The signature of modernity, that which cuts across all areas of inquiry, is the rejection of teleology. One might contend that to be ‘modern’ is precisely to be ‘ateleological’. Thus in modernity the teleological aspects of any science—whether physics and biology or politics and ethics—are discarded. And any science which is necessarily teleological throughout its entire structure—such as metaphysics—is discarded entirely.
Martin Heidegger articulated the essence of modernity in what Francis Slade calls the “fundamental sentence” of Sein und Zeit: “Höher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Möglichkeit”—i.e., possibility is higher than reality, or the potential is greater than the actual.