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3/30/2005 12:47:00 AM | Timothy In Dispute Instapundit says: IN THE MAIL: Stephen Hicks' Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Not my area, but the reader reviews look good.I thought that was a strange title. So I decided to look at the reader reviews. One reviwer (who was representative, I think) said: "Hegel's worship of the all-powerful state and Rouseau's worship of humans' 'animal spirits' are widely known and indisputable." Hmmmm. Indisputable? Actually, I've seen modern Hegel scholarship dispute this traditional interpretation as a myth. An article I recently read not only made a plausible case, but a rather persausive case for thinking otherwise. The other odd thing is that Hicks seems to think that Kant is a counter-enlightenment thinker (look at the index, and the reviews). The publicity for the book says that postmodernism has its roots in Kant (and Rousseau). That is the second time this week I've heard that claim. This must be some old school idea drilled into student's heads a while ago. The odd thing is that Kant is often taken as THE enlightenment figure. Now, my father (a philosopher professor) instructed me at a young age that the enlightenment was not all about one figure like Kant, but I don't remember him ever saying that Kant was not of the Enlightenment. So what is going on? I can think of several possibilities, including that the German Idealists claimed Kant as one of them. A;sp. Kant is (claimed as) an inspiration for many 'postmoderns' (but I quote Aristotle in papers and I'm not an Aristolean). Near the end of his life, Foucault wrote an essay on Kant's famous essay 'What is Enlightenment?' A lot of people thought Foucault was going BACK on his suppossed 'postmodernism' (I put that in quotes because I don't think the term was coined until after or just before Foucault's death, and for other reasons). I suppose I cannot take this too seriously. Hicks would probably say for very bad reasons that Habermas was a postmodern, and that makes little sense to me. perma link |
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