Postmodernism Part 1

[Music] welcome to the principal source audio presentation of postmodernism by stephen hicks post-modernism is the leading intellectual movement of the late 20th century it has replaced modernism the philosophy of the enlightenment for modernism's principles of objective reality reason and individualism it has substituted its own precepts of relative feeling social construction and groupism this substitution has now spread to major cultural institutions such as education journalism and the law where it manifests itself as race and gender politics advocacy journalism political correctness multiculturalism and the rejection of science and technology stephen hicks received his phd in philosophy from indiana university and is the chairman of the department of philosophy at rockford college in rockford illinois dr hicks is the author with david kelly of the art of reasoning readings for logical analysis as well as other books and articles he has participated in a number of conferences and discussions on objectivism and is currently researching and writing a book on business ethics at the 1998 summer seminar of the institute for objectivist studies dr hicks offered a systematic analysis and dissection of the post-modernist movement and outlined the core objectivist tenets needed to rejuvenate the enlightenment spirit by everyone's account we have entered a new intellectual era we are postmodern postmodernists claim that modernism has passed away and that we are in an exciting new intellectual era opponents of post-modernists look around the new intellectual landscape and don't much like what they see they say pretty much the same thing there seems to have been a major changing of the guard within the academy from outside the academy you hear fairly regularly a certain set of themes they're all anti-western themes columbus was bad for example america is a deeply racist and sexist nation western ideology is narrow it's exclusive it's intolerant the west is imperialistic imposing its capitalism its technology its science on other non-western cultures and increasingly upon a fragile ecosystem non-western systems because they live simply and harmoniously with nature are superior to ours underlying all of those themes we hear a more abstract set of themes fairly regularly subjectivism relativism egalitarianism both in ethical formulations and epistemological formulations there is no truth all cultures ways are equal no one group's values have any special standing so the west's emphasis on science individualism capitalism is nothing special on the other hand we hear deep themes of cynicism sometimes in the same paragraph everything is political in the sense of nasty power politics ad hominem argumentative tactics or legitimate crude political correctness is perfectly justifiable now those themes inform much of what goes on in the related professions in the humanities in literary criticism the most famous names nowadays are people like frederick jameson and stanley fish the notion for example that literary texts can be interpreted objectively is rejected it's replaced by the view that one's group membership that most deeply shapes one's views and feelings authors therefore no matter what their professed intentions are in novels are expressing their class interests or their race interests or their sex interests and so the task of the critic then is recast we need to deconstruct the text to reveal those deeper underlying interests and of course those authors who at least embody politically correct attitudes will be subject to the greatest amount of deconstruction nathaniel hawthorne for example in the scarlet letter seems if you read closely at least ambivalent about hester prynne's moral status was she a victim or was she a hero but this ambivalence shows that he has sold out and what he has sold out is to a fairly authoritarian and masculine religious establishment herman melville and moby dick may have thought that he was exploring fairly universal themes about personal ambition and social dynamic man and nature but what ahab really represents is the exploitive authoritarianism of capitalism and the nearly insane drive of technology to conquer nature in law the new wave is called critical legal theory known as the crits fondly for short they embody the new wave with their insistence at the so-called objectivity and neutrality of legal reasoning is a fraud there is no universal standard of justice there is only competing wills in the course of assertion of one group's interests over those of other groups law in the west is simply a cover for the assertion of white male interests and the only antidote to that poison is an equally specious assertion of interests of minorities and females this is associated with advocacy education at all levels in college for example the emphasis in the humanities upon reading the great works of the western canon is misplaced according to post-modernism with respect to the sciences the claim that no one knows anything for sure implies that science as a method has no special claim that we should teach science students to be equally receptive to alternative ways of knowing across the board at all levels the idea of presenting all sides of a debate in order to foster objective judgment is many cases deemed silly whether the issue is environmentalism or the impact of columbus's arrival or the status of women and minority groups in the 19th century slanted presentation and indoctrination is more or less taken for granted and behind all of those professional applications we find that the big contemporary names on everyone's lips the big guns who are appealed to by everyone are people like thomas kuhn and richard rorty two american philosophers and going across the atlantic jacques derrida michelle foucault and jean-francois leotard my purpose today is going to be to understand first and then criticize post-modernism i think it's false i think it's destructive but because of its fairly high standing in the academy it has done considerable damage and it's in a position to do a great deal more post-modernism is a philosophical and a cultural movement and such movements require that a lot of groundwork be put in place that a great deal of scaffolding be erected and that takes a lot of work by intellectuals over several generations movements on this scale don't just pop up into existence but they really are the result of long labor so i want to first do some intellectual history to show where post-modernism comes from and what it depends upon to critique it we need to know where it came from postmodernism has many symptoms in a variety of fields