DOCSLIB.ORG

The Theory and History of Authenticity

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Theory and History of Authenticity mediastudies.press • Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader The Theory and History of Authenticity Charles Lindholm1 1Boston University Published on: Jan 01, 2007 Updated on: Aug 12, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC-BY- NC 4.0) mediastudies.press • Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader The Theory and History of Authenticity The Social Origins of Authenticity WHAT ACTUAL CIRCUMSTANCES favored the rise of authenticity as a vital goal in today’s society? Lionel Trilling attempted to answer this question when he described the growth of authenticity out of the simpler and more modest virtue of sincerity, which itself arose in response to the momentous shift out of feudalism.1 According to Trilling, the concept of sincerity first emerged as a precursor to authenticity in the 16th century as a result of the gradual breakup of the face-to-face relationships of traditional European society. As was the case in many other pre-modern traditional societies around the world, the highly personalized universe of Medieval Europe was held together by a taken-for- granted social order that provided its members with secure positions in a divinely sanctioned hierarchy. Local authorities served church and state, and were served in turn by their vassals. The family replicated this order, with the father exercising a sacralized authority. This stratified and sanctified worldview validated the daily lives of the faithful. For most of those living in this cosmically ordained system, there was little or no travel away from their locality, and little or no social mobility within it. Under these circumstances individuals were constrained by the obligations entailed in their predestined social roles. What mattered was not personal sincerity and purity of intent, but only whether persons were able to live up to their obligations to the neighbors and kinsmen they had known and who had known them all their lives. This stable world was transformed utterly by the breakup of the feudal system and the massive movement of individuals out of the countryside and into mixed urban environments. Henceforth, people were no longer quite sure where they belonged, what their futures held for them, or who their neighbors were. They had begun the irreversible plunge into modernity, which can be succinctly defined as the condition of living among strangers. In this new, desacralized and unpredictable environment it became possible for some ambitious men and women to break out of their prescribed roles and pursue secular dreams of wealth, power, and fame. But the pleasures and possibilities of social mobility coincided with feelings of alienation and meaninglessness, as well as the potential for guile and deceit. Former inferiors could now pretend to be better than they actually were; origins could be hidden and high status positions claimed without any legitimate basis; neighbors could cheat and betray one another and vanish into the anonymous urban wilderness. It is not surprising that the original definition of the villain was the dissembler, a lowly person who rises by cunning.2 In this ambiguous milieu it is also not surprising that sincerity, doing what one says one will do, became a desired trait. The erosion of a sacred hierarchy, the fragmentation of roles and the sense of a loss of significance were met by the sincere person’s reliance on inner integrity to establish trusting and meaningful relationships. As Polonius advises his son: “To Thine own self be true and it follows as the night the day that thou canst not be false to any man.” 2 mediastudies.press • Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader The Theory and History of Authenticity This shift was supported by the dogmas of a newly rising Protestant bourgeoisie who had begun to transform the moral climate of Europe. The Protestants asserted that all persons are ultimately responsible for their own salvation. According to their doctrine, no one could intervene between the worshipper and God; no priest could interpret the confessions of the faithful and absolve them of their sins or sell them guarantees against damnation. Instead, the members of the congregation had to become worthy of redemption on their own. This could only be accomplished by scrutinizing their souls to uncover and root out any evil impulses. Since they were required to practice self-interrogation and purification, the Protestant faithful tended to became urgently concerned about their own motivations: for them, it was not enough to act morally, they now had to be certain that the intent behind the act was also wholesome. As a result, sincerity became a defining virtue among this vanguard population. The rise of sincerity also correlated with the radical egalitarianism that was practiced and preached by Protestants, who not only defined themselves in opposition to the hierarchies of the Catholic church, but also against the formalities of a remote and increasingly illegitimate courtly society. Instead of an ostentatious display of silks and jewels, they self-consciously wore plain clothing and appeared without adornment, revealing themselves in public ‘as they really were.’ Similarly, they made a practice of simple speech that did not employ any of the flattery and rhetorical flourishes of the gentry. But the requirements of modesty and sincerity had paradoxical consequences. The first was the ambiguity of representation. How could persons thrown back on their own interpretations of themselves and their duties be certain that the appearance of sincerity was not actually the result of self-delusion and pride? Couldn’t the unpretentious man actually be sinfully proud of his modesty, couldn’t the believer persuaded of his sincerity actually be the worst of hypocrites, capable of lying even to himself? The second was the relation between the perception of inner truth and the demands of the social order. Couldn’t being true to one’s own intuition of right and wrong be more important than conforming to what is required by society? Because their doctrine considered all human beings to be spiritual equals in the eyes of God, the most extreme Protestants even believed they could and should speak to aristocrats without honorifics or etiquette. That this might lead to dire consequences did not matter to them; they would be rewarded in heaven. Their critical attitude toward authority easily spread to self—questioning. How are we to know what we are really like, and what God really demands of us? Many Protestants tormented themselves with internal debates about these knotty matters of conscience, self-deception, and duty, as we know from the diaries and autobiographies that proliferated as an outlet for their spiritual anxieties.3 As a result, they were passionately concerned to discover an ultimate and absolute truth, outside of social norms and emotionally compelling. This moved them away from the social virtue of 3 mediastudies.press • Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader The Theory and History of Authenticity sincerity and toward the more solipsistic goal of finding a guiding inner light—that is, of achieving authenticity. […] The gradual triumph of capitalism and the predominance of wage labor provided another impetus toward development of the modern ideal of authenticity. In the old system, a worker’s inner feelings and sense of self were irrelevant, since each person was locked into an occupation that would last a lifetime. It was enough that the role was enacted properly. But when work in the open market was no longer hereditary or connected to any larger meaning system, labor began to lose its capacity to define identity. Instead there was increasing alienation from work that seemed meaningless and, worse, destructive of the worker’s eternal soul. Revulsion was especially directed toward the obligation to act obsequiously in order to please employers. Previously, subservience was part of a larger cosmic order of deference; now it stood athwart the new ideal of equality.4 Workers had become capable of imagining something better for themselves, but they also knew they could be dismissed for expressing resistance; as a result, for many their occupation was no longer a calling demanded by God, but rather became the enforced imposition of unwanted inferiority by an increasingly alien and antagonistic authority. As a result of all these factors, the early Protestant distaste for aristocratic artifice was easily extended to become a generalized contempt for role-playing in general. As one writer put it: “Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?”5 To balance out the perceived distortion and repression of newly discovered individual personalities and universal souls in the competitive open marketplace, people began to believe that their common humanity demanded free sharing of genuine (that is, authentic) feelings when among intimates. […] The social consequences of the new emphasis on personal authenticity were profound. Protestants throughout Europe began to declare that they were no longer obliged to follow whatever rules were handed down from above; instead, one’s duty was to make a personal judgment as to whether those rules were moral and equitable. These judgments could be made by referring to one’s inner light—that is, to the authentic moral truth emanating from within, and not by obedience to the conventions attached to social roles. Soon enough, this critical attitude spread beyond the church. In the same fashion as a Protestant church member had a duty to leave the congregation and find another more in tune with his or her values, thinking men and women in Europe and later in America began to make personal decisions as to whether the state deserved their loyalty. If not, the citizen had an obligation to stand up in opposition to the injustice and, in the extreme case of France, to overturn the state and establish a new one that would offer them an authentic community, envisioned in a way not very different from a covenanted Protestant congregation.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 1 Modernity and the Crisis of Value (Hums 288 / Engl 284
