Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism

by Raymond Tallis

Over the last few years, Raymond Tallis has published widely acclaimed critiques of influential trends in contemporary for example, Not Saussure - described as 'one of the most brilliant and effective of all rebuttals of post-Saussurean theory' - In Defence of Realism and The Explicit Animal, which demonstrated the baselessness of contemporary accounts of consciousness. Enemies of Hope takes the story further, identifying the themes common to anti-humanist twentieth-century thought and challenging the cult of pessimism that pervades our age. Tallis teases out the many strands of the comfortable, self-congratulatory cynicism of modernist and postmodernist cultural critics, exposing their self-contradictions and their wilful blindness to the distinctive mystery of human nature. The 'pathologisers of culture' and 'the marginalisers of consciousness' are shown to be the enemies of hope - the hope of progress based upon the rational, conscious endeavours of humankind. Perceptive, passionate and often controversial, Raymond Tallis's latest debunking of Kulturkritik explores a host of ethical and philosophical issues central to contemporary thought, raising questions we cannot afford to ignore. After reading Enemies of Hope, those minded to misrepresent mankind in ways that are almost routine amongst humanist intellectuals may be inclined to think twice. By clearing away the hysterical anti-humanism of the twentieth century Enemies of Hope frees us to start thinking constructively about the way forward for humanity in the twenty-first.

Genres: Philosophy

514 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 1997

About the author

Professor Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic and was until recently a physician and clinical scientist. In the Economist's Intelligent Life Magazine (Autumn 2009) he was listed as one of the top living polymaths in the world.

Born in Liverpool in 1946, one of five children, he trained as a doctor at Oxford University and at St Thomas' in London before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford. Professor Tallis retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer, though he remained Visiting Professor at St George's Hospital Medical School, University of London until 2008.

Prior to his retirement from medicine to devote himself to writing, Raymond Tallis had responsibility for acute and rehabilitation patients and took part in the on-call rota for acute medical emergencies. He also ran a unique specialist epilepsy service for older people. Amongst his 200 or so medical publications are two major textbooks - The Clinical Neurology of Old Age (Wiley, 1988) and the comprehensive Brocklehurst's Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology (Harcourt Brace, co-edited with Howard Fillitt, 6th edition, 2003). Most of his research publications were in the field of neurology of old age and neurological rehabilitation. He has published original articles in Nature Medicine, Lancet and other leading journals. Two of his papers were the subject of leading articles in Lancet. In 2000 Raymond Tallis was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in recognition of his contribution to medical research; in 2002 he was awarded the Dhole Eddlestone Prize for his contribution to the medical literature on elderly people; and in 2006 he received the Founders Medal of the British Geriatrics Society. In July 2007, he received the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing, and in November 2011 he was honoured with the International League Against Epilepsy's Special Excellence in Epilepsy Award. He is a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

Over the last 20 years Raymond Tallis has published fiction, three volumes of poetry, and 23 books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism. Together with over two hundred articles in Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and many other outlets, these books offer a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness, the nature of language and of what it is to be a human being. For this work, Professor Tallis has been awarded three honorary degrees: DLitt (Hon. Causa) from the University of Hull in 1997; LittD (Hon. Causa) at the University of Manchester 2002 and Doc (Med) SC, St George's Hospital 2015. He was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Liverpool until 2013.

Raymond Tallis makes regular appearances at Hay, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and other book festivals, and lectures widely.

Raymond Tallis's national roles have included: Consultant Advisor in Health Care of the Elderly to the Chief Medical Officer; a key part in developing National Service Framework for Older People, in particular the recommendations of developing services for people with strokes; membership of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence Appraisal Committee; Chairmanship of the Royal College of Physicians Committee on Ethics in Medicine; Chairman of the committee reviewing ethics support for front-line clinicians; and membership of the Working Party producing a seminal report Doctors in Society, Medical Professionalism in a Changing World (2005). From July 2011 to October 2014 he was the elected Chair, Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD).

In 2012 he was a member of the judges' panel for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

In 2015 he judged the Notting Hill Essay prize.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enemies of Hope is an engaging, energetic critique of the postmodernist world view. Tallis shows that there are important grains of truth in postmodernism, but that the conclusions postmodernist thinkers draw from these truths are wildly exaggerated. Tallis clarified many issued for me. He ends the book with a convincing presentation of how enlightenment ideals should be recast to take into account the valid concerns of postmodernism. An outstanding work.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exhausting romp for the philosophically-inclined, offering a contemporary defense of the Enlightenment impulse.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not gonna lie, I didn't read the whole book. I flipped through the prologue, skipped part one entirely, and skimmed the epilogue, mostly because I was only interested in part two.

Tallis, as he explains in the preface, "take[s] issue with…. twentieth-century Counter-Enlightenment thought, which is characterized above all by skepticism, or even hostility, towards the idea of a human being as a conscious, rational agent and of human society as susceptible to a progressive improvement as a result of the efforts of conscious, rational agents” (xiv). As such, part two is his critique of what he calls "the marginalization of consciousness." He sees many current intellectual trends—namely, Marxism, psychoanalysis, (post)structuralism, and cognitive psychology and behaviorism—as being dangerous in their repudiation of Enlightenment ideals of progress, reason, freedom, equality, humanism, democracy, science, etc.

I won't go into his specific criticisms of each movement, as that would take too long; instead, I'll summarize the main similarities: (1) the discrediting and minimizing of consciousness is itself a conscious process, and could not occur if we were not rational, ironically (2) anti-individualism is usually espoused by influential individuals, doubly ironically (3) a one-sided emphasis on systems and structures leaves people powerless to change them. In chapter 10, he reduces his entire problem with the critics of consciousness into one sentence: Ideological reductionism is harmful and self-defeating. The apotheosis of Language, History, Society, the Unconscious, etc. inevitably oversimplifies reality and strips us of agency, overlooking the specificity of human experience.

One could reasonably argue that Tallis is attacking straw men or simplifications of complex theories. Though, of course, Tallis himself acknowledges this possibility, and freely admits that, being unable to read everyone's œuvre, he can only address the general ideas and not all their intricacies. To use two examples, one could show, contrary to Tallis, that Marx did not, in fact, hypostatize history (at least in his early, humanist phase), but was extremely critical of this very move, emphasizing the agency of individuals; and also that, toward the end of his career, Foucault changed his focus from how power is exercised over people by institutions to how power exists in the hands of individuals themselves and their capacity to shape themselves as subjects, etc. I'm sure scholars of Derrida, et al., could summon other such clarifications. However, this misses the point. Again, Tallis clarifies that he is not really attacking Marx, Durkheim, Saussure, et. al THEMSELVES, but rather Marx-ism, Freudian-ism, structural sociology, Deconstruction, etc—that is, the ideologies that have been fashioned in their name, and which have often perverted the sources.

I quite enjoyed part two, but I cannot speak about the rest (i.e., the majority) of the book, so take from this what you will lol.