and applications but to cure those symptoms we need to find the source or sources all right first actually before we do the intellectual history i want to define precisely what post-modernism is as a philosophical movement i want to figure out what theses constitute post-modernism what distinguishes it from other philosophies there's a fairly standard rejoinder by post-modernist at this point they will object to the whole idea of defining post-modernism this resistance is part of the philosophical package post-modernists love plurality ambiguity they don't much like singularity and precision the idea that there's a correct definition is suspiciously like part of that western realist objectivist package implying pigeonholing dissecting pinning things down trying to sort out necessary and sufficient conditions like scientists do well i say that's damn right and i love it concepts mean what they mean that is the source of their power and the networks of concepts that make up post-modernism is no exception well there is a fairly legitimate issue here a somewhat difficult issue post-modernism is a whole philosophy and a philosophy has many components sorting out which ones are fundamental and which ones are derivative is often not easy post-modernism also has manifestations in all aspects of culture from law to religion to art to economics and it's also often not easy to see the connections among all of the cultural manifestations and to connect them to the underlying philosophies but let's do that anyway like the easiest starting route would be to focus on post-modernism's contrast to modernism since it proclaims itself as post-modernism understanding what it sees itself as rejecting and moving beyond should be clarifying and since modernism has been around for several centuries it is something that is going to be an easier task to get a grip on so what's modernism well modernism also is a broad philosophical movement we heard david speaking about the enlightenment philosophy this morning and that's exactly what it is i have on the board here and also on your handout on the the opposite side of the flow chart where all of the tables are a grid or a table defining a philosophy involves in my judgment four essential components and then one derivative component the metaphysical component we do metaphysics we're asking what the basic nature of reality is an epistemological component defining the means and nature of human knowledge how we know whether it's by reason intuition mysticism or what an application of metaphysics to metaphysical nature of human beings right what is our deepest nature what is the nature of our rational capacity its relationship to emotion relation of our consciousness to reality whether we have volition or free will on how that relates to causality these are all issues of human nature that a philosophy needs to touch on questions of value first in ethics what is the nature of value finding virtues and then as a component of that the core concepts of social ethics uh the the moral concepts that are necessary to organize a society i like to boil that down actually just to three questions right philosophy boils down to what's real how do you know and so what metaphysics epistemology values so to have a philosophy you need to touch on all of those and have systematically worked out answers to all of those major questions modernism does that in philosophy we monitor we locate the the beginnings of the modernist movement with renee descartes primarily for his contributions in epistemology but more comprehensively with john locke renee descartes died in 1650 did most of his writings in the first half of the 17th century john locke died in 1704 most of his major works were published in a really remarkable flurry 1689 through 1690 the two treatises of government essay concerning human understanding in 1690 and 1689 you had the the letters concerning toleration which were extremely important and influential in england modernist philosophy flowered comprehensively and became the dominant view in the 1700s the dominant set of views by the middle part of the 1700s would be characterized metaphysically by naturalism epistemologically by an emphasis on reason in human nature the idea that human beings are born tabula rasa or blank slate and in ethics and politics we have a strong emphasis on individualism and liberal democracy so on that table that you have there what i have is on the left side at the top so we have here's the branches of philosophy going down and then you'll find the second column from the right the modernist essential theses about philosophy and integration that's essentially the enlightenment the enlightenment is essentially the 1700s or the 18th century enlightenment philosophy was radical and the enlightenment's thinkers saw themselves as radical they saw themselves as the flip side of the philosophical movement that had dominated the west for a thousand years the medieval synthesis the medieval philosophical outlook had dominated from roughly 400 time at which rome empire was collapsing on through about 1400. by the 1400s you can see the renaissance developing and what you have in the renaissance and the reformation is kind of a centuries-long battle where in which the forerunners of the enlightenment are undermining the medieval synthesis and paving the way for the enlightenment the medieval synthesis was the exact opposite of what the enlightenment ended up with on metaphysics instead of the naturalism you have an emphasis on supernaturalism supernaturalism is where it's at there's a realm superior to nature this realm is secondary or or derivative in epistemology reason is de-emphasized or shoved out the door the primary means by which you know a supernatural dimension is not reason or sensory experience it's mysticism or if you are not one of the special few chosen by god to receive mystical experiences it's faith in human nature the dominant view is one of original sin and subordination we are dependent and subordinate to god's will not our own and in ethics obviously of an ethic of altruism in christian religion politically and economically also you have feudalism as the dominant expression of the the medieval worldview with its hierarchy of who's more important than whom and in fact who gets to receive the sacrifices and to whom the sacrifices need to be made those are the uh well i don't have it on here i forgot to bring the handout those are the pure forms pre-modern pre-modernism is a consistent more or less internally coherent set of answers to all of the major philosophical questions you find an equally pure and internally consistent