Postmodernism, Reason and Religion 1st Edition by Ernest Gellner (PDF)

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First Published in 1992. On questions of faith, Ernest Gellner believes, three ideological options are available to us today. One is the return to a genuine and firm faith in a religious tradition. The other is a form of relativism which abandons the notion of unique truth altogether and resigns itself to treating truth as relative to the society or culture in question. The third, which Gellner calls enlightenment rationalism, upholds the idea that there is a unique truth, but denies that any society can ever possess it definitively. Learned and stimulating, Professor Gellner’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of postmodernism and the relations between Islam and the West. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the ideological condition of contemporary society.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Ernest Gellner is a philosopher who champions fact finding and clear headed thinking. As a scholar of the Muslin religion he probably knows more about it than the average cleric. Yet his central effort here of trying to trisect the world into the three titled “sectors” does not work, however erudite his argument. For a start, neither postmodernism nor reason is a religious belief or a faith to fall back on for comfort this darkness at noon. If anything, reason (and by this Gellner means the belief in reason) and postmodernism have as a common feature the belief in the fallibility of human endeavours. Their common theme is the eternal presence of human stupidity and the futility of human intelligence. Religious fundamentalism is essentially the same thing, with the declared hope that its divinity is always there to guard the fail line. Well, he tried.

⭐By far the best part of this book is its droll, ironic, facetious demolition of the cultural relativists turned deconstructionists. As Gellner observes, relativism is good for allowing people their choice of wallpaper, little more.I was disappointed that there was not more in this brief book on fundamentalist Islam, since it was advertised as having been written as half of a duplex along with an Islamic historian.My main critique of Postmodernism … is that Gellner presents the reader with a kind of intellectual 3 card monte. Postmodernism on the left is ‘bad,’ fundamentalist religion on the right is ‘bad,’ ergo, the only card left standing, in the middle, his brand of Englightenment Fundamentalist Secularism (as he candidly calls it) must by the process of elimination be ‘good.’But those 3 categories are numerically incomparable. There might be 50 thousand committed postmodernists in the world–insignificant. There might be 400 million EFS’s in the world, western europe plus bicoastal university USA. There are probably 2-3 billion committed religious believers in the world. But folks in Gellner’s and the postmodern microcosms snobbishly condescend to those poor beknighted refugees from the 13th century.Gellner’s big mistake here is to equate all sincere religious belief with fundamentalism, a bad gaffe for a sociologist, who should at least be able to correctly report what a given community thinks, believes, etc., even if he doesn’t agree. But most Christians I know, and I believe most Muslims, and Hindus, are post rationalist, not pre-rationalist. That is, we take the best of the enlightenment, dredge its many infirmities, and add the good to the already very good religious faith. Two superb examples of this would be Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both of whom were highly degreed and intellectually acclaimed in the maw of the enlightenment, saw its positives, rejected its weaknesses, and blended the one with the other, to create a superior development (not change) to 21st century Catholicism.Gellner is to be praised for admitting that the 2 attempts at putting 100% pure enlightenment-ism into political action were train wrecks, the french and russian revolutions. He also admits that his enlightenment fundamentalist rationalist secularist religion probably could have only grown up on Judaeo-Christian soil. But the problem is, is that the EFRS religion has been living off the fumes of Christendom for centuries, cutting the limb on which it is sitting, and soon the cultural vacuum which is europe (and bicoastal USA) will be ripe for plucking by immigrants with a more muscular response than ‘whatever.’

⭐As a person educated in the values of Enlightenment rationalism and a convinced adherent to its principles, I was naturally attracted by the title of Ernest Gellner’s book “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion”. I expected a learned and thought provoking comparison of intellectual systems of thought and, at the same time, a rousing defense of rationalistic thinking as the only valid method available to humans in their quest for understanding and mastery of the world around them.I have to say that my expectation of lively examination of different doctrines and ideas was indeed exceeded by the author’s vast erudition and ability to present in a clear yet exciting manner the most complex philosophical concepts.However I was surprised and perhaps disappointed a bit with the way professor Gellner chooses to position rationalism in the triad defined by the title of the book. While declaring himself a “humble adherent” of what he calls “rational fundamentalism” he does not go out of the way to set this method of thought in a particular privileged position. Excited by his task of refereeing a three way contest and not the usual binary match-up of other similar works, the author makes an obvious effort to appear evenhanded, at least from a formal perspective. He dully identifies common elements and opposite points of view between any of the three schools of thought he is examining. Nevertheless, from the beginning, I was surprised by the inclusion of postmodernism on equal footing with religious and rational thought. Reading further I noticed that the author eventually abandons his formal evenhandedness and starts a vigorous and passionate attack on postmodernism. Pouring scorn and contempt over postmodernist ideas seems in fact to be the main thrust of the book and one wonders whether postmodernism status was raised a notch in the title so it can be hit harder from two sides. Ernest Gellner’s ire is raised in essence by cultural relativists and their claim that knowledge and morality have no meaning outside a particular cultural context. To be fair, initially the author identifies cultural relativisms as only a current of postmodernism but soon after he starts using the terms interchangeably, perhaps to maintain consistency with the title. Professor Gellner’s animosity and disdain toward all “relativists” know no limit. In his opinion, postmodernism is an “affected fad” practiced by sheltered western academics tormented by colonial guilt. Those academics are misguided, naïve and a danger to our civilization and to themselves. Gellner even amuses himself fantasizing about a postmodernist intellectual who, just before being killed by an enemy from a non-western cultural background, is trying to plead with his executioner using clever arguments from Wittgenstein.In comparison, the religious fundamentalists are treated very gently. They are acknowledged as “deserving our respect” and religious monotheism is hailed as a worthy precursor of rationalism with whom it shares the belief that there is only one source of truth. Whether that source is Yahweh, Allah or scientific reason, it seems almost like a secondary distinction at that point. In particular Islamic fundamentalism is appreciated in a paternalistic sort of way for being “simple, powerful and earthy”. Its latest advances in Muslim countries are explained by the author, in a very original way, as a kind of modern snobbery. Now urbanized and a little better off, the Muslim masses can finally affect the fundamentalist attitudes reserved in the past only to minority Muslim elites. The corollary seems to be that perhaps we just need to wait for the fashion to change and they will adopt eventually less dangerous fadsIn fairness, in his foreword, professor Gellner hints at an explanation for some of his choices of arguments and emphasis. The book was supposed to be published as only the first half of a larger book in which the second part was to be contributed by a renown Islamic scholar. In the end it was published as a stand alone volume and the author admits that had he have known that beforehand, he would have written some chapters quite differently.The observations above did not take anything away from my pleasure in reading this book. Like professor Gellner, I believe that knowledge is definitely beyond culture. I am not so sure about morality. Also, in my opinion, postmodernism is so much more than cultural relativism. While admitting that Marxism and even Nazism are children of the Enlightenment, Ernest Gellner refuses postmodernism the same lineage and sets it up as the enemy. I believe postmodernist artists and philosophers are just as committed to reason as the Enlightenment thinkers. They just lost the optimism that assumes that scientific progress and human virtue are always and necessarily moving in the same direction.All in all, an excellent book that I highly recommend.

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