Customer Reviews

Toward a New Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Paul Kurt

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I loved his earlier book -in defence of secular humanism .this cotinuation of the same with greater clarity and flair . must read to better understand our life`predicament I wish Icould meet the proffesor and discuss with him .

This aptly titled work carries an idea (all thy titles thou hast given away), and an implied challenge. In a period when a postmodern traffic jam of formerly modern millies and New Age bedouins and their high-priced gurus have changed the course of history in favor of more exciting Spenglerian fare, the gesture of invoking a renewed project, toward a new Enlightenment, represents a brave effort to go down fighting, or else simply stand and watch the frittering away of a significant heritage, suddenly defenseless against the triumph of new obscurantisms. But then the Enlightenment proposed would hope to bypass the splitting dialectic in the original project, well indicated in the original query of Kant. One need not agree with the actual proposals of this viewpoint then to see the cogency of the idea. Nor does a now defenseless rationalist need to feel put upon in an environment of pompously 'enlightened' New Age pied pipers, for the issue of the Enlightenment remains to haunt its wiseacres. And of course a dozen meanings certainly not intended by the author have already been three-card monte-ed onto the term, and the question of Kant. Like the sufi tale of the crows and the sweet pie, the very notion is almost stolen merchandise. One problem is, how would we initiate social change along these lines? Wasn't Marx a dabbler in this field? Seize the bull by the horns and start a social movement-no, the New Agers have filled the void.
More directly, I found the essays in this book to be a useful and ironic commentary on the past generation's confusion, and the amnesia about modernism its detractors need to repropose a new social conditioning. While I would find the skeptical humanism proposed not quite to my taste and too limited to withstand the predestigators now at work, and a bit underpowered in the flood of substitute sugars flooding the market, its basic gist confronts the postmodern entropies with quite a direct dialectical 'quo vadis'.