one by the time of the enlightenment on all of the major fundamentals they are opposed to each other the renaissance is kind of a transition zone now i'm obviously painting with very broad strokes here using a very wide brush i think that's justified we can point out that enlightenment philosophy was not totally homogeneous and might enlightenment philosophers disagreed among themselves on many core issues descartes for example has a highly rationalistic account of what human reason is locke has a more empiricistic account of what human reason is well that's uh that's the reason why they're at the heads of competing philosophical schools about the nature of reason but for both of them and this is the key enlightenment point reason was the fundamental what they disagreed with was exactly what the nature of reason was and by putting reason as the fundamental and the most important human faculty the whole enlightenment project flows from that now that's the flip side if we start with descartes and lock and put reason fundamental this has consequences reason if you emphasize it as a faculty of knowing nature okay then you go down this lower half here reason systematically directed toward understanding nature gives rise to science as an enterprise the institution of science and it's not accidental that all of the groundwork projects in science were being done at roughly this time newton's principia was published in i think 1687. does that sound right looking at that contemporary of lock so we have a contemporary of luck in effect laying the groundworks for the modernist movement in science if you emphasize that reason is a faculty of the individual and so that that has immediate value consequences and these are the ones that lock is emphasizing you have a strong emphasis on individualism each of those then has derivative consequences if you follow the individualism for example politically emphasizing individualism gives rise to liberal democratic forms of government and so we have all the liberal democratic revolutions going on in the 1700s in economics if you emphasize individualism you get capitalist economic economic uh institutions and so we have adam smith in the later part of the 1700s writing wealth of nations 1776 to be exact if you go down here science if you apply it to kind of inanimate objects you get engineering the industrial revolution picking up steam by 1750 if you apply it to medicine medicine is being put on a scientific footing in the 1700s the basic work in biology and chemistry is starting to be done and then my medicine really doesn't come into its own though until the 19th century those then have later applications the amount of freedom in the society increases exponentially you have in the 19th century the ending of slavery for the first time in human history the ending of the subordination of women the gradual extension of the franchise and so on uh the old story wealth explosion as a result of capitalism number of material goods that engineering in the industrial revolution is producing is huge and when medicine kicks in human health and longevity and life expectancy increases dramatically all right that is the enlightenment vision uh david read from condorcet i mean he was writing at this time here before most of this institution building had been done so it was all a projection from the standpoint of the 20th century we can look back and see that this worked right this was a set of philosophical ideas that because they were deeply true they were able to deliver the goods the enlightenment philosophers were able to set up the institutions that were able to fulfill all the promises that for example condorcet is mentioning this is what the post-modernists are attacking and they're attacking it in the most fundamental way possible they're attacking it down here or at this end of the flow chart reason is what they are attacking in epistemology and individualism is what they are attacking in the value branches and so it's not going to be surprising that when you flush it all out they end up attacking everything else that's on this list at some point or other so the technology that comes out of science is attacked the capitalism is attacked and ultimately the liberal democratic institutions are going to be attacked this set of ideas you end up with then are going to be the exact opposite ones if you attack all of these ones here and that's the far chart on the right here the postmodernists also end up with a fairly coherent internally anyway set of ideas that are distinct from the other two you end up with anti-realism as it's called we can't say that reality is supernatural or that it's natural talk about what reality is is just meaningless we are against the idea of saying what reality is in epistemology we have a deep skepticism as a result of that you get the relativisms in the human nature you have some sort of determinism and it's either of a genetic sort or of a biological source or genetic or biological or environmental sort both of those attacking the idea that we are autonomous creatures or that we have free will and then in the value branches you get the collectivist expressions the consequences of those ideas when put into practice are that there is no objectivity so there's no neutral court of appeals possible all you're going to be left with then is competing group interests you don't have any rational recourse in sorting out these group interests so you only have irrational methods possible your you emphasize the third-person perspective that post-modernists will take you will have an egalitarian focus but of course they end up denying that you can have a third person perspective so all you can do is you go back to your first person perspective and from that you appeal to your group membership and your your group's interests over other people so my first question then is going to be now that we've defined what post-modernism is and i hope clearly distinguished it from all the other major competitors past the intellectual history question how did we get from the modern philosophy to the postmodern philosophy post-modernism is a phenomenon of the latter half of the 20th century enlightenment philosophy was flourishing in the 1700s still continues to flourish in some sectors of our culture but how did that transition happen i want to start with emmanuel kant my first historical thesis or intellectual historical thesis about where this comes from is that post-modernism is a consequence of a very deep skepticism khan critiqued uh published his critique of pure reason in 1781 in my judgment he is along with jean-jacques rousseau the most significant