Customer Reviews

Crossing the Postmodern Divide

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fascinatingly interesting, endlessly provocative, and eminently worthwhile read penned by a thoughtful philosopher who seems to have one foot in the heavens and the other planted firmly in every-day life. Borgmann serves up a busman's tour of history, ranging from observations on icons such as Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, yet at the same time coldly,cautiously, and carefully illustrating how we have lost so much more than we have gained in our earnest struggle to free ourselves from tradition and its hold on us, as we have increasingly become the mindlessly individualistic souls so boldly detached from any meaningful connection to one another that we have now become both socially and spiritually bereft, strangers in a strange land indeed.

Borgmann's view of contemporary society offers us nothing that others have not written even more eloquently about elsewhere; his gift to us is rather to illustrate with uncommon verve and precision exactly how the our dance in the history of ideas as well as our enthusiastic embrace of materialism has acted to gradually bankrupt us in terms of having any real meaningful sense of who we really are and why it is we are alive. According to the author, we are now living in circumstances so far estranged from any kind of natural connection to or relationship with the environment that we seem to believe that whatever artificially created surroundings we may have are mere furniture, incidental and unconnected to us or how we experience our lives, and therefore we cannot understand the ways in which this "mere furniture" fatefully influences and determines our own possibilities, both in terms of our material well being, and for Borgmann, at least, also in terms of our waning recognition of the possibility of any substantial spiritual existence.

This is indeed a rather breath-taking vision, one that both encapsulates prior history, and also places that history in context as the meaningful prologue to what now exists. We have confidently left behind any belief in meaningful central authority, are ardently enthusiastic believers in the unalloyed superiority of the rational mode of thought, and are bravely rational progressives in the sense we take mere "material progress" to be the greatest possible good. Now at long last we awake from five centuries of striving to be free to find ourselves locked into a wide-open world of someone else's design, suddenly left in the lap of material luxury to try to cope with forces we neither understand nor fully appreciate in terms of their magnitude or consequence. Instead, we tune into the shallow commonweal of the media, where all things are hyped, and where nothing is scared, other than the stock market and the supposed spread of individual wealth. Is it any wonder we have collectively lost faith in the power of the present to satisfy us, or become suspicious that the future holds little but more of the same vacuous fare?

As another reviewer states, it seems the more we grasp for meaning, the more ghostly our existences become. Borgmann, true to his beliefs, underscores the desperate need each of us has to find meaningful connection in the community of our peers. We must strive to overcome our addiction to living lives of material inconsequentiality by devoting ore energy and resources to exploring our common humanity with others in our own habitat. For in the end, according to Borgmann, it is as simple (and as problematic) as having the good sense to establish more human connections to our colleagues, neighbors, and friends. We need a life, according to Borgmann, richer in social interaction and shared community as opposed to continue to seek material ends. This is a book I highly recommend. Enjoy!

This is a strange book for those of us who are not philosophers. This review GREATLY differs from the others based on context and development.

On the positive side, the first three chapters do an excellent job of developing the themes and recapitulating general philosophical trends for the reader. One does not need to be a thoroughly read exegete of philosophy to understand the text, which is the impression one would get based on the other verbose and grandiloquent reviews.

On the negative side, the fourth chapter which is really the authors personal development falls short of clarity and new and incisive exposition. The reader who will have been drawn in by the first three chapters wonders what the fourth has to do with the previous three. This may really be a lack of good writing, as ideas become bogged down in vagaries.

This is even more problematic when the fifth and final chapter seems to disregard the entire book and delves wholeheartedly into urbanism and urban planning. While I liked this chapter and found it interesting, the linkage between this chapter and the previous four is tenuous at best. An entire book based on just the final chapter would have been more successful I believe. It is this continuous transition from abstraction to specificity that is the undoing of the text. To insist that the text was written in a way to mimic the 'crisis' of post-modernity would be ludicrous and I believe can be better attributed to lack of focus and an unmoored sense of the subject.

