The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

14 The passage from modernity to postmodernityends, and a certain pessimism as to te possibi1t r of reali ng such aproject under contemporary e o lOmlc and polmcal condltlons. Andthen there are those - and thIs IS, as we shall see, the core of postmodernistphilosophical thought - who insist tha .t we should, in .thename of human emancipation, abandon the Enhghtenment rṛoJectentirely. Which position we take depends upon how .we explal the'dark side' of our recent history and the degree to whICh we attnbuteit to the defects of Enlightenment reason rather than to a lack of itsproper application.. .Enlightenment thought, of course, lllternahzed a whole o t ofdifficult problems and possessed not a few troublesome contradIctions.To begin with, the question of the relation between means and ndswas omni-present, while the goals themselves could never be speCIfiedprecisely except in terms of some utopian plan that often looked asoppressive to some as it looked emancipatory to o : hers. Furth r­more, the question of exactly who possessed the claIm to s penorreason and under what conditions that reason should be exercIsed aspower had to be squarely faced. Mankind will have to be forced .tobe free, said Rousseau; and the Jacobins of the French RevolutIontook over in their political practice where Rousseau's philosophicalthought had left off. Francis Bacon, one of the precursors of Enlightenmentthought, envisaged in his utopian tract New Atlantis ahouse of wise sages who would be the guardians of knowledge, theethical judges, and the true scientists; while living outside the dailylife of the community they would exercise extraordinary moral powerover it. To this vision of an elite but collective male, white wisdom,others opposed the image of the unbridle individualism of gre tthinkers, the great benefactors of humankllld, who throụ? teIrsingular efforts and struggles would P uS? reason and CIVIhz tlOnwilly-nilly to the point of true emanCIpatiOn. Others argued eitherthat there was some inherent teleology at work (even, perhaps,divinely inspired), to which the human spirit was bound to resp nd,or that there existed some social mechanism, such as Adam Smith'scelebrated hidden hand of the market, that would convert even themost dubious of moral sentiments into a result advantageous to all.Marx, who in many respects was a child of Enlightenment thou ? ht,sought to convert utopian thinking - the struggle for human bemgsto realize their 'species being' as he put it in his early works - into amaterialist science by showing how universal human emancipationmight emerge from the class-bound and evidently reprẹssive, thoughcontradictory, logic of capitalist development. In so dOlllg he focusedon the working class as the agent of human liberation and emancipationprecisely because it was the dominated class of modernModernity and modernism 15capitalist society. Only when the direct producers were in control oftheir own destinies, he argued, could we hope to replace dominationand repression by a realm of social freedom. But if 'the realm offreedom begins only when the realm of necessity is left behind,' thenthe progressive side of bourgeois history (particularly its creation ofenormous productive powers) had to be fully acknowledged and thepositive outcomes of E lightenment ration lity f lly a pp ropriated.The project of modermty has never been WIthout ItS cntIcs. EdmundBurke made no effort to hide his doubts and disgust at the excessesof the French Revolution. Malthus, rebutting Condorcet's optimism,argued the impossibility of ever escaping the chains of natural scarcityand want. De Sade likewise showed that there might be quite anotherdimension to human liberation apart from that envisaged inconventional Enlightenment thought. And by the early twentiethcentury two major, yet quite differently positioned, critics had puttheir stamp upon the debate. First, there was Max Weber whoseoverall argument is summarized by Bernstein, a key protagonist inthe debate over modernity and its meanings, thus:Weber argued that the hope and expectation of the Enlightenmentthinkers was a bitter and ironic illusion. They maintaineda strong necessary linkage between the growth of science, rationality,and universal human freedom. But when unmaskedand understood, the legacy of the Enlightenment was the triumphof . .. purposive-instrumental rationality. This form of rationalityaffects and infects the entire range of social and cultur llife encompassing economic structures, law, bureaucraticadministration, and even the arts. The growth of [purposive-instrumentalrationality] does not lead to the concreterealization of universal freedom but to the creation of an'iron cage' of bureaucratic rationality from which there is noescape. (Bernstein, 1985, 5)If Weber's 'sober warning' reads like the epitaph of Enlightenmentreason, then Nietzsche's earlier attack upon its very premises mustsurely be regarded as its nemesis. It was rater as if Nie zsce.plunged totally into the other side of BaudelaIre's formulation morder to show that the modern was nothing more than a vital energy,the will to live and to power, swimming in a sea of disorder,anarchy, destruction, individual alienation, and despair. 'Be ? eath thesurface of modern life, dominated by knowledge and SCIence, hediscerned vital energies that were wild, primitive and completelymerciless' (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1976, 446). All the Enlighten-