figure in the counter-enlightenment we can have arguments about whether kant is first or rousseau is first that's that's a fun debate one of the exciting things about objectivism though and my judgment is the power that it ascribes to philosophical ideas and understanding what goes on in all aspects of human culture and human history that ideas matter is fairly widely held a lot of people will subscribe to that thesis but that the most fundamental philosophical ideas matter that is a more striking thesis that's the one that gives objectivism in my judgment a fairly unique perspective and take on what goes on in human history and being able to explain it now in the case of kant obviously you don't have to read far into ayn rand's writings to figure out that she thinks kant's philosophy is the worst disaster of all time that she holds his philosophy responsible for most of the irrationality and the destruction that has gone on in the last two centuries but if you don't know very much about the history of philosophy before and after khan it's difficult to see why she singles out kant and in her brief and vehement remarks she does not elaborate upon those and mostly what they do is they point in a direction where a lot more reading and thinking and research needs to be done so i'll make a gesture in that direction today the central thesis you find in the critique of pure reason is that reason cannot know reality we know that one it only knows its own subjective constructs a part of kant's motivation writing during the time the enlightenment is flourishing is religious you can see that the religion is taking a beating at the hands of secular naturalistic philosophy religion is on the defensive it's in danger effect of being laughed out of intellectual life he agrees however with the enlightenment thinkers that religion cannot be justified by reason and so as he states in the second preface to the critique of pure reason i had therefore to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith and so the whole project then of the critique is to show why reason cannot have knowledge of reality and since it can that leaves the door open for faith as a means of coming to have beliefs about reality okay so if you know anything about history of philosophy at this point you can say well so what why is kant special on these points there are lots of earlier skeptics who said we can't know reality lots of earlier religious apologists had subordinated reason to faith so what makes kant special on these points there are two things i think the first is that the earlier skeptics had not been as sweeping in their conclusions they would pick off a particular cognitive operation and raise problems for them maybe it's all a perceptual illusion so this we undermine our confidence in our perceptual faculties or maybe it's a dream thus undermining our confidence in being able to distinct distinguish truth from falsity or in fantasy maybe induction is only probabilistic thus undermining our confidence in all of our generalizations but the conclusions of skeptical arguments would be simply that we can't be sure that we are right we might be but we can't prove it now kant argument is deeper arguing that in principle any conclusion reached by any of our faculties must necessarily not be about reality on principle because our minds are structured in a certain way we can't say what reality is we can only say what the end result of what our mind's structured is and this is going to be completely general no matter what cognitive faculty you pick out and focus on that argument applies so consciousness with all of its faculties is thus undermined in a very deep way nakant is a landmark in a second respect earlier skeptics despite their negative conclusions continued to conceive of truth as a correspondence between mind and reality or between consciousness and reality kant then went a step further and redefined truth on subjective grounds if our minds are disconnected in principle from reality then to speak of any type of conscious relationship including truth as a correspondence to a reality that we can't know that makes no sense and so we then need to redefine truth not in terms of a correspondence to reality but internally and subjectively and for him it's going to be an internal relationship of coherency and so what you find then with kant is that external reality drops out of the picture totally we can't know it and we don't define truth in terms of it and that is why kant is a landmark so i start my story with kant as we march along to post-modernism after kant really the story the history of philosophy is the story of german philosophy kant died at the beginning of the 19th century just as germany was beginning to replace france as the world's leading intellectual nation it is german philosophy that sets the uh the program now i want to focus briefly on two strands in german philosophy in the 19th and the 20th century and we'll do this next slide here [Music] one strand starts with hegel and runs through marks hagel is definitely the most important and influential german philosopher of the 19th century marks not influential in the 19th the most influential in the 20th both take off from kant but cast kant's deepest conclusions in a different direction for example one of khan's backup arguments to show that reason is impotent appears in a section starting about two-thirds of the way through the critique of pure reason the section is called the antinomy of pure reason and its purpose is to show that reason is way out of its depth when it tries to figure out deep truths about reality kant there develops four pairs of parallel arguments on four metaphysical issues showing that on those issues reason validly leads to contradictory conclusions you can prove that the universe had a beginning in time but you can equally soundly prove that the universe must be eternal you can prove that the world must be made up of simplest parts and also that it can't be that we have free will and that strict determinism is true and that god must exist and that god might can't be proven to exist or that he doesn't exist this shows kant concludes that we can never know reality because there what we're trying to do is no reality but we are running into contradictions our reason therefore must be limited to internal stuff manipulating and reconstructing its own subjective creations now hegel thinks kant has missed a deep point here all right the antinomies are not a problem for reason contrary to kant but rather the key to the whole universe the antinomies of reason are only a problem if you think logical contradictions are