Finally there is a last moment delving into religion and its equation to democratic norms! When has real religious belief and practice across the centuries and continents ever been tied to contemporary notions of 'democracy'. Even the ancient Greeks knew better!

When reading philosophical monographs, the reader often finds him/herself in a maze of convoluted text that requires no small amount of eyebrow-furrowing and concentration to decode. Is it possible that the confusing landscape of social and conceptual issues of the postmodern condition could be plainly and poetically delivered in philosophical discourse? Albert Borgmann's volume "Crossing the Postmodern Divide" manages to do just this. It is an entrancing and fascinating read that guides the reader through a few of the philosophical conditions of modernism, traces their evolution into postmodernity, predicts the outcomes of these conditions, and proposes possible solutions to the less desirable aspects of these conditions.

Although Borgmann is not completely flawless in his logic, nor is he without his own bias, his analysis and conclusions "feel" right. Modernism, in light of Bacon's "aggressive realism," Descartes' "methodical universalism," and Locke's "ambiguous individualism," seems to directly relate to the postmodern ideals of "information processing," flexible specialization," and "informed cooperation."

Borgmann sees the postmodern atmosphere as transitional. He seems to feel that unless a newfound emphasis on local community is found, it will lead to "hypermodernity," in which the present dichotomy of sullenness and hyperactivity will create an unbridgeable gap between the real and unreal. In this scenario, the "hyperreality" of video games, movies, recorded music, and the undifferentiated commodification that shopping malls (much less online commerce) represent will come to dislodge us from everyday experience.

The Lowdown: I would suggest "Crossing the Postmodern Divide" to just about anyone who has an interest in the way in which the present-day world is shaped and is being shaped by Western ideals. Despite its 1993 publication date, it predicts a hauntingly familiar picture of the way in which a simple Amazon review can simultaneously contribute to and detract from contemporary reality.

In Crossing the Post Modern Divide, Albert Borgman has done a fine job of describing many troubling features of modern society. The emotively vivid, often poetic language that he uses renders the book very readable. It is disappointing that his attempt to explain how we arrived at our current sorry state of affairs is not cogently argued. Rather, it is riddled with fallacies.

Take his reasoning in the concluding remarks of chapter one, which are the basis for the inquiry he pursues throughout the book. He has already convincingly shown that our modern era is in many ways "rotten" and plans to show how things got this way. So far, so good. But then things take a dramatically illogical turn. We are told that if we wish to avoid perpetuating the evils we now face, we must attend to their "initial conditions." His idea here seems to be that if our current situation is bad, then the prior situation which influenced it must be bad, too. So if we change those conditions, we will cease to perpetuate the horrid practices that followed.

This line of reasoning is nothing short of what we might term a "reverse genetic fallacy." A genetic fallacy imputes a characteristic of the origin of something to what was derived from it. If the parents are bad, then must not the child be bad, too? Of course not. Many a good person had less than exemplary parents. That's why it is an example of fallacious reasoning. The reverse is to impute to the origin of something a characteristic of what was derived from it. If the child is bad, must not the parents have been bad, too? Obviously not. Some really vile people have had morally upright parents. Again, we see the fallacy in situation is bad, then the "initial condition" in the form of ideas of Bacon, Descartes, and Locke must be bad, too. Are we to accept this, as if the mistakes might not have been a result of errors in their application? I certainly don't think so.

For instance, we are told that Francis Bacon left us a legacy of "vicious realism" in his scientific method based on the fact that he promoted the development of applied science in his New Atlantis. For have we not reaped a bitter fruit from the tree of technology in terms of environmental destruction? So the attitude that it is acceptable to exploit our environment to its detriment is laid at Bacon's door. What is overlooked is the fact that Bacon explicitly places moral strictures on the use of science insofar as it is to serve humanity for its benefit, contrary to the current abuses documented by Borgman. It would seem, then, that the reprehensible state of affairs in society's treatment of the environment is based on a misuse, rather than a use, of Baconian ideas.

