Terry Eagleton, THE ILLUSIONS OF POSTMODERNISM (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1996)
It is delightful to find a book written about post-modernism by someone who is actively employed in one of the vocations in which the movement was planted, and in which it has flourished. It is especially welcome that this English writer can write, well, in English, unlike so many of the original workers in this field, such as Derrida and Foucault. Eagleton is both a scholar (currently Distinguished Professor of English at the National University of Ireland) and a leading practitioner of literary criticism.
Note that I especially agree with much of what Mr. Doepke says in his review, so I will not bother repeating it
As you will surmise from the title, this book is critical of much which goes on under the heading of `post-modernism'. I am especially pleased with his statement that the movement suffers from having been developed primarily in the field of literature, and when its way of thinking is translated to other fields, especially ethics and epistemology; it gets in way over its head. Eagleton's primary credentials for speaking on matters relating to religion are his literary and ideological views on Jesus in the Gospels, The Meaning of Life, and his critique of the `new atheists' in Reason, Faith and Revolution, Reflections on the God Debate.
The most dramatic impression one gets from reading this book is that `post-modernism' is neither a philosophy, such as `British Empiricism', a method of literary criticism, such as `The New Criticism', or even a framework for research, such as `Structuralism'. Post-Modernism is a political ideology, very similar to `socialism', `liberalism', or `fascism'. This contributes to the fact that there is post-modern architecture, art, dance, feminism, literature, music, anthropology, theatre, and film. There is even a post-modern post-modernism. This explains why so much of Eagleton's book is a play of `post-modernism' off against liberalism and socialism / Marxism. In this regard, Marxism has an unfair advantage, since Eagleton's arguments are based on a single theorist's works, and not on the mélange of ideas from great, average, and mediocre minds which contribute to his picture of `post-modernism'.
This diversity of `fronts' on which post-modernism battles often leads to a lot of damage inflicted upon itself by friendly fire. There are often contradictions between people who operate under the post-modern umbrella. To some, the most interesting contradiction is in religion, where post-modernism celebrates diversity. On the one hand, Christianity and Islam are given the license to thrive, each in their own cultural crib, but it prevents the two from seeing eye to eye about things, such as the condemnation of the ideological basis of Islamic terrorism. (The fact that Christianity and Islam do see eye to eye on this matter is a sign that post-modernism has serious flaws).
The fact that post-modernism is a political ideology makes Eagleton's book, at the outset, somewhat difficult to follow. From other books, such as Stanley Grenz' A Primer on Post-modernism, we are left with the sense that post-modernism is a coherent philosophy. It is nothing like this at all. It is a Weltanschauung, born of literary criticism and nurtured by several disparate sources, from Wittgenstein to French structuralism, to American pragmatism. This difficulty is compounded by Eagleton's very `literary' style which seems to enjoy the bon mot overmuch. But it explains why the book opens with a myth about a political ideology which has lost all traction on the minds of the populace. On the other hand, it seems that fellow literary critic Eagleton is speaking from the best possible vantage point to tease out post-modernism's clay feet.
It is not until well into the second chapter of this book that Eagleton seems to get down to brass tacks, in this opening summary of his subject:
`Postmodernist culture has produced, in its brief existence, a rich, bold exhilarating body of work across the whole span of the arts, which can by no means be laid at the door of a political rebuff. It has also generated more than its share of execrable kitsch'.
Post-modernism, as its name declares, is a reaction to the `modernist meta-narrative' exemplified by Rene' Descartes, but traceable all the way back to Plato. Three pillars of modernism are the separation of mind (thinking) from the body (as in Descartes' cogito, ergo sum), the reality of universal truths (Plato's theory of forms), and the primacy of rationality as a method for arriving at knowledge. Unfortunately, as Eagleton often points out, the post-moderns are often aiming their arguments at straw men, positions which no one actually held, or at least, not as broadly as they would like us to believe. For example, The third `modernist' pillar is central only to what the History of Philosophy gang calls the `Continental Rationalists', epitomized by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. And the irony is that two of these three were mathematicians, where this tenant is, was, and always will be true. In fact, since post-modernism, at its heart, is an epistemological skepticism, it fits right in with the primary tenants of that other Age of Enlightenment gang of philosophers, the English Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Many of their tenants are so much like Locke's and Hume's philosophy, it's positively embarrassing. Similarly, when post-moderns enter the world of Ethics, they are `depressingly reliant of this Kantian terminology'.
The reliance on Kant in Ethics is a good example of how the post-moderns waffle on one of their primary dogmas, the rejection, or at least the devaluing. of universals. Kant's Ethics (and the basis of modern Kantian justice systems by John Rawls) are all about arriving at universals, from another very non-post-modern point of view, the ideal disinterested observer or, in Kantian terms, the perfectly good will. Post-moderns devalue universals or `essential characteristics'. `one of the most heinous crimes in the post-modernist book'. Essential properties are as old as Aristotle. A flip way of characterizing them is the old saw, `If it walks like a duck and it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.' If you remove an essential property from an idea of an object, it becomes a different object, not unlike the mechanism of evolution, where arms and scales evolve into wings and feathers, changing a Subclass Diapsida (reptilian dinosaur) into Class Aves (birds).
To be sure, essentialism works a bit differently when it comes to cultural categories. The post-modernists love cultural diversity, but seem to ignore the fact that humans, by their nature, have both culture and language, even though there are great differences between cultures and languages.
Eagleton is an unapologetic Marxist socialist, and it is from this point of view that much of his criticism of post-modernism is based, especially his final word on the subject. Leftist socialism is all about social action and reformation but `In confronting its political antagonists, the left, now more than ever, has need of strong ethical and even anthropological foundations; nothing short of this is likely to furnish us with the political resources we require. And on this score, post-modernism is in the end part of the problem rather than of the solution.
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