Exmodernity as a Restart of History

History does not move in a straight line, nor does it close in a circle. It works differently: through the exhaustion of forms, through the zeroing of foundations, and through unexpected returns—not backward, but inward. It is in this sense that exmodernity can be understood as a restart of history. Not as a reaction to modernity and not as a correction of its errors, but as a fresh start after the previous logic has exhausted itself to the end.

Modernity was great precisely because it was radical. It staked everything, refusing the metaphysical supports of the past and betting on matter, rationality, and constructed order. The world came to be thought of as a collection of elements that could be disassembled, measured, rebuilt, and reassembled. The human being—as an autonomous unit. Society—as a mechanism. History—as a project.

Postmodernity carried this logic to its limit. It did not refute modernity; it brought it to its logical conclusion. If everything is constructed, then everything can be deconstructed. If there is no transcendent foundation, then there are no final meanings. If the world is a set of atoms and signs, then any order is conditional, any truth reversible, any future optional. In this sense, postmodernity was not an antagonist of modernity—it was its final phase.

It is precisely for this reason that both modernity and postmodernity converge in one fundamental foundation: in an atomistic-materialist view of reality. The difference between them lies in their attitude toward this foundation, but not in its overcoming. Modernity built, postmodernity dismantled, but both acted within the same ontology, where being is reduced to the material, the measurable, and the conditional.

The exhaustion of this logic manifests not only in philosophy but also in the experience of the world. A feeling arises that history has reached a dead end—not because "everything is over," but because the old tools no longer work. There is nothing to construct, nothing to deconstruct either. Progress has lost direction, critique has lost its object, and irony has lost its force.

The restart of history begins not with the invention of a new project, but with a return to those levels of thinking that were postponed, repressed, or marginalized in the era of the great modernity. Here it is important to understand that even within the ancient tradition, to which appeals are so often made as the "origins of the West," there never existed a single philosophy of the world.

Alongside the line of atomism, ascending to Democritus and later becoming the foundation of materialism and the scientific worldview, there existed in antiquity other, no less powerful directions. One line—from Parmenides to Plato—affirmed the primacy of being over becoming, the eternal over the changeable, the intelligible over the sensible. Another—associated with Heraclitus and receiving mature form in Aristotle—thought of form and spirit as immanent to matter, inseparable from it, but not reducible to mechanics and quantity. These lines were not exotic, marginal, or "early stages" of future materialism. They constituted equal foundations of ancient thought and for a long time coexisted as different ways of understanding reality.

And it is important that even this is only one example within one civilizational tradition. Beyond antiquity there existed and exist other philosophical and metaphysical schools, other ontologies and ways of relating humans to the world that were not continuations of either atomism or European rationalism. In the era of modernity and postmodernity, all these lines were pushed into the shadows—not because they were refuted, but because one of them was elevated to the rank of the universal, and then, already in postmodernity, turned into a thing in itself, having lost even its own alternativeness.

Modernity made a choice in favor of one of them, transforming it into a universal foundation. Everything else was either translated into the realm of myth, or aesthetics, or private belief. Postmodernity, destroying universality, did not return these lines to the game, but merely removed from them the remnants of authority, leaving the field empty.

Exmodernity begins at the moment when this emptiness ceases to be neutral. The restart of history means that postponed, repressed, and unfinished lines of thinking become relevant again—not as restoration and not as nostalgia, but as sources of new trajectories. This concerns not only ancient heritage but also other civilizational traditions that never fully fit into the modernist project and therefore preserved different relations to being, time, and meaning.

It is important to emphasize: this is not a return to a "pre-project" state and not a rejection of the achievements of modernity. The restart does not erase previous versions of history. It launches a new branch after the exhaustion of the old. Technologies, science, rationality do not disappear, but cease to be the sole foundation of the world. Matter is no longer thought of as everything that exists, and rationality—as the only permissible way of thinking.

In this sense, exmodernity is not a new "idea of the future" but a restoration of the depth of the historical field. History becomes open again because a metaphysical dimension returns to it—not in the form of dogma, but in the form of possibility. The world ceases to be a closed constructor and again begins to be perceived as something having an internal structure exceeding human projects.

The restart of history is the moment when humanity ceases to consider itself the author of being and again finds itself its participant. Not subordinate, but not an architect either. This is the fundamental difference of the new era from those departing: history no longer "continues" and is not "cancelled." It begins anew—at a deeper level than before.