Abstract

The epistemological, psychological and social thought of Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber is so closely related as to constitute a case of simultaneous independent discovery. These four authors synthesized the Kantian critiques of reason, the newly emerging theories of the unconscious mind and two of them, Bergson and Nietzsche, laid the foundation of contemporary deconstructionist theories of language. The four subjects of this dissertation assimilated the epistemological, psychological and linguistic critiques of knowing and transmitted these problems to such figures as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Bergson, Frued, Nietzsche and Weber were thus the source of contemporary postmodernism. But Bergson, Freud, Nietzsche and Weber were not the first postmoderns. Modernism here means the belief in epistemological certainty, in the ability of the human mind to attain truth through the application of objective, empirical observation and rational deduction. Postmodernism here means that radical critique of modern science as a mode of knowing which bases its criticism on perceived epistemological, psychological and linguistic impediments to knowledge. The ideas of Bergson, Freud, Nietzsche and Weber were the last gasp of modernism. ;The four subjects of this dissertation employed empirical observation and rational deduction in their study of the human mind and human society, so that they had not abandoned the essentially Baconian-Cartesian project at the heart of modernism. However, by applying empirical and rational methods to the study of the unconscious, they revealed areas of social and psychical reality which were not amenable to traditional scientific investigation. They exhausted modernism by revealing the limits of rational inquiry. Although they still believed truth was attainable, they all relied on the methodological employment of intuition. They were, therefore, not total skeptics, as are their intellectual progeny, the contemporary postmodernists, who have, by and large, denied that the mind can ever attain certainty