“Denunciations of reason’s inadequacies have an
all-too-familiar ring: since the dawn of the Counter-Enlightenment, they have
been the standard fare of the European Reaction.”
Richard Wolin (1952 – ) is an American historian and a prominent
critic of postmodernism. He is probably best-known for The Seduction of
Unreason (2004), a work of intellectual history aimed at a broad audience,
which argued that postmodernism was politically dubious in both its origins and
its implications.
For Wolin, postmodernism is best seen as a continuation of the
“Counter-Enlightenment,” a concept first advanced by Isaiah Berlin in order to
explain the rise of fascism. (Berlin’s argument was the subject of an earlier
article, here: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1065370980144116&id=986713261343222&substory_index=0) The basic idea is that the Enlightenment was a left-leaning
phenomena, which saw reason, progress, and freedom as natural allies, fighting
the good fight against superstition, backwardness, and tyranny, and sought the
reform of existing institutions, which were based on the latter, in accordance
with the former. Its conservative opponents therefore attacked the Enlightenment
as tending to stamp out tradition, community, and pluralism in the name of
Universal Reason, which was, in practice, simply their own political
aspirations and philosophical naivety writ large upon the cosmos. According to
Berlin these have been the battle-lines of intellectual history since 1789, or
thereabouts. Fascism was simply the latest manifestation of the perennial “revolt
against reason.”
Wolin picked up this argument and applied it to
postmodernism, by pointing to both conceptual affinities and actual “genealogical”
links. In the first case, postmodernism does indeed, as we have seen, stress
the importance of plurality, which it celebrates as intrinsically worthwhile.
In that sense it is hostile to the universal aspirations of the Enlightenment,
which declare that there is one truth, one standard of beauty, one morality,
one human nature, etc. – a doctrine that postmodernism is determined, both in principle
and in practice, to resist. The genealogical links begin with Nietzsche, whose
stress on individuality and passion, and whose hatred of timid bourgeois conformity,
are well-known, and progress from him to Heidegger, who may, or may not
(depending on who you believe) have been a Nazi. (Without getting into the
weeds on this topic, let’s just say that a lot of German intellectuals, like a
lot of Germans, made poor choices in the 1930’s, and that Heidegger was one of
them.) Heidegger in particular, and phenomenologists in general, were important
for postmodernist philosophers because their stress on the irreducible variability
of experience grounded their own critique of the totalizing aspirations of the
Enlightenment. Foucault vocally supported the Iranian revolution of 1979 (on
the grounds, it would seem, that it was anti-Western and therefore a good
thing), and the revelation, in 1989, that Paul de Man (a postmodernist literary
theorist who we haven’t been able to cover) worked for the Nazis during the war
simply added to the fire. In short, Wolin argued that the political choices of
postmodernists themselves showed that it was not actually a legitimate
representative of the liberal tradition, as it claimed. It actually belonged,
he insisted, on the reactionary right.
In a sense this was turning the weapons of postmodernism on
itself, for Wolin’s critique amounts to (irony of ironies) a deconstruction of deconstruction.
That is, it attacks postmodernism by revealing a questionable past,
affiliations, and assumptions, rather than by way of a direct frontal assault
on the central arguments. We’ve seen this strategy at work before, in Edward
Said’s critique of Orientalism.
Wolin also criticized postmodernism on the grounds that it
provided insufficient moral grounding for genuinely progressive or democratic
reform, for if everyone is free to interpret the world just as they please, and
if difference of opinion is something to be celebrated for its own sake, then
presumably we will have to admit the right of bigots to their bigotry,
plutocrats to their greed, criminals to their contempt for the law, and so on.
It is, we have learned, their right as human beings. How, then, will they be
compelled to live in peace with other people? Or, then again, how are we
supposed to organize for reform, if we no longer believe that any one truth is
common to all people? Effective political action is based on the things we have
in common (truths derived from evidence, and accessible to all reasonable
people), not the things that separate us. Obviously we aren’t going to be very
effective, politically, if we’re all trapped in the random Brownian motion of
independent subjectivity.
But the problem isn’t just suppressing anti-social elements –
it’s resisting them ourselves. Postmodernism, Wolin argued, leaves people
defenseless against the venom and empty promises of clever demagogues, who will
surely lead us around by the nose unless we are equipped, morally and
intellectually, to resist them. That is, unless we respect reason, evidence,
truth, and the right of all people to live lives of freedom and dignity, which
is what the Enlightenment was about all along. In short, postmodernism is not
just wrong – it is immoral and dangerous. Resisting it is more than just a good
idea – it’s a defense of civilization.
More on Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment:
Berlin’s original essay (it’s short and highly readable): http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/ac/counter-enlightenment.pdf
Paul de Man and Fascism:
More on Richard Wolin:
Part of a Series on Postmodernism (XV of XVII)
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