    MODERNITY AND THE CRISIS OF VALUE (HUMS 288 / ENGL 284 / LITR 246) Spring 2020 Benjamin Barasch W 3:30-5:20pm Office: WHC 303 WLH 115 Office hours: T/Th 4-5pm [email protected] What is genuinely valuable? What makes one thing better than another? How can We make judgments of value that transcend personal or group prejudice? These questions have come to seem impossible to ask, let alone ansWer. And yet they remain central to our lives, especially in a time of conflict so intense it threatens thought. In order to gain insight into our predicament, this course offers a moral psychology of the human subject since 1800: an account of the transformations of human consciousness that accompanied the social changes of modernization, including the rise of capitalism and democratic egalitarianism, the decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the growth of technology and the mastery of nature. Readings are split evenly between social theory and literature, and include Hegel on the master/slave dialectic, Marx on alienated labor, Nietzsche on nihilism and the revaluation of values, James on religious experience, Du Bois on double consciousness, Weber on rationalization and disenchantment, Adorno and Horkheimer on the dialectic of enlightenment, and poetry and prose texts by WordsWorth, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Baldwin that, amid modernity’s crises of transcendence, reground value in persons, things, and existence itself. Students will also develop their oWn methods of judgment and discrimination in order to discover What these critical practices might look like in 2020. We will ask: What criteria of value can we bring to bear upon works of art and thought? What does it mean to “get it right” in the humanities as opposed to the sciences? What is the relation betWeen a fact and an insight? Above all, We Will seek to grasp how acts of judging and valuing are central to What it means to be a person.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernity and Revolution
    Perry Anderson Modernity and Revolution The subject of our session this evening has been a focus of intellectual debate and political passion for at least six or seven decades now.* It already has a long history, in other words. It so happens, however, that within the last year there has appeared a book which reopens that debate, with such renewed passion, and such undeniable power, that no contemporary reflection on these two ideas, ‘modernity’ and ‘revolution’, could avoid trying to come to terms with it. The book to which I refer is Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air. My remarks tonight will try-----very briefly-----to look at the structure of Berman’s argument, and consider how far it provides us with a persuasive theory capable of conjoining the notions of modernity and revolution. I will start by reconstructing, in compressed form, the main lines of his book; and then proceed to some comments on their validity. Any such reconstruction as this must sacrifice the imaginative sweep, the breadth of cultural sympathy, the force of textual intelligence, that give its splendour to All that is Solid Melts into Air. These qualities will surely over time make it a classic in its 96 field. A proper appreciation of them exceeds our business today. But it needs to be said at the outset that a stripped-down analysis of the general case of the book is in no way equivalent to an adequate evalu- ation of the importance, and attraction, of the work as a whole. Modernism, Modernity, Modernization Berman’s essential argument, then, starts as follows: ‘There is a mode of vital experience-----experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils-----that is shared by men and women all over the world today.
    [Show full text]
  • Harrison Stetler Thesis
    “A skilled surgeon presiding at the birth of a new culture”: Christopher Lasch on the Politics of Post-Industrial Society Senior Thesis by Harrison Stetler Advisor: Professor Rebecca Kobrin Second Reader: Professor Casey Blake April 2016 Department of History Columbia University 16, 520 Words Acknowledgements: Writing this thesis has been an extraordinarily trying and rewarding experience, which I would not have been able to complete without an inordinate amount of help and support from friends and family. I owe a great debt to all my fellow students and to Professor Kobrin for providing an immense amount of support over the past year. I would also like to thank Professor Blake for guiding me through this study of Lasch’s thought. Likewise, I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of other teachers—Professors Mark Mazower, Adam Tooze, Mark Lilla, and Nicholas Dames, in particular—who have participated in a number of smaller yet indispensible ways throughout this long process. For letting me rant incessantly about Christopher Lasch, I am not sure whether I should apologize to or thank my friends. Thank you to my suitemates—Mark, Jackson, Kal, Derek, and Gerry—in particular. Thank you to Ruby, my intellectual soul mate, for venturing with me— through Adorno, Melville, and Flaubert—along our path to mystical modernism. I see this essay as a partial capstone to that journey. Thank you to Max for preventing me from thinking that “this is not the land of truth.” Thank you to Elena for humoring me during many a procrastination break outside of Butler.
