Reality has a bad habit of sneaking up on its deniers and biting them on the rump. In EXPERIMENTS AGAINST REALITY, Roger Kimball traces a straight line progression of thought in this century as he attempts to explain how Western culture has come under continuous assault by those who refuse to admit the existence of the "real" part of reality. He subtitles his book as "The fate of culture in the postmodern age," but it is not the forward looking fate of culture that interests him. Rather, his vision is backward looking as he examines the often intertwining loops of thought in philosophers, some of whom are quite unknown even to the educated elite.
Kimball begins with "The Case of Walter Pater," who was one of the mildest of Victorian authors. It came as a great surprise to him and those who knew him that he was hailed as one who called for a universal trumpet to engage in the wildest of sexual and artistic excesses. It was only one brief line of his STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE that is remembered today: He urged his readers to "burn always with his hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy." Pater, then, is a pre-twentieth century harbinger of those who would soon follow to claim that the pursuit of self-aggrandizement must trump a search for Eternal Truth.
Other essays on T. E. Hulme, Wallace Stevens, Mauriel Spark, and Robert Musil follow. Their connection to Kimball's thesis is less clear than I could readily see. They were legitimate heavyweight writers whose influence on the next generation of reality bashers may have been felt more in their style than in their content. In Part II, Kimball's selection of authors is germane: John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, and Francis Fukuyama. These latter writer/philosophers had a collective and powerful impact on today's assorted motley collection of post-modernists. It was difficult, painful, but necessary for me to read of the scabby excesses of Sartre and Foucault. As I read, I was reminded of the old saw about the wisdom of playing the ostrich in a field of like-minded ostriches when a predator approached. The denial of reality in that case and in all cases is distinctly unwise. EXPERIMENTS AGAINST REALITY is a sobering wake up call for those who wish to know the linguistic roots of those others who cry out that there is no "inside" to any text, philosophy, or thought paradigm.
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