The Veer Towers of the New Modernism: Proceduralism or Timocracy?
The Veer Towers of the New Modernism: Proceduralism or Timocracy?

Summary/Abstract: Veer Towers (2010) – one of the architectural works designed by Helmut Jahn – is here only a good allegory of the healthy scepticism after 9/11, regarding the new modernism. They may be seen as being iconologically linked with the philosophical question of its founding, namely, with the reasons for its perception as new in relation to the historical modernism. To this end, it is first necessary to consider the concept of the end of modernity. We can argue that, contrary to the claims of Gianni Vattimo, postmodernism can be viewed as a necessary development or return of modernism, which is primarily the mission of the post-Kantian proceduralism of Jürgen Habermas. However, a major role in the proposed strategy for the sustainable inclusion of the Other should be again played by anger, as suggested by Peter Sloterdijk. Must then the new – contortive or loose – modernism veer into another disaster? Will this attempt to control resentiments – such as the anger of the political Islam – force a turn to some timocracy well-known from the past, if proceduralism is in fact only a tortuously delayed voluntarism or quasi-occasionalism?

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