In many modern societies, there is a widespread tendency to associate the consciousness of modernity with a consciousness of superiority. Naturally, there is also admiration for many of the distinctive features of premodern societies. Indeed, it is not unusual to find nostalgia for what seems to have been lost in the course of progress, even as, beyond that, every modern society considers tolerance toward what is foreign and other than it to be one of its basic obligations. Nevertheless, even this demand already implies a separation from the non-modern, because it is itself part of a consciousness of having reached a higher, more developed standpoint than everything that does not share in modernity's specific achievements. For most people, the roots of this consciousness lie in an awareness of man's free self-determination, with all the consequences modernity derives from this: freedom of conscience, of opinion, of property, recognition of the dignity of every person as an individual capable of the same degree of self-determination, etc.

Nonetheless, too little attention is given to the fact that these values, though positive in themselves, are susceptible to very different interpretation, or to the fact that they have, at least as they have been interpreted in Western societies since the Enlightenment, often led to several highly negative effects. One of these negative effects is a widespread dichotomy of thought, one that, moreover, entails a historically problematic thesis since it distinguishes modernity from the non-modern as its strict antithesis.