a problem and that was kant's mistake right he was too trapped into the old aristotelian logic of non-contradiction what khan's antinomies show is not that reason is limited but that we need a new and better kind of reason one that embraces contradictions and sees the whole of reality as evolving out of contradictory forces so that's this third hegel marks point here hegel also differs from khan in adding an evolutionary component evolutionary ideas in the 19th century are in the air everyone is in fact laying the groundwork for darwin's explanation in 1859 in contrast to kant's belief that the subjective categories are necessary and unchanging hegel argues that the appropriate categories by which we structure reality are themselves evolving and relative what is metaphysically and epistemologically true in one epoch will be contradicted by what is true in the next and so on hegel differs from khan in a third key respect groups not individuals are the operative units kant was way too individualistic men's minds are not autonomous autonomy was a key point for kant rather their minds are a function of deeper forces of the universe operating on them those deeper forces are primarily for us as individuals our surrounding culture but we are constructed by our surrounding cultures so it's not that we are cultures are made up of individuals but rather cultures have an evolutionary life of their own and those cultures as they evolve construct their constituent individuals as part of the process additionally individuals are secondary in the ethically speaking as hegel puts it in his philosophy of history quote individuals come under the category of means to an ulterior end that ultimate end so that was an end of quotation this is me now that ultimate end is collective the process of society evolving toward its own ends during which it must of course quote trampled down many an innocent flower crushed to pieces many an object in its path those objects are the recalcitrant individuals within the society so that's hegel with marx we get a a more materialistic and pretty much more bloody version of the same general outlook all right so what we get from hegel and marks are three key ideas the group is the unit of analysis not the individual deep truths evolve and change over time and contradictions are to be embraced right as built into the nature of reason and so forth now this uh hegel marx framework is what i fondly like to call the pro-reason wing of german philosophy hagel loved to capitalize reason it was always reason with a capital r okay marx called his socialism scientific socialism and of course there is a more irrationalist deeply irrationalist line the romanticist line that comes out of kant's philosophy and this one includes major figures such as schopenhauer and nietzsche and denmark's lonely contribution to the history of philosophy soren kierkegaard kierkegaard born a generation after kant educated in germany was like kant deeply worried by the beating religion had taken during the enlightenment he was delighted to learn from reading kant that reason cannot reach numina or reality as it is but where kant hesitated here saying that therefore the nature of reality is closed off to us kierkegaard says that that only proves you can't know reality by reason what is needed is a non-rational access to reality and in accordance with kierkegaard's deeply felt religious needs it's an irrational leap of faith that is necessary the leap of faith has to be irrational and you have to make the leap knowing that it's irrational because after the enlightenment we know that we can't prove the existence of god and after the enlightenment we know that the traditional religion that we are making our leap into the judeo-christian tradition involves all kinds of bizarre paradoxes and contradictions if you read for example fear and trembling okay you will find kierkegaard's panagiric to abraham it's the the opening section of it it's worth a read abraham is the hero or one of the heroes of the old testament who in defiance of all reason and all morality is willing to kill his son isaac simply because god tells him so any rational person would raise all kinds of questions and say why this is not a good thing to do kierkegaard or abraham is going to turn his mind off god commands i take the leap i believe i do it character guard reveres abraham because he was willing to as a character puts it crucify reason and leap into absurdity kierkegaard has been deeply influential upon theology especially protestant and some strands of jewish theology in the 20th century schopenhauer also of the generation after kant and contemporary of hegel's agreed that cons showed reason's inability to grasp reality this however contrary to kant is because reality itself is deeply irrational and conflictual so reason hasn't got a chance will and emotion are much deeper faculties than reason and it is through will and emotion that we grasp the essence of reality in the next generation nietzsche agrees as he puts it in the second essay of his genealogy of morals the problem with philosophers up to and including kant was their emphasis on reason the emphasis on reason men's a loss of reliance upon instinct once the philosophers took over men quote no longer possessed their former guides their regulating unconscious and infallible drives they were reduced to thinking inferring reckoning coordinating cause and effect these unfortunate creatures they were reduced to their consciousness their weakest and most fallible organ and again how pitiful how shadowy and fleeting how aimless and capricious the human intellect is so what nietzsche means then with his passionate exhortations to be true to oneself is to break out of the artificial and constricting categories of reason reason is a tool for weaklings weaklings who are afraid to be naked in the face of a cruel and irrational or conflictual reality and who therefore build fantasy intellectual structures to hide in the yay sayer by contrast the man of the future will not be tempted to play word games but he will tap into his deepest drives his will to power and he will channel all of his instinctual energies in a vital new direction all right so stepping back what we get then from this other postcontinent strand of philosophy is again three key themes there's an agreement with kant that reason is important or impotent to know reality the claim that will and emotion trumps reason and yields deep truths about reality and third that reality is deeply conflictual or observed death of nietzsche in the 1900s very convenient brings us to the 20th century and so what we need to do is