    [Show full text]
  • A SINGULAR MODERNIST: FREDRIC JAMESON and the POLITICS of MODERNISM Sean Homer American University in Bulgaria
    VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Volume 1 Issue 1 2017 “St. Cyril and St. Methodius” University of Veliko Tarnovo A SINGULAR MODERNIST: FREDRIC JAMESON AND THE POLITICS OF MODERNISM Sean Homer American University in Bulgaria For the past 30 years Fredric Jameson’s name has been so inextricably tied to the fate of postmodernism that his recent work on modernity and modernism has been interpreted by some critics as a “retreat” from the cutting edge of contemporary cultural theory to politically regressive and imperialistic notions of modernity. For some of us, however, Jameson’s recent work marks a welcome return to what he always did best, writing about modernism. The “Preface” to A Singular Modernity (2002), however, seems to exhibit a marked weariness on Jameson’s part to returning once again to all those old undesirable issues that it had been “one of the great achievements of postmodernity” to have discredited (1). It is not just the renewed interest in notions of modernity in popular political and academic discourse that concerns Jameson but, I want to argue, a much older “dispute in the politics and philosophy of history.” What remains at stake for Jameson in these “undesirable” issues of modernity and modernism is the fate of socialism’s emancipatory project in light of the seemingly irresistible triumph of global capital. Keywords: Fredric Jameson, Marshall Berman, T.J. Clark, aesthetics, politics, modernism, postmodernism, utopia. Fredric Jameson observed more than a decade ago that we are experiencing a certain “return of the repressed” in the early twenty-first century as those previously moribund concepts of aesthetics, ethics, citizenship and civil society are once again resuscitated in academic discourse (Singular 2-3).
    [Show full text]
  • Book Catalog Fall 2018
    Urban Research BOOK CATALOG FALL 2018 urpub.org UR (Urban Research), the imprint of Terreform, publishes progressive books about cities and their futures. Understanding that no single approach is adequate to the promise and problems of the urban, we publish a wide range of designs and analyses. Our list includes projects ranging from the practical to the utopian, from community-generated plans for neighborhood transformation to outstanding outcomes from academic studios, to visionary speculations by designers burning the midnight oil, and to collations of scholarly arguments about the most urgent issues of urban growth and survival. Michael Sorkin Editor in Chief Advisory Board Tom Angotti, Hunter College CUNY Thom Mayne, Morphosis Architects Kazi Ashraf, Bengal Institute Suha Ozkan, World Architecture Community M. Christine Boyer, Princeton University Colin Robinson, OR Books Teddy Cruz, Estudio Teddy Cruz Jonathan Solomon, School of the Art Institute Mike Davis, UC Riverside of Chicago Edward Dimendberg, UC Irvine Tau Tavengwa, African Center for Cities Ana Maria Duran Calisto, Estudio AO Srdjan Weiss, Normal Architecture Office Anthony Fontenot, Woodbury School of Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths College Architecture Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia GSAPP Susanna Hecht, UCLA Kongjian Yu, Peking University John Hill, New York Institute of Technology Walter Hood, UC Berkeley Cindi Katz, Graduate Center CUNY Romi Khosla, Romi Khosla Design Studio UR (Urban Research) urpub.org 2 UR01 GOWNTOWN: A 197X PLAN FOR UPPER MANHATTAN UPPER PLANFOR 197X A GOWNTOWN: Gowntown investigates the impact of Columbia University’s expansion into Upper Manhattan and proposes strategies of transformative leverage provide GOWNTOWNbroad and focused benefit and counter an urbanism of trickle-down and gentrification.Gowntown proposes a planning paradigm focused on both carefully designed and spontaneous institutional and environmental A 197-Xconnections.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernism/Modernity in the Post-Revolutionary Diaspora
    GRETA N. SLOBIN (Santa Cruz, CA, USA) MODERNISM/MODERNITY IN THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY DIASPORA "Nikogda nichei ia ne byl sovremennik" Osip Mandel'shtam In its last decades, the twentieth century occasioned passionate debates in the west about its beginning - about modernism, its definition, esthetics, and politics. The importance of a stocktaking of the modernist legacy acquired new urgency in the swiftly approaching turn of the twenty-first century. As Marshall Berman noted in his seminal book on modernism, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1983), "we don't know how to use modernism."' Berman's explicit purpose was to restore the memory of modernism and its promise: "This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead."2 This work, concerned with the relation between modernity and revo- lution, was one of the first that included an extended discussion of the Rus- sian contribution and its distinct history in the context of European moder- nisms. Modernism for Berman is revolutionary in its break with the past artistic traditions. His main concern is to reveal "the dialectics of modernization and modernism" in the interwar period.3 In a subsequent discussion of Berman's book, Perry Anderson provides a useful clarification of terms: "Between the two lies the key middle term of "modernity" - neither economic process nor cultural vision but the historical experience mediating one to the other."4 The question Anderson asks is one that has great relevance for the Russian expe- rience: "What constitutes the nature of the linkage between them?"5 He then singles out development as "the central concept of the book and the source of 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Getting Past New Left Pastlessness*
