Conclusion: Political, Social and Cultural Criticism and Theory

[Music] i'd like to conclude our examination of the great minds of the western intellectual tradition with an examination a sort of synoptic overview of the tradition of moral and political discourse in the 20th century looking for certain commonalities and grounds for connectedness between schools of thought and between thinkers that perhaps on some issues are not entirely in agreement but represent a continued trend or a sustained trend in one or another intellectual direction now the first case we have to look before we start talking about contemporary intellectual life i have to look to the past perhaps this is my homage to gotomer to connect ourselves to the tradition particularly the great figures that stand astride the origins at the beginnings of 20th century thought who have somehow formed formulated or determined or delimited the traditions of western thought and in particular i think there are two great thinkers two sort of giants of the mind whose work stands above all others as being influential in the 20th century and i'd say these two thinkers are friedrich nietzsche and sigmund freud in the first case freud and nietzsche shattered inherited conceptions that were foundational fundamental to the process of articulating the status of human beings in nature articulating the status of human beings in society and legitimizing the articulation of those statuses in the first case friedrich nietzsche his most important contribution is the negative idea in some respects that god is dead and god is dead means more than the end of theology more than the end of christianity more than the end of the inherited religious traditions of the west it also means that metaphysics is over the entire platonic tradition the entire metaphysical tradition that moves from plato through scholasticism and into descartes and the kind of modern rationalists you know the rationalists of the last 500 years um what he's saying is that god is dead means that there's no imaginary space no imaginary realm where we can keep either religious entities like angels or god or things like the platonic realm of the forms or descartes clear and distinct ideas so the idea that god is dead doesn't merely kill god it kills god's dwelling place it kills the metaphysical realm it makes implausible all gestures outside of space and time that's what god is dead means and that's the big importance of it it's usually attached exclusively to religion but it means so much more than that the whole tradition of idealism the whole hope for moving beyond and outside of nature is undermined by nature now one of the results of this in some ways the most intriguing result of this is that for nietzsche ethics become aesthetics in other words they become a matter of taste they become a matter of perspective they become a matter of opinion they are ultimately not decided by any externality any rational grounding any divine law ethics is completely aestheticized and what results then is the collapse of moral universality we can no longer talk as if there were one kantian rule the categorical imperative that applies equally at all times to all rational souls in fact it's a crapshoot it's arbitrary it's an aesthetic judgment of taste and there's really no argument we can have about moral judgment any more than we can argue about what the prettiest color is so what that means then is our entire traditional moral discourse has come to an end because all our moralities presuppose some set of beliefs about the world and all of those are contingent all of those are dubious and all of those are arbitrary so we end up paradoxically or more perhaps oxymoronically with a sort of absolute relativism and this causes a collapse of our conception of moral universality and it tends to generate anami to separate people and to contribute to those centrifugal forces in society corresponding to this collapse of moral universality is a collapse of the universality of political discourse politics is transformed into an exclusive domain of the will to power the reason we advance certain political projects is because they gratify our will to power it is so clear for example that people like foucault have taken taken a a leaf from the book of nietzsche here in their almost obsessive uh analysis of power as being somehow the marrow the the or stuff of social and intellectual life so i'd be inclined to say that this politics as the will to power becomes a sort of volunteerism if you look at things like the writings of sorel in the early part of the 19th of the 20th century or the writings of camus and sard and heidegger and people like that this arbitrary commitment this ungrounded commitment this willingness to just jump in and say this is what i like this is what i believe this is what i will try and foster in advance is all a result of this collapse of moral and political universality into the domain of the aesthetic which means that everything at night all cows are black and ultimately what that leads to is voluntarism and what that leads is to chaotic politics politics where you can't reason issues out we can only fight them out and of course that sword of chaos is very much nietzsche's taste because he thinks that we've become passive and tame and insipid and we can finally improve our lot when we begin to do things on a heroic scale again back past the age of plato back to the age of homer almost nietzsche calls for a homeric commitment the possibility of doing something heroic sometimes you get heroism we might find praiseworthy sometimes we get unpraised worthy heroism but at least it's heroic it doesn't matter so much what they do as how they do it there's the nietzschean