/lit/ - Literature

>>9045037

so what would you say to the proposition that postmodern continental philosophy--and its popularity among self-titled american "deconstructionists"--is not a product of nietzsche's hammer, heidegger's existentialism or adorno/the frankfurt school's appropriation of marxism into the critical method--but it is rather the lingering symptom of a uniquely american phenomenon. this phenomenon arose in the 19th century when the elitism and intellectualism of early puritan ideology gave to the antinomean religious revivalisms of the early- and mid-century; what was preserved was the crushing moral certainty of puritanism--the desire to see the world as right and wrong, as fundamentally a battle ground between good and evil--without its educational hierarchy. i would argue that it is in this antinomean tradition--where anne hutchinson might be the first and most famous examplar--that whitman and emerson first grew (this is santayana's argument in his "genteel tradition" essay). insofar as whitman and emerson's philosophy's sought to look ever-inward, rather than outward, as the authoriative source of their inspiration, they deified the self and relegated the role of traditional external authority to a quasi-demeaned status--it became all about judgments which emanated not from some sovereign, collective authority, but from individual opinions.
so whitman and emerson picked up the moral certainty of puritanism and combined it with the relativism viz. authority that came with the various 19th century backwater religious revivals. so, while they certainly departed from populism and came to define high american letters, i think they actually formalized and institutionalized a popular antinomeanism that we see existing today on both the american leftist intelligentsia as well as the alt-right neo-populists (this is partly richard hofstadter's argument in his seminal "anti-intellectualism in american culture"--an absolute must read, one of my top 3 on american history). the popularity of german idealism--see especially hegel and william james, for instance, or nietzsche's influence on turn of the century american thought--met the watershed post-war immigration of european intellectuals (see: adorno, marcuse, etc.) who would lay the groundwork for postmodernism precisely because they found soil amenable to its cause in american culture.
so my argument is--and i would love to hear your thoughts--that postmodernism is really an extension of this paradoxical american tradition, which combines puritanism with revivalism, adding crushing moral certainty (which it would never admit) to a type of hollowed-out relativism that is the ultimate endgame of antinomean politics.
so, i would say: the genteel tradition (whitman, emerson + trascendentalism, william + henry james et al) is really the source of postmodernism, not the continental philosophy that the french post 68-ers feign to have preserved through the war and dredged up themselves.