A long form conversation with host Daxton Page.
Topics:
The lesson of the high-school group project.
The Nazis and Nietzsche.
Freud, Marx, and the Critical Theory of Marcuse.
Kant and postmodernism.
Was Kant an Enlightenment thinker?
The importance of Rousseau.
Individualism and Collectivism.
My current book project.
Is philosophy practical?
I’m curious about the sort of lineage of postmodern philosophy and its relation to Marxism/Neomarxism. Of course the postmodernists have their standard tactic of claiming that the Marxist philosophies are themselves meta narratives and therefore not postmodern. The fact that all of the postmodern philosophers support redistribution is purely coincidental, of course. Have you read George Kennan’s Long Telegram? He seems to me to predict the Soviet use of a tool very similar to postmodernism to undermine the west. Included in his analysis is an observation of the rejection of objective truth in Soviet society. That makes me question whether postmodernism was a reaction to the failures of Soviet communism and rejection of its meta narrative or a sort of distillation that left behind the parts that seemed to have caused the failure. It seems almost like a rebranding where they focus on aspects of the Soviet system that existed all along, but not always at the forefront. That’s not to say Marx is postmodern, but rather that the Soviets were engaging major elements of postmodernism before it became a separate branch of philosophy. What is your take on Kennan’s description of the Soviet worldview as it relates to postmodernism?
I just clicked “purchase” on Explaining Postmodernism, so forgive me if you’ve already addressed this in the book.
Thanks for this, Brad. I haven’t read Kennan, so thanks for that pointer too. I do an analytic comparison (in contrast to my book’s intellectual-historical lineage) is my Open College podcast #23, “Is Postmodernism Neo-Marxist? Yes, No & Sort Of.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjaymP5GGMg
I agree that many of the elements in pomo we long operative and that much of pomo is a new integration and re-branding of them.