aesthetic and political theory now connected with this idea is freud's project which i would say has been at least equally influential compared to nietzsche's influence and both of them run very deeply are profoundly implicated in the thought of any contemporary thinker what's important about freud is first of all the splitting of the subject splitting of the subject into its component parts the id the ego the superego the idea mechanisms of repression um all the the systematic organization of the mind the geography of the mind that freud offers us in addition to his sort of temporal morphology of desire as desire files a certain path in each of the individuals which accounts for example why every young man must go through an edible phase there is a sort of shape to human desire and the shape is defined by temporality and by the kind of biological facts underlying our psychic life the result of this the splitting of the subject is that introspection is deep privileged back in the time of descartes you knew what was going on in your head you just looked inside and you told people with freud another of the masters of distrust a master of suspicion like nietzsche he said are you so sure that you know yourself are you really so transparent perhaps you've been creating illusions for yourself at the same time you were creating illusions for other people the importance of freud's work and of course it's multivalent in many respects but one of the leading elements in this that's been so influential in the contemporary world is freud's interrogation and his suspicion about the manifest content of language of communication this makes communication problematic and what we need then is some rule some set of rules which allow us to move from surface meaning to the subsurface meaning to find the ultimate reality which is disguised in the process of communication systematically disguised so what's important about freud is that he has made the process of communication much more problematic and difficult than it had been in earlier philosophical times the 20th century is particularly the age of incomplete fragmentary and uncertain communication and may i suggest that this uncertainty of communication this fragmentation of knowledge this dissolution of the centripetal forces which or the centripetal forces which hold society and thought and the self together have generated a fragmentation of the self and a fragmentation of society which seems to preclude continuous completely coherent discourses about either the self or the world that's experienced by the self and this is isomorphically represented in the fragmentation of knowledge in the contemporary world in other words the postmodern idea that there can be no overarching legitimizing metanarratives is a way of gesturing at the fact that we are no longer whole selves we are fractions we of interiority we are the debris of parts of a self we cannot form a fully transparent cartesian cogito because we cannot get that delphic self-knowledge ultimately that socrates was searching for and if you can't know yourself as socrates be more than happy to point out it is going to be that much more difficult to know the external world it will turn out that the external world is just as fragmentary and incomplete as partial as you are and that there will be a direct isomorphism between the one and the other so the idea then that knowledge is intrinsically partial fragmentary distorted and uncertain means that our knowledge of ourselves is correspondingly distorted fragmentaria and uncertain and i believe that since the world i am told is constituted socially is constructed in language since our language is only fragmentary and partially incomplete so is the thing which it describes this language constitutes it and that means that you're just pieces of potentially part of a self but we don't have quite what it takes to be a self anymore naturally enough we find this difficult to cope with and naturally we are trying to find a way out of this labyrinth one of the difficulties that postmodernist offers post-modernism offers us is the proposition that it may be impossible they may as bart said this may not be a labyrinth this may be home so get used to it make the best you can of it now in addition to being to the fact that post uh world war ii intellectual life is conducted in the shadow of freud and nietzsche i would be inclined to say that we have a new set of problems we have old problems too some of those haven't gone away but there's a new set of problems that this generation of thinker has been forced to confront which has had very great significance for political and moral theory particularly political theory and that's the advent of the machine of course the machine age has been around for several centuries now but here what i'm talking about is the cybernetic calculating machine the mechanisms of information storage and retrieval things which have changed the way in which we communicate which have made communication in some respects more accessible to a vast variety of people this videotaped lecture series being a very good example of the proliferation and the increasing complexity of communication systems and this offers us some benefits surely it offers the potential for an increased degree of of human liberation a decrease in toil and misery and unhappiness and perhaps pain and that's the kind of should i put it uh that's the optimistic or affirmative reading of these changes in technology which have generated tremendous changes in society and in our theory of morals and our theories of politics the pessimistic reading of technology and particularly the technology of cybernetic information transfer is much more typical of post-modern