find a way to bring together these two strands of german thought to synthesize them for the new century the philosopher who in my judgment does this more than anyone is martin heidegger heidegger notorious for the obscurity of his prose actually that's pretty much all of german philosophy but heidegger is uh pretty bad he's also notorious for his actions and inactions on behalf of the nazis during 1930s but he is unquestionably the leading philosopher of the post-modernists jacques derrida michel foucault said they were followers of heidegger rorty richard rorty cites heidegger as one of the three big guns influencing his thinking now heidegger himself places himself squarely in the kantian tradition reason as kant said is incapable of knowing reality now put this next slide up here in fact reason is our primary obstacle to knowing reality as heidegger writes in an introduction to metaphysics logic and reason would forbid us asking certain questions such as why is there being and not rather nothing or why does being be or in our terminology why does existence exist not non-existence now logically it seems like an absurdity or we reach an absurdity whichever way we go we could say for example well there's no answer to why existence exists it just exists for no reason but if something exists for no reason that's observed why did you do that no reason it was observed right that's an observed action on the other hand if we say that there is a reason why or an explanation for why existence exists then we need an effect to step outside of existence to explain it if we step outside of existence we step into nothing okay and that also seems absurd because then we're going to explain existence from nothing that you can get something from nothing and that's absurd either way we go we're deep into absurdity yeah well this doesn't stop heidegger logic right would say that the question is ill-formed it's contradictory so the question should be set aside existence exists that's your axiom you go from there on the other hand switching to a heideggerian first person perspective these questions strike a very deep feeling in me so here i have a conflict logic and reason say the question is contradictory and should be set aside but my feelings urge me to explore the question in a non-verbal emotional way fortunately as we've learned this conflict is yet another sign that logic and reason are impotent and as we know by now we should expect to find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things contradiction is a sign that we're on to something important deep feeling therefore trump's logic the next step is of course if we're honest when we all consult our core feelings we find ourselves full of dread anxiety and all that other cool stuff kierkegaard talked about and then we're off into an existentialist wallow now there's more where that came from but let's step back and put heidegger on the flow chart here with heidegger what we get is the two lines integrated the lessons post post heideggerians can take from him are i've got six of them here i think the other all should be right there conflict and contradictions are the deepest truths about reality reason is subjective impotent logical contradiction isn't an argument against anything feeling is a deeper guide than reason authenticity requires a deeply felt leap into conflict and paradox and secondly that you embrace collectivism now just assert that last one for now without argument but in heidegger you find a very deep collectivism of the nationalistic variety the sympathies with the nazis are evidence of this but in all of his deep philosophical writings you find a view that authentic living requires that you consciously absorb into yourself your your cultural tradition that you see yourself as part of the development and flow of your people's tradition all right so that's my reading of the essence of the continental tradition in philosophy as it's called after kant the continental tradition fairly quickly and gleefully abandoned reason putting clashing wills and troubled emotion at the forefront and in the continental tradition obviously we can find a lot of the ingredients of post-modernism now this though leaves a problem because this can't be the whole story because there's a gap post-modernism is thriving in the american academy here and in the american academy for the longest time it had little use for hegel nietzsche kierkegaard and heidegger the anglo-american tradition in contrast with hegel's speculative wanderings and kierkegaard's wallowings it allied itself with science with rigor with reason with objectivity it had been deeply impressed with science and it saw science as an alternative to the now discredited religious and speculative philosophy it wanted to make philosophy scientific and it wanted to justify the roots of science this positivist spirit broadly speaking pro-science pro-logic dominated the anglo-american scene for much of the 19th century and most at least half of the 20th century and so it's got to be the collapse of that positivistic spirit in american philosophy that is also part of the story of the rise to post-modernism now i got a slide here since time is short i'm going to whip through this this is probably a more familiar story to most of us here i'll pick out a few big names and put them in a narrative okay beginning of the 20th century bertrand russell foreshadows what's to come in the final chapter of an often read introductory book called the problems of philosophy published in 1912 beginning of the century russell summarizes the history of philosophy as a repeating series of failure after failure to answer its questions can we prove there's an external world now can we prove that there's cause and effect no can we validate any of our generalizations no can we find an objective basis for morality no way russell concludes therefore that philosophy can't answer its questions we've been trying forever got nowhere must not be answerable and so he comes to believe that any value philosophy has can't be in offering truth or wisdom it's got to be somewhere else ludwig wittgenstein and the early logical positivists took the problem one step further why has philosophy traditionally failed to answer any of its questions well because those questions are meaningless the mistake earlier philosophers had made was thinking that philosophy was about its own unique subject matter but that's wrong philosophy has no content as such no metaphysics no ethics no theology no aesthetics those are all content and they're all meaningless this means we need to recast philosophies function philosophy is not a content