Still more fallacies are found in Borgman's attacks on the idea that there are moral universals. The first occurs where we are told that Kant is guilty of "sleight of thought" for moving from premises showing that feelings are unreliable guides for conduct to the conclusion that the ground of morality must be found in a universal principle of action. This is nothing less than an ad hominem attack. Disagree though one might (and I don't) with Kant's conclusion, and fault his transcendental logic as erroneous if you will, as some have done (not including myself), and you nevertheless remain on the firm ground of critical analysis. But insinuate that Kant was being deceptive, by using a play on words based on the phrase "sleight of hand" which characterizes tricksters, and you have crossed the line that demarcates reasoning from a personal attack. Having studied moral philosophy and taught ethics courses for three decades, I have encountered a wide range of both positive and negative opinions about Kant's theories, but none have cast aspersions on his character by suggesting that he was some sort of philosophical flimflammer.

The next fallacy is contained in Borgman's allegaton that Kant "purchased universality at the expense of vacuity," meaning that Kant provided no basis for actually applying moral universals. Here, Borgman is guilty of arguing against a straw person because he is demolishing a caricature instead of a characterization of Kant's theory. The view Borgman attacks is an oversimplified version because it ignores well known and relevant qualifications contained in the work he is citing, Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. There, Kant gives two formulations of his categorical imperative in addition to the one mentioned by Borgman which address the issue of how to apply it to specific situations. For instance, in his second version, Kant presents criteria for treating people with respect for their dignity, and then in the third formulation, he provides additional guidance for acting in a moral community (see Barbara Hermann's Practice of Moral Judgment for an insightful explanation of these points and a discussion of why Kantian ethics is compatible with the insights of Carol Gilligan regarding the ethics of care). Taken together with his universal law formulation, Kant's two additional versions of the categorical imperative provide perspectives that inform the first and thereby render the theory applicable to our practical needs.

So although Crossing the Post Modern Divide initially holds out the promise of helping us to understand how we got ourselves into the post modern predicament in order to enable us to break free from its spiritually destructive grip, Borgman's treatment ultimately does not live up to the expectations raised at the outset because the author fails to provide a carefully reasoned and historically accurate treatment of the very conditions he sets out to change.

Vincent A. LaZara, Ph.D. www.odincomm.com

Borgmanns's work contains not only thoughtful analysis, but striking critique and a powerful vision of how to bring meaning back into our lives. Borgmann traces the rise of modernity back to the work of Bacon, Descartes, and Locke; continuing by examining the course of the modern age and its' eventual end. He gives us a startling look at the extent to which our culture is one of sullenness and hyperactivity. Borgmann ties in his analysis with the idea of "the promise of technology" from his earlier work Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. The promise of technology is deeply tied to liberal democracy and while originally it was a relief to be saved from many of the burdens of life now people seek to be alleviated from or compensated for every burden. It is for this reason the Borgmann suggests that "we are in danger of loosing our sense of reality."
Borgmann continues with an economic examination of modernity and what he sees as its' decline. He gives us an outline to the postmodern economy which is forming with the end of the modern era: "information processing in place of aggressive realism, flexible specialization instead of methodical universalism, and informed cooperation rather than rugged individualism." It is in Borgmann's chapter on moral decisions and material culture that we see his plan for a life of interaction and community as opposed to the vacuous modern life of individualism and universalism.
From his history of the rise and fall of modernity to the sullenness and hyperactivity of our culture, Borgmann provides vivid and mindful insights into prevailing attitudes. Examining the failure of individualism and modernism, he presents alternatives to the joyless and artificial culture in which we are trapped by proposing a life of "bodily engagement, communal celebration, and focal orientation." Borgmann's work is not only philosophically engaging but powerful on an individual level which can touch us all.

I sent a review about 10 days ago; I was wondering why you did not run it. Could you let me know? Thank you.