Stephen Hicks

Many postmodernists, though, are less often in the mood for aesthetic play than for political activism. Many deconstruct reason, truth, and reality because they believe that in the name of reason, truth, and reality Western civilization has wrought dominance, oppression, and destruction. “Reason and power are one and the same,” Jean-François Lyotard states. Both lead to and are synony-mous with “prisons, prohibitions, selection process, the public good.”[6]
Postmodernism then becomes an activist strategy against the coalition of reason and power. Postmodernism, Frank Lentricchia explains, “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” The task of postmodern professors is to help students “spot, confront, and work against the political horrors of one’s time”[7]

Rhetoric about trying to put the sins of the past behind us, about progress and democracy, about freedom and equality before the law—all such self-serving rhetoric serves only to mask the brutality of capitalist civilization. Rarely do we catch an honest glimpse of its underlying essence. For that glimpse, Foucault tells us, we should look to prison.
Prison is the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force. … What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn’t hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely ‘justified,’ because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality.

In philosophy, modernism’s essentials are located in the formative figures of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650), for their influence upon epistemology, and more compre-hensively in John Locke (1632-1704), for his influence upon all aspects of philosophy.
Bacon, Descartes, and Locke are modern because of their philosophical naturalism, their profound confidence in reason, and, especially in the case of Locke, their individualism. Modern thinkers start from nature—instead of starting with some form of the supernatural, which had been the characteristic starting point of pre-modern, Medieval philosophy. Modern thinkers stress that perception and reason are the human means of knowing nature—in contrast to the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s own character—in contrast to the pre-modern emphasis upon dependence and original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual, seeing the individual as the unit of reality, holding that the individual’s mind is sovereign, and that the individual is the unit of value—in contrast to the pre-modernist, feudal subordination of the individual to higher political, social, or religious realities and authorities.[13]