thinkers since the end of the second world war we have become increasingly anxious about the status of technology in our society because we feel perhaps that the tail is beginning to wag the dog that it pushes us around much more than we use technology to push nature around we feel constrained we feel as though our options and our choices are being increasingly limited as our privacy is eroded as more people can know more about us with greater ease as the mechanisms of social control become progressively more effective or performative if they have more information so for a great many reasons the advent of communicative technology and cybernetic technology has been a bet noir big problem for contemporary post-modernist and post-structuralist thinkers and technology connected with this generates a whole set of new problems that haven't been addressed yet and that we're just beginning to address and just beginning to think our way through and try and work some of those out but it will be another generation or two generations at least in other words there's plenty of there are plenty of unsolved as a matter of fact unasked questions about political theory which are connected to the advent of global technology some examples global warming who's responsible is the gl whose responsibility is the global degradation of the environment we don't have a school of thought which gives a satisfactory answer to that although it's a question that's going to become more and more important in the future without any doubt there's no way we can avoid that a second set of questions connected with that is uh suppose hypothetically the biosphere the simple biological limitations of the planet impose certain limits to the degree to which we can have economic development to the degree to which we can release fossil fuels to which we can extend the ozone layer suppose for example it's not possible to develop the third world into something analogous to say southern california suppose the simple limitations on the biosphere on the atmosphere and on the oceans won't allow for it suppose there are just too many people doing too much stuff to the environment suppose global warming would get too bad then does that mean we have to abandon the idea of equality particularly insofar as it's connected with the equal distribution of wealth as i understand it one of the most important traditions in contemporary political thought is the idea of equality particularly the idea of economic equality and the idea of equal or roughly equal distributions of property which are usually entailed in discussions of justice well suppose simple brute material reality prevents us from ever realizing that on a global scale does that mean that the redistribution of wealth if that were to be a limitation intrinsically does that mean then we have to reevaluate all our values or does it mean that the first world is going to vote to redistribute its wealth and cut back its income 50 75 percent a very difficult and intriguing set of moral and political problems is going to be generated by the increasing globalization of technology and by our increasing information about the influence this technology has on the atmosphere and on the environment so the connection between increasing human capacities and a relatively shrinking domain of area of space of matter to exercise those capacities on may create a sort of antagonism between the two and this may have tremendous repercussions for our conceptions of just political order and for our conceptions of political ideals these ideas have just been touched upon and they will be be they are likely to become main intellectual concerns of the next century there is no way to avoid them now technology since the end of the second world war has been probably the most disputed terrain among those who work in political and moral theory start from the beginning and look at the most important of the post-world war two thinkers and see where they stand on technology see if we can connect their views and see how one develops out of the other start with martin heidegger martin heidegger is known for his critique of technological man he says that technology is a distraction that gadgets pull us away from our authentic lives we are as t.s eliot put it distracted by from distraction by distraction we are constantly being pulled from one sensation and novelty to another but it prevents us from achieving authentic being and authentic meaning in our lives there is a powerful element of technophobia here and there is also a powerful element of resentment against the advent of post-modern technology and we'll try and articulate the reasons why that might be the case when we look at a couple of other cases that fit in the same mold the frankfurt school think of marcusa or adorno or horkheimer or any of those social critics extended the criticism of technology to its ideological manipulation of public opinion through the media of mass communications so when marcus writes one dimensional man what he is saying to the world is that you people have been made one-dimensional by the fact that machines run you you do not run machines the tail has started wagging the dog and if you would recapture your authenticity if you would really become human again you must break the bondage that you have that that you have to machines they can no longer be the masters they must be the servants we cannot give mechanical reality we cannot give technology a chance to become autonomous on its own now jurgen habermas who's one of the main extensions of the frankfurt school certainly the most important living exponent of that approach to the world i think has moderated these claims into a much more reasonable and persuasive sort of a