discipline it's a method discipline its function is analysis hence the name analytic philosophy and it should see itself as an assistant to science so the purpose then a philosophy in this newer analytic tradition is to analyze the perceptual linguistic and logical tools that science uses scientists perceive organize it organize their observations linguistically and concepts and propositions and then structure those linguistic units using logic philosophy's job then is to figure out what perception language and logic are all about so what in a nutshell has 20th century anglo-american philosophy had to say about perception language and logic well the dominant conclusion about perception is that it is theory laden that means that all of our perceptions have theory built into them what we see carl popper norwood hanson paul fireabend thomas kuhn four of the biggest names in the 20th century philosophy of science all argue that our theories largely dictate what we will see now this is true perception then is hardly a neutral and independent check upon our theorizing putting it in kant's original language our perceptual intuitions do not conform to objects rather our intuitions conform to what our faculty of knowledge supplies from itself our conceptual structures shape our observations not vice versa and so we are stuck inside a subjective system with no direct access to reality similar conclusions are reached for language and logic language and logic are a conventional internal system not objective reality-based tools of consciousness the positivists taking wittgenstein and karnap as leading examples in the pragmatists here taking quine and ernest nagle as leading examples agree on this as wittgenstein puts it in the tractatus all the propositions of logic say the same thing that is nothing they say nothing because they are merely a function of how we have decided to use words but how we use words is conventional we could use or we could have decided differently we could carve the world up differently with our words we could using uh nelson goodman's example decide not to pick out one color of this color spectrum and call it blue and then call the neighboring section green but we could pick out kind of a section in the middle and call it bleen or it's up to us that's a matter of convention so if language and logic are conventional then the rules of logic and language hardly say anything about objective reality and so logical proof cuts no mustard in adjudicating competing claims about fact also if the rules of logic and language are conventional well what's the stop someone from adopting different conventions nothing the rules of logic and grammar can be as variable as other conventions including performance uh how we greet each other do we shake hands rub noses hug or what okay none of them is more objectively right than the others now by the 1950s starting to talk faster now the rules conclusions are commonplace step is thomas coons publication in 1962 his monumental structure of scientific revolutions if science tool sciences tools are perception logic and language than science one of the enlightenment's prized children is merely an evolving socially subjective enterprise with no more claim to objectivity than any other belief system so i see kunis in effect integrating everything that went on beforehand so by the 1960s really the pro-science pro-objectivity spirit that had animated much of anglo-american philosophy has collapsed the next step is richard rorty's best known of the american postmodernists and he generalizes the point to anti-realism as kant had said 200 years ago we can say absolutely nothing about numina about what's really real rory's anti-realism is exactly the same point the idea that we can speak about what's real is just an illusion there are no objective answers there is no truth there are only truths and truths change now once these conclusions are reached about knowledge and science the anglo-american tradition is ready to take seriously kierkegaard hegel nietzsche and heidegger this is what we started to see happening in the 1960s all right after this whirlwind tour then of 200 years of western philosophy i can now summarize and offer my first hypothesis about the origins of postmodernism all of the key ingredients of postmodernism are laid out for them by 20th century philosophers most of 20th century philosophy however has not been systematic it's been anti-systematic on principle for the most part it's been developed in a piecemeal fashion post-modernism is the first synthesis the first system putting together all of the pieces you've got metaphysical anti-realism epistemological subjectivity feeling at the root of all value issues the consequent relativism of knowledge relativism of values the collectivism the anti-science attitudes are all integrated into a totality once we set our reality and reasoning aside what's left well we have our feelings when we inspect our feelings what do we find well from kant and sorry from kierkegaard and heidegger we get a deep sense of dread and guilt from mark we get a deep sense of victimization and rage from nietzsche we get a deep sense of a need for power from freud we get a welling up of dark smutty sexuality where these feelings come from well they're determined either biologically or environmentally in either case i am not individually in control of my feelings i am a product of my group membership whether it's economic sexual or racial and of course the shaping experiences vary from group to group so differing individuals and different groups have no common experiential framework there is no objective standard by which to mediate those different feelings no appeal to reason is obviously possible nasty political correctness then makes perfect sense that's how you impose your group's agenda on other groups post-modernism then is the end result of the counter-enlightenment inaugurated by conscious epistemology now that's the first hypothesis i'm going to talk two more minutes okay okay a big problem for this hypothesis and this will be a homework problem but i'll give you a clue right i call this the kantian explanation for post-modernism and here's the problem okay if deep skepticism about reason and the consequent subjectivism and relativism or the whole story you would expect a random distribution of positions across the political spectrum adopted by post-modernists if all of values including politics are a matter of a subjective leap into whatever fits your preferences we should expect to find people making leaps into all kinds of different preferences and so we should expect a more or less random