San Francisco Bay Area resident Daniel Joseph Polikoff has published eight books of poetry, translation, criticism, and creative non-fiction. At home in diverse fields and streams, his wide-ranging work draws upon world literature, depth psychology, anthroposophy, Neoplatonic philosophy, and other wellsprings of deep inspiration. He consistently aims to harmonize the spiritual and sensible dimensions of human nature by way of the middle term of all things: soul.
NEW BOOK:
Apocalypse of the Modern Mind is the second volume of Daniel Polikoff’s Reset or Renaissance series. The first (Two Roads: An American Scholar’s Covid Chronicle) tells us what really happened during Covid. This compelling sequel tells us—not only how—but why.
The democratic impulse that emerged with such dramatic effect (first in America and later in Europe) grew out of a rich soil of ideas revolving around the most profound and far-reaching concerns: the status of divine and natural law and the relationship of the one to the other; the respective provinces of reason and of faith; the nature and destiny of humanity. It is in reviewing and recollecting that rich intellectual history that we can gain insight into the principles underlying the philosophy of democracy and (more generally) the truly liberal impulse that engendered modernity. It is that order of comprehension, as well, that enables vision of the counterfeit side of that precious coin: the deformation of liberal and democratic ideals implicit in the nefarious “dialectic of enlightenment” and its frightening consequence: the technocratic authoritarianism so dramatically displayed in the Covid era.
Polikoff is concerned here not only with the dark shadows that creep in under the door of our enlightened modernity, but with radical solutions to the problems thus posed: solutions suggested by those bearers of a renewed Romantic or Transcendentalist idea of what enlightenment really means.