stance habermas points out that technology is potentially liberating if it is used in such a way as to extend the domain of communicative rationality to an enlarged speech community and i think that there is a considerable justice in this observation and let me make an analogy back to a novel to give the idea if you think about 1984 i'm sure most of you read it winston smith is prey to technology and george orwell is very afraid of technology why because he thinks it crushes human freedom by giving the authoritarian state a chance for an oppressive surveillance a 100 percent of the time now think about how technology has in fact practically worked the advent of something like the video camera instead of having the government install them in all of our bedrooms so the big brother can watch us the video camera has been an enormously liberating tool in the hands of individuals you can actually go out and tape the rodney king beating and for the first time you could convict police officers and say that yes i have good hard fast evidence you know how i got it not from sharpening up my eyesight i got it because i have technology and technology is mass produced to the point where certain private individuals can buy it and use it in anti-totalitarian anti-oppressive ways so i think that there is a considerable justice in habermas defense of the potentially liberating effect of technology and i think there are good practical reasons in the world around us to think that technology has been a double-edged sword but those who are trying to throw technology out and call it into disrepute are in fact throwing the baby out with the bath water the idea of undermining the status of science and technology in society i think at this point in our historical development is a a sort of concession to the intellectual luddites among us to those who want to destroy the machines because it because it causes them anxiety and worry and unhappiness and they believe that the machines are the cause of this the machines are the occasion of it perhaps but the machines are not the cause the machines are the scapegoat for the fact that our self has become fragmented that we do not know who we are because we don't even form a holistic unit anymore the fragmentation of the self corresponds to the fragmentation of knowledge and that corresponds to the fragmentation of society and the political discourse which describes it and legitimizes it now an invert or an inverted treatment of habermas of technology compared to that of habermas is that a foucault foucault thinks that the increase in the power of science has been a trojan horse for disguise state coercion if you think for example of technological advances like the penitentiary right previous to that we didn't have the means for locking people up so it was necessary to kill most of them even for trivial crimes some people would describe the construction of the penitentiary as being a humane change a kind of enlightened reform which decreases the total amount of human misery in fact foucault would say that's not the case it's a stalking horse for the separate political interests of these of the political and social elite which generated the penitentiary system the bourgeoisie and it is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie to keep a living labor force which can be in which can be forced into docility and passivity and obedience and it's so inefficient to kill off people who could potentially become your laborers so what foucault is essentially saying is that technology inevitably serves only a fragment of society and it is an oppressive means by which an elite imposes its will to power on a passive majority and he thinks that while we probably can't get rid of technology most of the alleged liberating elements in technology have been covert stalking horses for the will to power now leotard is somewhat along the same lines leotard says that the performativity demanded by modern capitalism and by advanced industrial society by as we might put it post-modern society skews truth and justice towards wealth and the different is then terroristically silenced think about it this way leotard looks into the pragmatics of modern science and what he sees is that hmm if you're going to conduct high level science nowadays you've got to have funding because there's a lot of expense that comes with building a lab and if you're going to have funding you have to get the funding from people that have the money and the only way you can get the money is from either private individuals or from the state and the only way you can persuade them to give you money is by justifying your project on the basis of performativity it's the most efficient way of finding this out the result is that what emerges is a sort of correspondence between power in the form of economic wealth and the ability to conduct research programs and the truth that comes out of it so what leotard is saying is that if you're rich enough you can buy reality you can buy truth pay for the research program in other words science itself is ideologically tainted and it is ideologically tainted because it always serves the interests of in this in the case of advanced capitalism those who value performativity which is the high bourgeoisie and because of that it means that our science and our technology is intrinsically bound up with this constricting coercive project of imposing the will to power of an elite on the masses that is why he thinks that technology and science if it is understood to be a unitary thing that there's one true description of the world a scientific mimesis of external nature that the result is terroristic silencing of other discourses about science right makes a certain amount