    Getting Past New Left Pastlessness* William H. Thornton Associate Professor Graduate School of Foreign Language and Literature National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, R.O.C. No book has done more to shape our conventional view of radicalism in the :1960s than Theou~A Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture (1969). Roszak defined the generational politics of that decade in terms of the counterculture's resistance to technocracy. Here I turn to a largely neglected legacy of that same youth culture: its blanket resistance to historical reference. Both of these putative radicalisms support a politics of the street (Lasch, Culture 151)­ a would-be camivalism that turns out to be as highly mediated and "technocratic" as any party politics. Indeed, at about the time Roszak was framing his counter-technocracy argument, Norman Mailer concluded that the new generation, having been weaned on T.V. and technologically packaged affluence, "believed in technology more than any before it..." (103). The basic premise of youthful radicalism was a sense of boundless possibility­ a sense that could hardly have been imagined outside a technologically oriented society. In 1968, at the Youth International's "festival of life" outside the Chicago Democratic Convention, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman packaged their own version of youth politics in the form of a nationally televised counter-convention (Lasch, Culture 154). These highly orchestrated theatrics could pass for the "real thing" because, as Christopher Lasch contends, a surfeit of medi.ated spectacles had already produced a general "indifference to the distinction between illusion and reality ... Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power" (159-60).
    [Show full text]
  • In Memory of Marshall Berman
    American Sociological Association Volume 26 Number 1 Community & Urban Sociology Section Fal l 2013 CUSS Newsletter INSIDE THIS Concentrated Poverty & Concentrated ISSUE: Affluence: Notes for a Comparative Analysis Editor’s Note 2 In Memorial 3 -Marshall Berman Herbert Gans tal transactions and criti- Columbia University cal mass processes take 2014 CUSS Panels & 4 place in both. Likewise, Roundtables The concept that pov- so do good and bad so- erty-related social prob- cial and individual effects. News & Notes 6 lems are caused in part The most dramatic - 2013 CUSS Awards 7 by the spatial concentra- and disturbing - findings Presentations tion of the poor was intro- of concentrated poverty duced by urban sociolo- research are associated gists and antipoverty re- with high poverty neigh- New Books 8 searchers during a period borhoods, areas in which of increasing poverty at 40 percent or more of the Announcements 11 the start of the 1990s. population is poor. Low The debates over concen- Since then, the coun- poverty neighborhoods, trated poverty and wealth try has seen an immense where 20 or 10 percent of intensified after the 2008 increase in the number of the residents are poor Great Recession. affluent people, but soci- have fewer socially and ologists have not consid- individually destructive ered the possible exist- neighborhood effects. problems parallel to those ence of similar spatial The basic question: found in the highly con- concentration effects does the same pattern centrated areas of the among this population. apply to
    [Show full text]
  • Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization
    City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research College of Staten Island 2019 Foreword: Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization Jonathan Cope CUNY College of Staten Island How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/si_pubs/199 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Foreword Jonathan Cope The day after graduation ceremonies, I find myself walking across a freshly emp- ty campus to the library I work in. As I approach my office to begin this essay, the serenity of this gorgeous, sunny spring day is punctured by the sounds of an an- gry-sounding man emanating from a nearby minivan. At first, I think there might be an argument occurring inside the van, but as I approach, I recognize a timbre and pacing that would probably be familiar to anyone who grew up in much of America in the 1990s—it’s the voice of the popular conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. As I write, the man—who I had initially thought was yelling inside the van—may well still be sitting quietly outside in the parking lot listening to “Rush.” In 1957 Hannah Arendt observed that the process of modernity has created “a global present,” but that “this common factual present is not based on a com- mon past and does not in the least guarantee a common future.
