The *printing press* presents the society with yet another overflow of meaning. The criticality now consists in the ubiquity of an audience used to be able to read books and newspapers, pamphlets and certificates, files and records, and assumed to actually do their reading, even if highly selectively and always idiosyncratically so, on the one hand, and an individualization of the selective use of printed matters, on the other. Almost anybody has read something, and not just the Holy Scriptures, but also comments, novels, and reports. Yet these are not read aloud in order to be admired and to get copied, like in monasteries before, but read silently and individually in study rooms and offices in order to be compared among each other and to be evaluated according to the possibility of different, if not divergent, opinions. The printing press is the birth of a general public which is not confined any more within the boundaries of social strata, and of the individual who is forced to learn how to move in situations which demand both education, i.e. the ability to select what to have read and what not, and diversity, i.e. the ability to surprise with different, yet interesting opinion.

The printing press disseminates communication not only among people absent and present, but also among people having to take their own stance toward the matter communicated. It is not only belief any more, and admiration, which is necessary to deal with the printed word, but also *comparison and criticism*. The overflow consists in these comparisons and criticisms being presented in places appropriate and inappropriate. The Enlightenment hoped for individuals able to draw reason out of, and re-invest into, what they read, such that the public, as a kind of supreme instantiation of this reason, both encourages reading and controls its outcome (Immanuel Kant). But this hope for reason, a sort of *telos* re-applied to itself, comes too late, if the real problem in communication does not consist in knowing what is right, or wrong, or which opinion might be justified, and which one not, but in knowing how to move from one opinion to another one, if they all have a certain right to them and all know to attract their reader.

This is what Montaigne in his essay "An Apology for Raymond Sebond" discovers, and what Descartes in his "Discours de la méthode" brings to the point: As soon as the individual reader, reading along and being alone with himself or herself, is confronted with not only divergent, but possibly contradictory opinions he or she is not in any position to decide on, it only helps to move on and to doubt everything, even while possibly enjoying it, save doubting oneself being the one who reads. The most important discovery by Descartes does not consist in a method to produce evident knowledge, which he looked for but did not find, but in the *morale par provision*, which he proposed to maintain in the meantime and which proved to be of lasting value. This *morale par provision* offers four principles which lay down the hidden ethical codex of modern society: First, do not pull down your buildings as long as you are still building a new one, since you need a place to stay in as long as the new one is not yet finished; second, be obedient toward the laws and mores of your country exactly as the most level-headed people among your contemporaries are; third, be firm with your actions, even if they are not certain, because the traveller only succeeds in leaving the forest if he keeps direction; and, fourth, overcome rather yourself, and not the destiny, change rather your desires, and not the order of the world, because it is only our thoughts which actually are within our powers. The last of these principles, of course, is the venerable one already spelled out by roman stoicism when it proposes to distinguish matters we have command over, from matters we do not (Epictetus). From these principles Descartes decides, in the middle of a winter night in 1619/20 near Ulm, Germany, where he was struck by the imperfection of all knowledge, to rather go about and cultivate his mind.

Luhmann, in his conjecture about the culture forms of different dissemination media, proposes to call Descartes' invention of a kind of restless countering of all possible situations, a kind of skeptical comparison of anything with everything else, the culture form of the modern society emerging from its dealing with the introduction of the printing press. A constant search for equilibrium and for values is just the other side of a successful, even if unhappy, because inherently divided (Hegel), adaptation to the dynamics of a society, which develops confessional wars, protest movements, science, the market economy, democracy, and bureaucracy out of its mass distribution of scriptures, pamphlets, books, letters, papers, paper money, polling cards, and files.

A relentless *restlessness* replaces, as the dominant culture form, the reliance on both metacommunication and purpose, which both stay with us, to be sure, but are refined to interaction and to organization, respectively. The overall society gets dynamically temporalized, demanding of social action to deal with the surplus meaning of comparison and criticism, and changing, therefore, to lay the appropriately nervous foundations of its social order, from a reliance on social strata to a reliance on symbolically generalized media of communication, which are money and power, truth and belief, love and art, perhaps even values.

All of these media that come to make probable the success of communication in times when due to comparison and criticism that success gets ever more improbable, are visible in their semantic foundations already in Greek antiquity, but, like evolutionarily pre-adaptive universals, they only now replace other structures to more generally order the society and become the main tracks for the selection and motivation of communication. Note, that they come to be able to motivate communication because of their selectivity: Money buys without asking for social bonds; power forces without asking for agreement; truth may convince without asking for an appropriate change of action; and love binds passionately without asking for economic or political reason. This selectivity becomes the moral scandalon of modern society, and the reason of its evolutionary success.

That is why we propose to call these *success media* of communication the number form of the printing press society, i.e. of the modern society. These media define the blanks, the empty spaces to be filled by selective action, without actually asking which individual from what social stratum is behind that action. Modern society programmatically includes everybody, which means, every individual on the basis of his and her human rights indistinct with respect to ethnical, religious, economic, educational, gender, or whatever difference. That is why exclusion only now begins to become an issue, it could not have been a social problem before.

The other side of this universal inclusion of the individual is its individualization. The structure of modern society consists in blanks being defined such as to be filled by individual decisions yet to be undertaken, and to be undertaken without recourse to any universal criteria of what is right and what is wrong. These blanks obey the social logic, so to speak, not of the individual and its needs and desires, but of their networking among further chances to buy and sell, command and obey, love and be loved, discover as true and as false, decide as legal or illegal, belief and disbelief, or percept as beautiful or ugly.

To have to do this, and to do this all day and every day, indeed demands a lot of these individuals imitating each other yet also having to distinguish themselves from one another. *Morals* come in handy to provide the modern society with a re-entry which refers to a sort of transcendental values, which allow both to affirm and to negate what is here to be decided on every day. Morals provide for values which, on the one hand, are subject to comparison and criticism just as anything else in the modern society, yet, on the other, again and again try to get beyond comparison and criticism even if that proves to be in vain. Morals gets along with any one of these success media of communication by bringing about differentiated sets of values, while at the same time applying for a unified version of the social order of the society subordinating everything to some *summum bonum*. Yet and much to the dismay of ethical philosophy such a hierarchy of values is impossible, since their very comparison is impossible due to their being based on individual utilities which are beyond social judgement (Kenneth J. Arrow). That is why morals is suitable as the reflection form of modern printing press society in the first place. Values are beyond comparison and criticism. That is why people keep to think that they can claim them to found their comparisons and criticisms on them.

Perhaps fatally this feature of morals being beyond comparison in modernity is focusing particularly on the *evil*, not only on the good. The evil is considered to be beyond intelligibility, i.e. beyond comparison and criticism. That seems to be part of a possible explanation of the attractiveness of the evil as a position to look at, and not only look at, but also to rely on for possible interventions into, the society (see Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky). The evil is as restless as steady, as radically individual as beyond individuality, as critical as beyond criticism, and, above all, as attractive as repulsive. In modern society it takes the place of both the gods and the reality, wrapping these into a semantics of horror and seduction, which is neither religious nor objectivistic but searching for the impossible becoming true, thus bringing the meaning form of modern society to its vanishing point.