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Pocket Guide to Postmodernism
Much of this crisis can be compared to the crisis of religion in the late 1700s. They also faced the same choice to either accept science for its facts and reason, or to double down, deny, and protect faith at all costs. Likewise, postmodernism would seem to be a response to the crisis of faith of the academic far Left. If we cannot win on this particular terrain, theoretical or practical, we need to change the terrain. The postmodern epistemology redeploys language as a rhetorical weapon rather than as a seeker of truth.
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment Before going further, let’s revisit another figure who predated Marx and was pivotal in developing the politics of the Counter-Enlightenment. This would be the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas appear quite anti-individualist and anti-liberal when compared to the ideas of John Locke’s liberalism. Rousseau, active in the 18th century, was a contemporary of Kant and later influenced the Jacobin leaders who would head the French Revolution, which transformed into what later became known as the Reign of Terror. Rousseau was an admirer of Sparta’s militaristic and feudal communalism, in contrast to the classical Athens that defended commerce, diversity, and the high arts. Rousseau, as can be found in the first line of his popular work Émile, found that civilization and culture corrupts human beings from their nature. And what is the foundation of civilization? Not reason, rationality, rights, justice, or science, all of which are constructs of an artificial rather than natural way of life. They cause moral degradation, he argued in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
