Monday, June 04, 2007

That about wraps it up for Marx, Freud, and Post-Modernism

Here is a brilliant summary of the essential problem with three great anti-Christian philosophies of our era by Robert Spillane, Professor of Management at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management. The Maquarie MBA is the only one in the world that requires all students to do a unit in the history of Western Philosophy. Very enlightened! This is from the Philosopher's Zone on ABC Radio National. (The podcasts are a great way of brushing up on your Philosophy 101 in the midst of a busy life.)
Robert Spillane: He was right, and it's interesting that existentialism did pass into intellectual history in the 1950s, and was replaced in the '60s by a return of Freud and of Karl Marx, which is a deadly cocktail. But the thing that Marx and Freud share is that they're both what I call victim philosophers. They hold that we are not existentially free. If we're not free, we're not responsible, and we're not free in Marx, because of our position in the class system and capitalism; and we're not free in Freud because of the traumas of our early childhood, and thus you have a double philosophy of un-freedom. Now that of course, in its turn has given way to postmodernism in the late '60s and 1970s. And I have to confess that I've made some fairly disrespectful comments in the book about postmodernism. I don't see it as a philosophy, I see it as an anti-philosophy, and of course insofar as postmodernists can agree on what they believe, they seem to agree that there is no truth, which means that they're stating a truth. They seem to agree that there are no facts, and they're stating a fact. And this self-reflexive problem becomes so serious that it's very hard to see how postmodernism can be called a philosophy.

1 Comments:

At Thursday, June 07, 2007 7:38:00 pm , Anonymous Anonymous said...

postmodernism sux!

(I know, I know, not a very eloquent remark. But it is concise).

 

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