world and human/nature interactions. 

We cannot authentically embrace any particular position without acknowledging our prejudices and adopting a particular perspective relative to others. We are turned back to geo-historically situated knowledge — not knowledge of the essence of the world in isolation — but rather understanding in a context of places, periods, narratives, vocabularies, and metaphysical assumptions. This knowledge is scientific, but also relative, aware of history and the views of others. It is value-laden, practical and ethical, part of an ongoing discourse in critical and hermeneutic (interpretivist) studies. Perhaps the best way to understand this shifting ground of subjectivity and objectivity is through the notion of frameworks.