of sense the difficulty is is that how will we get out from under this will we fund astrology and um say the usual medical methods of inquiring into how to cure aids will we get say a weed someone that wants to do ouija board research on aids we fund that as well or are we forced into a situation not just because of our bias towards performativity but by the nature of the external world itself that it would be irresponsible to fund an infinitude of difference who all want to look into the same practical problem from different perspectives so leotard has shown us that yeah there is a sort of determination which power exercises on knowledge in this scientific age based upon organized socially conducted research and yet at the same time i think that he's taken it too far and that if in practice we wanted to live by this it would mean that we would have to give an equality of funding and equality of status to every kooky possibility and i think that would be a gross mistake people will die if we fund ouija board aids research if we spend half our money on astrology and half our money on clinical trials we will kill a lot of people with that sort of rejection of performativity and i'm it's impossible to convince me that that is simply an ideological construct that's an attempt to take control of the state for my own personal or my the collective purposes of the group i represent i think that the idea of performativity in the critique of science has gone too far there dangerously far irresponsibly far now we have an antidote to this and his name is alvin gouldner and alvin gouldner is the one is our renegade marxist he's our socratic marxist that was covered by professor stalloff's lecture and alvin gouldner is a member of a new class a special class not the high bourgeoisie a class that intellectuals don't talk about very much it's called the intellectual class and alvin gouldner makes the strikingly important argument that like the bourgeoisie the intellectual class has certain class interests which distort its just its speech and its thought and its ideology and that intellectuals pursue their own separate narrow class interests at the expense of the public good just as much as the high bourgeoisie does alvin gouldner says that there are only two in the modern or postmodern advanced capitalist world there are only two possible ruling elites and of course even though we have democratic forms elites ultimately call the shots the elite of wealth that owns capital marx has already talked about that quite a bit goulder wants to add the idea of another elite that owns a different kind of capital the intellectual elite that own the conceptual means of production it's a deep idea if that is true if our renegade marxist has found that intellectuals form a separate self-conscious stratum in society and that their interests because they long to take control of the state because it's so saturated in the new chain will to power if their interests conflict with that of the high bourgeoisie it will be their job to get a mass following and use that mass following to get voted into state power and then take control of the state and gratify their will to power this is a sort of foucaultian program well here's the problem with this if both intellectuals and the high bourgeoisie have different and antagonistic interests in the political realm what makes us think what gives us good ground think that only intellectuals are being public spirited and not selfish and are willing to do what's good for the masses of society what is it that makes us so much more moral than other people guldner points out that we're not more moral than other people in fact we're exercising our will to power we want to take control of the state and post-modernism in that view could be read as an elaborate power play by intellectuals they create a very caustic discourse which delegitimizes everyone else's claims towards authority towards certainty towards reality and towards knowledge and then in this ironic void that's left somebody has to take up the slack somebody has to be sufficiently sensitive to understand that we can't have totalizing discourses anymore somebody has to be willing to make the possibility of moral and political judgments in a new key and you know who that's going to be intellectuals in other words post-modernism is a power play by intellectuals where they serve to delegitimize the characteristic discourse of the other alternative ruling elite and their mass democratic base in order that they can take control of the state and the way in which they usually disguise this is really ni-chan they say we're not trying to take control of the state because of our will to power we reluctantly are willing to take control of the state because we're the only ones who see what's good for the public and particularly we're the ones who are taking care of marginalized discourses may i suggest to you that our concern with marginalized discourses is a means to take control of the state and taking control of the state is an is the end not the means towards undoing the marginalization of discourses post-modernism is the will to power of contemporary intellectuals not all intellectuals let us make a worthwhile distinction and this also comes from gul'dan this is a very fine argument in my view intellectuals may be broken down into technological intellectuals those who are connected to the natural sciences and what i would call humanistic intellectuals those are connected with the soft sciences guys like me guys who don't do math people that read text and then tell other people about them and interpret them and have a nice time luxuriating in the pleasures of the text well what happens is something like this technological