The purpose of this research is to examine selected discourse of modern and postmodern/semiological social and cultural critique with particular reference to the range of phenomena, texts, and ideas associated with modern occultism and New Age thought. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the context in which critical theory has emerged in the twentieth century and to identify characteristic modes of semiotic and postmodern discourse, and then to discuss the New Age in respect of such discourse.
To get a sense of the historical context for the emergence of critical theory, it may be useful to return to the very origins of philosophy, or at any rate to the structures of philosophical discourse. McKeon cites Plato's utter dependence on the form and method of the dialogue, "suited to carry out all three tasks of philosophy simultaneously--the discovery of truth, the construction of arguments, and the clarification of minds" (McKeon 27). The tradition of rational (= logical, systematic) discourse has persisted through the whole of Western philosophy and theology to this extent, that questions of truth inform logical and epistemological debate, questions of reality or being inform metaphysical, ontological, and cosmological debate, and questions of value inform the axiological and ethical debate. According to Marcuse, the rationalist philosophical tradition culminated with Hegel, whose life and work coincided with the more culturally general and decisive transition of the West toward modernity, out of the dislocations of the French Revolution, which itself had marked once for all the end of Western feudalism and which heralded the decline of absolutist monarchy and politics and the rise of bourgeois capitalist industrialism that would mark Europe and America in the succeeding centuries.
Man's position in the world, the mode of his labor an enjoyment, was no longer to depend on some external authority, but on ...