Repudiating Truth -- a review of Explaining Post Modernism by Stephen Hicks
Channel: Roman's Book Report
Date: 2013-08-08

"reason," writes Foucault, "is the ultimate language of madness"

Deconstruction, Stanley Fish confesses happily, "relieves me of the obligation to be right ... and demands only that I be interesting."

Postmodernism, Frank Lentricchia advises, "seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change."
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Postmodernism is the end result of the Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason.

RATIONALISTS
Kant's skepticism - relegated rationality to inside the mind.  skeptical of perception.
"I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."
Hegel - Reality is an entirely subjective creation; 

IRRATIONALISTS
a. theists
Schleiermacher - "The essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence.  I repudiated rational thought in favor of a theology of feeling."
Kierkegaard - Abraham & Isaac. Each of us must learn "to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd."
"Faith requires the crucifixion of reason."

b. athesists
Schopenhauer
Instead of a god wrote about a Will striving toward nothing.
(depressed 16 year old high school student?)
Nietzsche
Reason is a tool of weaklings who are afraid to be naked in the face of a cruel and conflictual reality and who therefore build fantasy intellectual structures to hide in.
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Heidegger 
"Why is there Being and not rather Nothing?"
Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality; 

Ludwig Wittgenstein --  Philosophy cannot answer its ques­tions because its questions are simply meaningless.  "All propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing."

Kuhn

Rorty:  "To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest,"
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back to Rousseau: "whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free."

Johan Herdner
"I am not here to think," Herder wrote, "but to be, feel, live!"
made Kant local -- German nationalism

Johan Fichte (reacting to Napoleon):  
"By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest."

Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud

Marcuse - "'absolute annihilation' of the common sense world,"

Rudolf Bahro's From Red to Green,

Rorty: "I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins."

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