intellectuals they get the national science foundation and they get lots of money from the state and so they're not nearly so angry as humanistic intellectuals because technologically intellectuals get respect they matter people listen to them people take them seriously and they get more than adequate funding so long as they construct things that explode right they work for the military and that's where all the money comes from and that's where it all goes to the problem here is that the high bourgeoisie having co-opted a certain element of the intellectual class has left humanistic intellectuals out in the cold and they're all broken-hearted and they don't have any connection to the power of the state which they long for because they're saturated in the will to power and so they construct an ideology which serves to delegitimize all other alternatives and once we've really delegitimized all other alternatives then we have room for the different and the different demands that it be taken just as seriously as all these other alternatives now you want to ask yourself who gains from these delegitimizing of science who gains from treating technology as oppressive and the state as illegitimate those who want to take control of the state those who are the alternative ruling elite post-modernism is the ideology of intellectuals humanistic intellectuals who are saturated in their own resentment and who are frustrated by their inability to take political power that's what post-modernism is they use as a stalking horse they're interested in the different in diversity they're using that as a means to take control of the state that is the real niche in reading and if they had the niche and nerve of foucault to say i don't want to hear anything about this altruism it really is about the will to power i want to take control of the state power is its own end well then at least we would have people being honest about what post-modernism really is it's a power play by the intellectual class and most of the discourse which centers around this delegitimizing of technology with the fact that technology turns you into a machine and robs you of your authentic essence and prevents you from being authentic and whole and whatever it is the buzz word is nowadays all it really amounts to is the fact that it leaves humanistic intellectuals out in the cold and they resent their own irrelevance that's what post-modernism amounts to and that's why it's so saturated in the mistrust and the suspicion of nietzsche and freud now connected with that idea is the idea that legitimation both of politics and ethics and knowledge is ultimately impossible right we found that in bart we found that in leotard consensus building is an illusion if you do it you're better off not doing that what could greater could offer a greater and permanent justification for their posture of defiance for their withdrawal and antagonism towards the culture as a whole for their antagonistic status towards the middle of the road the mainstream of society this is what justifies that now let's think about how we want to handle this when it comes to moral judgment and the problem of political coercion all right in the case of the existentialists like heidegger or sartre what we get is free play there is no way of legitimizing moral judgment or political judgment you can go either way cesar fights on the side of the resistance in the second world war and heidegger fights on the side of that doesn't fight but he he sides with the nazis he's a nazi collaborator he gives the nazi salute before every lecture the point here is that existentialism by subjectivizing and in any chain a sense aestheticizing ethics means that we're playing tennis with the net down that everything's in and that there's no possibility of being morally mistaken or morally wrong the key thing is that you have to be committed this is a romantic notion of of emotional uh force or emotional power as being the only possible legitimizing ground for a politics or a morality which is forsaken the possibility of rational consensus beyond existentialism there are the marxists and that's a very interesting trend nowadays it's fascinating to see that marxism is still alive and well in high cultural in the best universities in the advanced industrial world considering the fact that marxism has collapsed every place else in the world universities become something like the modern analog of jurassic park we can go and look at the intellectual dinosaurs while they're still with us right and we keep them safe so the rest of the world doesn't get in their way because obviously it can't make it in that darwinian external world of real rough and tumble politics so into universities end up becoming uh something like game parks where we keep endangered intellectual species like marxists right and this helps legitimize and it helps make more powerful and more socially coherent their stat their stance of defiance towards the world and society at large the great socratic different or exception to this marxist rule is alvin gouldner himself alvin gouldner calls himself a renegade marxist which is the kind i like alvin gouldner says he is a socratic marxist who says i have some very interesting questions to ask not just about the society which is full of lies and full of hypocrisy he doesn't doubt that but i want to turn our critical apparatus on us and see if we can be honest for a moment and that's what this argument about the intellectual about intellectuals being a separate social class amounts to it is using the marxist apparatus against the apparatus of marxist marxism itself and this theme of reflexivity of turning our intellectual guns back on our own lines is part and parcel