Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault
Very authentic, concise and provocative, author Stephen R.C. Hicks provides valuable insight to the reader, divulging the postmodern movement, perhaps a vague concept to the masses. A solid account of the era engages the uninitiated mind: postmodernism has been the most vigorous intellectual movement of the late 20th century. In this important masterpiece, entitled Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, subjects such as political activism and the rejection of traditional philosophical alternatives are analyzed.
What is Postmodernism and how is it defined? Do we have a good sense of Modernism? Can we skillfully interpret a work of literature, for example The Fountainhead, or appreciate the visceral extreme as the postmodern artist makes a provocative statement with an outlandish piece like the Fountain?
Consider The Fountainhead written by Ayn Rand, a paragon of human independence and a tribute to the creative freethinker.
We are given the names that are setting the tone: Michel Foucault (Beyond Good and Evil), Jacques Derrida (deconstruction), Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty.
Also, further up the chain includes: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time), Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx.
At the top are leaders: Georg Hegel (1770 – 1831), Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), plus Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), also a personal favorite of Adolf Hitler as well as inspiration for Nietzsche. The main body of The World as Will and Representation states at the beginning that it assumes prior knowledge of Immanuel Kant’s theories.
Discover the age of postmodernism: “It describes both an era and a broad movement that developed in the mid to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism which marked a departure from modernism.”
With profundity, the author exhibits the importance concerning individualism and its historical role in ethics and freedom. Then individualism becomes the key to many things. The author builds this consensus: “Postmodernism rejects the entire Enlightenment project.”
A two part hypothesis is summarized firstly concerning post-Kantian or German idealism if you will, and secondly of a political nature which demands further exploration.
What really stands out (for me at least) in Explaining Postmodernism is the indiscreet role of German philosophy in today’s education system. With regards to education, the following concept is projected in Explaining Postmodernism:
In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world. That view of education is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity.
A frightening quote from German philosopher Johann Fichte on education is instructive:
On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty.
The Addresses to the German Nation is political literature by Fichte that advocates German nationalism in reaction to the occupation and subjugation of German territories by Napoleon’s French Empire.
In the 20th century Neo-Kantianism becomes the lines laid “back to Kant”, we discover Structuralism (founding figure of psychology Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig) which is supported by ‘looking within’, and Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl), concepts using tools to better understand the workings of consciousness.
Kant with his central thesis—”that the possibility of human knowledge presupposes the active participation of the human mind”—becomes a game changer. This is a turning point for philosophy.
The name of a movement in German philosophy that began in the 1780s and lasted until the 1840s is German idealism, where Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is designed to show the limitations of our knowledge. While Kant had become king of philosophy in his day and some feel he was the greatest philosopher in the world, yet his ideas are less radical than those that followed him.
The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant is considered one of the most influential works in the history of critical philosophy.
The differences between Kant and Hegel are hard to follow, even for those familiar with works from both authors. Hegel visualized things through social consciousness and the dialect, or the self-awareness of collective society.
The beginning of the 19th century (The Age of Ideologies) brought much change, and Hegel was a system builder that united German philosophy. “Hegel is, by some accounts, an apologist for the totalitarian absolute state.”
So, what is real freedom to Hegel? “It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”
Hegel’s most important and widely discussed philosophical work is Phenomenology of Spirit. Who was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?
His account of the master–slave dialectic has been highly influential, especially in 20th-century France. Hegel has been seen in the 20th century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad; however, as an explicit phrase, this originated with Johann Fichte.
It is especially the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche that has endured, exerting a profound influence on modern intellectual history and Western culture. With influential concepts such as the Übermensch (Superman) and the doctrine of eternal return, Nietzsche elevates the idealized individual.
The Counter-Enlightenment was a term used by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.
While some retreat into quietism, others use words as a weapon. When we think of Existentialism we think of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize.
Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979) was a German-American philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
One-Dimensional Man, Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a 1964 book by philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in which Marcuse offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the Communist society of the Soviet Union, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression in both these societies.
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