Posted on 02/14/2005 5:57:58 PM PST by Hank Kerchief
Stephen R.C.Hicks' Explaining Postmodernism is really a philosophic history journey—it has a definite start, follows clearly marked guide posts and takes us to a logically unavoidable finish line.
In clear simple language, easy to read and often entertaining, Hicks takes us on a guided tour, showing us exactly how and why we have ended up with a culture which is at once blessed by technology and liberal politics—and yet beleaguered by philosophic ideas and related activism that would have us change our lifestyles, indeed, our very thinking, to embrace a darker, centuries old world, dominated by religion and faith, where suffering is the dominant human state.
Hicks' method essentially organizes the prominent philosophers from the 1500's to the present day and groups them according to their philosophic premises, under the dual banners of Enlightenment and Counter Enlightenment. He demonstrates what the essentials of each group is, and how they effect our modern, everyday life, and why the end product of the Counter Enlightenment philosophers is postmodernism and nihilism.
The guided tour starts at the end of the era of "modernism" characterized by Serfdom and Church rule, and moves to the introduction of a new radical philosophic thought (Francis Bacon, 1561 to John Locke 1632), which established a philosophy of "naturalism," stressing perception and reason as human means of knowing the natural world, as opposed to the faith, mysticism and tradition which had preceded it. The emphasis on human autonomy and the fact that each person forms their own character all challenged the pre-modernist thinking of supernaturalism, mysticism, collectivism, and subordination of the individual to "Gods will."
This new philosophy matured into that known as Enlightenment. Hicks demonstrates that acceptance of reason "systematically applied, yields science." From this groundwork of epistemology grew invention, individualism, Capitalist economics, and a "liberal" Western political system. By the mid 1700's, knowledge and technology had exploded at an unprecedented scale into the Industrial Revolution.
However, as Hicks demonstrates, these philosophies were incomplete and suffered a deadly weakness, and were vulnerable to attack. These attacks came first from France and Rousseau, then the German Idealists, exemplified by Kant, Kirkgaard, Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl and Freud.
Continental thinkers, more deeply immersed in religion and church dominance, saw the Enlightenment movement as a thing of horror, a "loss of traditional values" and with an unavoidable end in loss of religion and rampant individualism, which they claimed would see people pitted against each other in hatred and win/lose competition, with the most ruthless succeeding to power and ownership.
The German Idealist intellectuals drew their inspiration from the utter blackness of Rousseau, (1712 - 1778), who stated that the only hope for humanity was to abandon reason, because it had led to the loss of compassion. He advocated a return to a primitive state which would reject science, and replace it with acceptance of God and total submission of the individual to the state. Developing a vigorous epistemology, Continental intellectuals mounted an attack of bitter hostility on the Enlightenment movement.
Hicks does a very good job of drawing these varying philosophical attitudes together to show how they formed the Counter Enlightenment movement which attacked the Enlightenment at its weakest point: its failure to develop the strong epistemological base for its own philosophies.
One cannot help feeling a gratitude to Professor Hicks for being willing to wade through and understand and clearly present works on our behalf that are, even at a superficial reading, horrifying in their intent—which is to destroy everything Enlightenment philosophy has provided in the forms of science, technology, and culture to the Western world for the past 150 - 200 years.
The failed predictions made by the Counter enlightenment philosophers that the Enlightenment would collapse, paving the way for general acceptance of their own world view, led to the activist forms of those philosophies in the form of politics, Socialism and Marxist Communism, which also explains why the Counter Enlightenment and its successor, postmodernism, are also predominantly "left wing" in their political activities.
Hicks shows how the equally wrong and failed predictions of the Socialist and Communist movements that Capitalism, (even the pseudo-Capitalism it has become) would inevitably fail, leading to a mass uprising of "proletariat against leaders," has led to the bitterness of the modern postmodernists philosophers with their attendant rage and nihilism which seeks to destroy everything Enlightenment thinking has brought us.
The end of this excellent guided tour demonstrates how Franco-German idealism moved into America and gained precedence in the Western world, which had grown from a philosophy of reason, individualism, and autonomy. Hicks shows us how the academic philosophers—such "leading lights" as Richard Rorty and Herbet Marcuse—not only put down and spread the roots of a socialist epistemology, but by changing basic premises they achieve their aim of destroying individualism and Capitalism.
One of Hicks most profound insights concerns the relationship between the Frankfurt School of mainly German intellectuals trained in Kant, Heidegger, and the theories of Sigmund Freud. Freud stated (in Civilization and its Discontents, 1930. Cited by Hicks) that "civilization is an unstable surface phenomenon based on the repression of instinctual energies" (my italics).
With his claim that the conflict between the need of society to regulate the chaos this supposedly causes and the resultant "conflict" caused in the individual leading to "hysterics, obsession and phobias" Freud offered the Frankfurt and postmodern philosophers a theory (psychology) that is "admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of Capitalism."
This weapon was introduced in America by American student philosophers studying on the Continent, Marcuse, especially, turned against the greatest, most productive Capitalist society ever to exist. Postmodernism has been taken deliberately into the universities to infiltrate the minds of those who would go into the world to hold gatekeeper positions as teachers, mass media writers, psychologists, and academics, spreading its infection.
While exhibiting a writing style that is easy to digest, enjoyable to follow, and often entertaining, Hicks draws all his material from primary sources, giving quotations from the original where appropriate and full references for those readers who might prefer to read the original philosophies for themselves.
As with all good work, the reader is left with questions that the book does not claim to address, but which the author stimulates. This makes it an excellent read both for those with little knowledge wishing to gain a quick understanding, to those whose interests lie in further and deeper understanding of modern philosophy and the world we live in today.
(If you want on or off this list please freepmail me.)
Hank
Umm....barf alert?
I've got it on my "next" list. After reading this review it's at the top.
Oooh, the boogey man. Run, everyone! Heresy alert!!
"--- the fact that each person forms their own character all challenged the pre-modernist thinking of supernaturalism, mysticism, collectivism, and subordination of the individual to "Gods will."
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Whoops! those are 'fighting words' at FR.
But true.
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