    [Show full text]
  • The Graduate Center the City University of New York 2012–13
    Bulletin The Graduate Center The City University of New York 2012–13 Volume Thirty-Five / NUMBER ONE 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309 www.gc.cuny.edu General: 1.212.817.7000 Admissions Offi ce: 1.212.817.7470 (TDD users should call the New York Relay Center at 1.800.662.1220.) 2012–13 Bulletin, The Graduate Center, CUNY NOTICE OF POSSIBLE CHANGES The City University of New York reserves the right, because of changing conditions, to make modifi cations of any nature in the academic programs and requirements of the University and its constituent colleges without advance notice. Tuition and fees set forth in this publication are similarly subject to change by the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. The Uni- versity regrets any inconvenience this may cause. ACCREDITATION The City University of New York is registered by the New York State Department of Educaton: Offi ce of Higher Education and the Professions, Cultural Education Center, Room 5B28, Albany, NY 12230; Telephone: 1.518.474.5851; http://www.nysed.gov/heds/IRPSL1.html. The Graduate Center has been accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States As- sociation of Colleges and Schools since 1961, last reaffi rmed in 2010. See http://www.gc.cuny. edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Policies/General/Accreditation.pdf. 2 THE GRADUATE CENTER CALENDAR / 2012–13 FALL 2012 August 16 (Thurs.) ..................... Registration begins at 9:30 a.m. for newly admitted matriculated students. Deadline for fi ling for readmission and last day for nonmatriculated, auditor and permit students to fi le an application for the Fall 2012 semester.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernity, Commodification, and Spiritual Affiliation in Rosemary's
    Linda Sheppard, ‘Modernity, Commodification, and Spiritual Affiliation in Rosemary’s Baby’ Film Journal 5 / Screening the Supernatural / 2019 / pp. 75-92 Modernity, Commodification, and Spiritual Affiliation in Rosemary’s Baby Linda Sheppard University of East Anglia, UK Introduction In the early scenes of Rosemary’s Baby protagonist Rosemary Woodhouse (played by Mia Farrow) is shown renovating the Manhattan apartment she has just rented with her husband Guy (John Cassavetes). Painters apply white paint to the dark wood that adorns the gloomy interiors; the flat is re-painted, re-carpeted, re-furnished, and Rosemary hangs new curtains and lines the shelves of a mysteriously concealed closet. She pauses in her home-making to watch her husband’s TV commercial for the “the swingin’ world of Yamaha”. Later she is interrupted by a comically intrusive neighbour, Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon), who comes to introduce herself and see the apartment which has recently been vacated by her recently deceased friend, Mrs. Gardenia. Commenting on the brightness of the home and its modern design, Minnie flatters Rosemary even as she questions the cost of these adornments, the choice of which has been influenced by the world of magazines. In this way, from early on, the Woodhouse family seems to be aligned with impulses involving covering the old, ushering in the new, and establishing a sense of self vis-à-vis expensive and fashionably arranged accoutrements – all of this thanks to the support of the media which provide suggestions for what to buy, the means whereby these items may be acquired, and indications of where and how these products should be artfully displayed.
    [Show full text]
  • An Insatiable Dialectic
    An Insatiable Dialectic An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism Edited by Roberto Cantú An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism, Edited by Roberto Cantú This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Roberto Cantú and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5292-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5292-0 To Marshall Berman (November 24, 1940-September 11, 2013) TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Roberto Cantú Part One: Critique and Modernity What is Critique? ....................................................................................... 24 Richard J. Bernstein, New School for Social Research, New York Afterword: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 2010 .................................... 36 Marshall Berman, City University of New York Cross-Cultural Hermeneutics after Hegel .................................................. 44 Joseph Prabhu, California State University, Los Angeles Essay on Postmodern Culture: A Consideration of Values
    [Show full text]