of the whole postmodernist tradition remember that bard demythologizes everything until he decides let's demythologize demythologizing and see what we end up with meta myth mega myth that's all that's left all right now beyond marxism we have various kinds of efficiency arguments these are usually rather friendly to capitalism and these are usually found in the anglo-american tradition you find people like oh wherever you can find utilitarianism there aren't too many of those now it's not at all pomo to adopt something from the early 19th century like bentonite utilitarianism but there are a few in places like australia you find a utilitarianism is quite important there smart or in this country hare rm hare have made arguments along the utilitarian lines this is adapted and taken further by a guy named by someone like lumen with his idea of performativity and the maximum output for the minimum input the idea is that there should be some sort of calculus rational rational calculation of the of the connection between effort that goes in and output so i would say that utilitarianism is connected with this scientific project of no of rationally calculating out how it is we'll organize our political and moral theory and then of course this tendency has had its critics it generates its own critical stance and the critical the great critic of contemporary utilitarianism is rawls rawls is the one who makes the argument that utilitarianism has an inadequate or insufficient conception of equality and he tries to legitimize and justify the welfare state ask yourself what class of people manage the welfare state ask yourself what class people would be interested in legitimizing the welfare state it's intellectuals people that have college degrees and go out and run large bureaucracies why is it then that we have a theory being generated at this place at this time by an element of this particular class because it serves the interest of that class guldner's argument is root and branch it's a very powerful set of thoughts take this whole trend of thought this pro-scientific trend of thought which i think is characteristic of the anglo-american world much more so than the tradition of continental philosophy you see the same sort of problem with trying to find some ground for moral legitimacy you for example i would be inclined to say that all pragmatists are attempts to kind of muddle their way through the fact that all pragmatisms attempt to kind of muddle their way through the fact we don't have any grounds for our moral and political judgments and i would be willing to say those of you who are reading at home and trying to find out how this stuff connects scratch a pragmatist and in every case you will find a positivist with a broken heart they wanted to reduce the world to nature and they failed and they wanted one big set of rules which allowed them to be all sociological like carnap the problem is it didn't work and so they said oh let's cash it in and just kind of muddle through that's the best we're going to get think of someone like richard rorty who was one of carnap students all right so every pragmatist is a positivist with a broken heart they don't quite get what they want i would say that pr no one likes pragmatism by itself pragmatism is many people is the second choice philosophy of many people pragmatism would make a great candidate for vice president but nobody gets quite the candidate they want now let's think about where this leads us this pragmatism leads us in some ways surprisingly enough to the same sort of conundrum the same predicament we have when we look at continental philosophy you can have left-wing pragmatists like richard rorty who's really kind of syrupy and sentimental and he's a nice fellow he's a nice man but it's kind of saccharine on the other hand you can have real tough guys who have adopt the same sort of intellectual outlook someone like willard quine who's a reagan republican as far as i know well both professor rorty who's at the kind of liberal end of the democratic party and professor quine who's at what i would describe as the right wing of the republican party both are pragmatists in good standing in the same way that sard and heidegger can both be existentialists in good standing once we have no ultimate ground for to legitimize our political and moral judgments it's like playing tennis with the net down we accept a certain set of rules but they don't guide our decision making or guide our sentence construction or guide our theory production process in such a way as to prevent us from generating contradictions as hegel said at night all cows are black and that's what we have here this aesthetic or this transformation of politics and ethics into aesthetics we are all the children of nietzsche and the result of that is leotard's idea that we we're all talking past each other that we're all speaking our own separate languages and that may not be a bad thing because after all you can't avoid it we're making a virtue of necessity now move away from the anglo-american tradition which is for the most part favorable towards science if you look at something like structuralism and its step-child post-structuralism both take both levy strauss and bart take us from that early structural standpoint which is a modernist standpoint and they break through the presuppositions of structuralism they turn the structuralist process of demythologizing of looking for a substantial inner under reality against itself and they find that the inner under reality of structuralism is just another myth they find out then that structuralism demands post-structuralism it's one of those machines that destroys itself like some of the great dadaists put together on