Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

“The Sleep of Reason”

Yakov Rabinovich’s “The Sleep of Reason” reviews my Explaining Postmodernism.

I like that guy.

Portuguese edition of Explaining Postmodernism

I’m happy to announce that a Portuguese translation of my Explaining Postmodernism will be published in Brazil by Callis Editora. Here are links to their website in Portuguese and English. The publication date is TBA. Progresso!!

Defining postmodernism

Following up on an earlier post contrasting modernism with pre-modernism, I here contrast post-modernism to both.

Postmodernism as a philosophical system is defined by means of its characteristic claims in the five major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, ethics, and politics. Postmodernism as a historical movement is defined by the time of its formulation and most vigorous activity.

[This chart is from Chapter 1 of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

Defining modernism and pre-modernism

Intellectual systems and movements are defined philosophically by means of their characteristic claims in the five major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, ethics, and politics. As historical movements, they are defined by the time of their formulation and most vigorous activity.

So in the following table I offer a definitions of pre-modernism and modernism, each with the implicit genus “philosophical system” and a five-dimensional differentia.

Next: Defining post-modernism in contrast to modernism and pre-modernism.

[This chart is from Chapter 1 of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

Kleist: How Kant ruined my life

Ian Brunskill reviews Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, in a new translation by Peter Wortsman.

Kleist was widely-traveled, energetic, a brilliant writer — and a suicide at age 34. Why?

Brunskill writes: “Kleist in his youth had espoused with enthusiasm all the optimism of the Enlightenment. Reason would conquer all; happiness would come with experience and understanding. In March 1801, however, by his own account, he seems to have encountered the thought of Immanuel Kant (it is not clear what precisely he read), and his world fell apart. By testing the nature and limits of human knowledge, Kant had sought primarily to establish the possibility of a meaningful metaphysics. To Kleist, however, it was much grimmer than that: Kant had shown, he believed, that empirical knowledge was unreliable, reason illusory, truth unattainable and life quite meaningless. ‘My sole and highest goal has vanished,’ he wrote. ‘Now I have none.’”

In my Explaining Postmodernism (p. 81), I quoted Nietzsche on Kant:

“As soon as Kant would begin to exert a popular influence, we should find it reflected in the form of a gnawing and crumbling skepticism and relativism.” That quotation continues with Nietzsche’s making a direct connection to Kleist: “and only among the most active and noble spirits, who have never been able to endure doubt, you would find in its place that upheaval and despair of all truth which Heinrich von Kleist, for example, experienced as an effect of Kant’s philosophy. ‘Not long ago,’ he [Kleist] once writes in his moving manner, ‘I became acquainted with Kant’s philosophy; and now I must tell you of a thought in it, inasmuch as I cannot fear that it will upset you as profoundly and painfully as me.’”

Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (Archipelago, 2009) is also available at Amazon. Brunskill’s review is online at the Wall Street Journal for a few days. (Thanks to Roger for the link.)

Update: C. August has an excellent, extended follow-up post on Kleist, Kant, and the competing readings of the two.

The evolution of socialist strategies

Or: “From Marx to the Neo-Rousseauians.”

The flowchart is from the end of Chapter 5 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, summarizing the argument developed in that chapter.

Click the image to enlarge.

More excerpts are available at the Explaining Postmodernism page.

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

Index and Bibliography for Explaining Postmodernism

At the Explaining Postmodernism page, the Index, Bibliography, and Acknowledgments are now online.

Index [pdf]

Bibliography [pdf] [html]

Acknowledgments [pdf]

And with those items posted, the entire book [pdf] is now available online.

The Climate of Collectivism: Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism

At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Four of my book is now available online. This chapter chronicles the rise of Counter-Enlightenment, collectivized social and political thought on the European continent, from Rousseau and Kant in the eighteenth century, through Fichte and Hegel in the nineteenth (Marx is treated separately in Chapter 5), setting the stage for the great battle between Right and Left versions of collectivism early in the twentieth century.

Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:

Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [pdf]

From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics 84
The argument of the next three chapters 86
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence 89
Back to Rousseau 91
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment 92
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism 96
Rousseau and the French Revolution 100
Counter-Enlightenment Politics: Right and Left collectivism 104
Kant on collectivism and war 106
Herder on multicultural relativism 110
Fichte on education as socialization 113
Hegel on worshipping the state 120
From Hegel to the twentieth century 124
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century 126
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? 131

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]