In reponse to excellent questions and insights regarding my previous post, I’ve decided to offer a sequel. While Jim is certainly right that the whole of the Enlightenment can’t be reduced to its anti-religious premises, and there are surely important thinkers who don’t fit the bill, the essence of the modern Enlightenment is the liberation of the individual from the two traditional restraints on him, nature and God. First and foremost, what links early modernity and late modernity is the philosophical theme of the abstract, disconnected individual—-there’s a geneological line that runs from Locke’s rational being with rights and interests to the lonely existentialist who suffers deeply from nihilistic angst. In these two very different versions, nature is either transcended by its abstract mathematization and reduction to fodder for labor or its abstract poetiziation and reduction to fodder for deconstructivist hermeneutics. In postmodernity as it is typically understood, we find the Rorty inspired intersection of these two currents—an acceptance of the metaphysical collapse of the individual coupled with the project of weaving gossamer tales of his rights and responsibilities, whether ultimately defensible or not. In postmodernity properly understood, one can discern both the extraordinary technological progess science has achieved and its utter failure to capture the full and true nature of man. Likewise, it can understand that what typically passes for a postmodern response to modernity is only its unwitting continuation, hyperbolically tracing its impoverished account of both reason and nature to often comic conclusions. Maybe more than anything else, a postmodern conservatism is a principled return to an experiential realism, that take seriously an account of human eros and consciousness unvarnished by gratuitous, theory-laden abstraction.