the other hand there are oh and all right in addition to this i would be inclined to say that of all the contemporary sets of new approaches to knowledge the only one which doesn't really fit into this post-modern paradigm one of the few that doesn't really fit in is godomrs hermeneutics the idea here is that we can achieve transparency or clarity of interpretation it's an endless cycle so we get we never get to that hegelian finality but at least there's the possibility of really knowing a real external world which exists a real cultural tradition which exists independent of our feelings about it it doesn't make us collapse back into solipsism it rather gives us a sort of asymptotic job of continually renewing our connection to the cultural tradition so i say that not habermas but uh uh hermeneutics in particular godhammer and his uh and the results of his thinking which i think is things like the communitarian political uh thought of people like uh galston or michael sandell i think that that idea of recapturing a sense of community is one of the new and intriguing post-post-modern ideas in a way it went around post-modernism which may save it some time because i suspect that 50 years from now post-modernism will be a cul-de-sac something no one reads anymore and i'm not so sure that's a bad idea let me close up this discourse by looking at a few of the ironies of this negative antagonistic stat stance which humanistic intellectuals take towards technology science and the theory of knowledge in the first case it seems like the everyday practical world and even perhaps not the not exclusively the everyday practical world but sometimes the extraordinary parts and the extraordinary agents the extraordinary people in the world are blissfully unaware of the contemporary developments in intellectual life and i think that may well be a good idea i'm confident that intellectuals will resent that because they've adopted that as a sort of reflex rather than a kind of considered opinion but the reason why i think that intellectuals are likely to resent their irrelevance is that when the contemporary world talks about important historical changes important historical agents they're always talking about people whose motivations and whose orientations are not post-modern are not post-structuralist think of something like oh i don't know gorbachev and the changes that he instituted in russia i'll bet he hasn't read anything that's post-modern think about lee kuan yew in singapore putting together the first technological city-state i bet he is antagonistic to the whole tendency of post-modernism these are real important political agents it's the irrelevancy and sterility of academic debate that become that becomes most prominent when you think about it in the context of contemporary affairs in the moral realm think about our great moral agents the people who i guess uh someone like already barracks and would have described as spiritual pioneers someone like say i know desmond tutu or mother teresa these people are locked into some into an ideology which post moderns would be inclined to call religion which is not even modern it's pre-modern and the problem is that not only are they the most conspicuous and influential and impressive and inspiring of moral agents their entire orientation is if not antagonistic to irrelevant to what cutting-edge intellectual theory what cutting-edge moral and political philosophy tells us is the real status of knowledge like our poor singaporeans and poor americans who don't know that they're terrorized in the case of leotard many people particularly religious people who are doing remarkable things in places like south africa or india or perhaps right next door to you are oblivious to the fact that sincerity has gone out of fashion and now irony is all the rage it may be then that the reason why intellectuals rage so powerfully the reason why they beat their heads against the institutional cages of the ivory tower is because they have created a self-fulfilling prophecy they have made alienation an end in itself they have pursued a sort of narcissistic self-indulgence which allows them to ride their own favorite hobby horse at the expense of continuity with the domain of culture as a whole and at the expense of logical coherence itself this then is my take on the predicament of post-world war ii thought when we analyze the tradition we try and incorporate the tradition and we try and figure out not just in theory but in practice what these intellectual trends amount to i think that the sociology of knowledge tells us much more about this sort of intellectual construct than any sort of theological theoretical demythologizing i would be inclined to say that the result of the post-modern project is that a intellectuals have become incred for all their avant-garde posturing intellectuals have become incredibly provincial and incredibly conventional the political ground occupied by most professional intellectuals is an amazingly small and truncated spectrum of political and moral thought and this is a self-contained infinity this is an infinity which marginalizes itself and makes a virtue out of its own alienation the result of all this moral and political chaos this philosophizing in the dark is that we generate individual and unique philosophies of resistance protest and negation which serves as rhetorical clothing for the intel for the naked resentment and ambition of the intellectual class

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 10,650

Rating: 4.9378238 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Conclusion, Political, Social, Cultural, Criticism, Theory

Id: n9e0g5s_LCk

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021