distribution across the spectrum this is not what we find in the case of post-modernism post-modernists are not people who have reached relativistic conclusions and then found comfort in a variety of political persuasions postmodernists are uniformly monolithically far left-wing in their politics michelle foucault lefty jacques derrida lefty richard rorty stanley fish left andrea dworkin catherine mckinnon left frederick jameson way left jean-francois leotard left not a single major name and of all the minor names i've read not a single one is anything except left and pretty far left so there's something else going on here part of that something else is that socialism has dominated political philosophy in the 20th century particularly among academic intellectuals but this is still puzzling because for most of socialism's intellectual history it has been defended on modernistic grounds of reason and science marxist socialism has been the most dominant version and that of course was scientific socialism socialism socialists argued could be proved by evidence and rational analysis and anyone open to the evidence was would then see uh socialism superiority be proved so i'm going to stop there the question is what do we need to add to get the socialist part integrated into the post-modernist framework i'll pause there for today and we'll go now to questions [Applause] steve the standard objectivist response to uh kant and to most of the various threads you've woven for us through here up to through post-modernism is uh the sort of self-refutation uh problem with violation of axioms what does this tradition have to say about that what do post-modernists have to say about this uh uh how aware are they of sort of the standard response that we would make to their basic foundation uh are they and and do they have a response yeah but i think there's two responses to that one is that okay maybe there's a contradiction in my position but until i can conceive of something else that's better a philosophical framework that's going to be satisfactory i'm going to go with the one that seems most on the right track to me knowing that right now it's got some contradictions maybe we'll be able to sort those out in the long run okay that's kind of a an optimistic response but it's also a hard thing to do i mean if someone points out a contradiction in your philosophy it's a huge leap then to say oh well there's a contradiction here and so i throw it all out the window and go into something else usually what you do is you try to conserve as much as possible right try to bracket the contradiction and then make the changes piecemeal now if however the contradictions that are pointed out are really deep right and you know that your system follows from very deep contradictions you know that in effect your whole system is infected so you can't really play that game for very long then you have a choice you either then have to get rid of your whole system and go to something else maybe live in doubt or without a system for a while which is psychologically hard or you have to find a way to say the contradiction doesn't matter even though it's a deep contradiction and what i see especially the religious thinkers of the time as doing is saying you can point out all kinds of contradictions in religion god is three and god is one mary was a virgin but i don't know how that could have happened right uh the list goes on god is omniscient so he knows everything we're going to do in the future but still we have free will and we're responsible um and so on those are all contradictions we don't have answers to them but then this just must mean that logic and contradiction in that whole reason game isn't where reality is at deeply speaking and so you just bracket all of that i know this is true and then you start talking about faith now is that honest well i don't think so if you formulate it in those terms but that's what happens i think that's pretty clearly what's going on with kierkegaard one of the nice things about postmodernism for us as philosophers is very inside of the debate here it's it's it's very easy for us uh to go and pick out these absurd quotations and point out uh contradictions and inconsistencies in their in their in their writings uh what in your opinion is is the reason that so many uh so many people in academia so many seemingly intelligent people are attracted to post-modernism as a doctor and what what's the most charitable spin you can put on that uh yeah all right you're asking an awful lot um the charitable spin will come tomorrow and the socialism is part of i think it's not an accident that the the intelligent people whom you would mention right as finding themselves attracted to post-modernist or post-modernism are also socialistic and so i think the primary thing that's going to be driving really something that's going to be driving it deeply is going to be the political commitments and we'll explore those tomorrow uh stephen this is just a minor point and i'm asking i think that i'm correct but just correct me if i'm wrong um according to your talk today in this graph it it seems like you're implying that today i mean you have analytic philosophy and then post-modernism and i totally agree that analytic philosophy and the things you point out have led to post-modernism yes but aren't the major uh philosophy departments the united states predominantly um analytics still and that post-modernism really hasn't taken a hold at all in the philosophy departments that's true philosophy is by and large healthy compared to most other disciplines in the humanities where you find the worst manifestations of post-modernism are in english literature in the law schools in educational theory and bizarrely enough nursing theory okay i read a couple of monographs by nursing theorists and you have heidegger he's the man um yeah oh there's a story that's can be told there anyway uh yeah you're quite right that most of the philosophy departments though are not deeply infected by i mean they will have people who are high tagarians but you know the heidigarian person is one person among 20 right or they'll have someone perhaps who does deconstruction and and french continental philosophy and stuff like that but for the most part yeah they are still in the analytical tradition the analytical tradition has still got a lot of momentum behind it and people are still working in it and you know there can be a lot of good work done when you do analytical philosophy because that analytic work does need to be done philosophy though i think has by and large you know after logical positivism collapsed said well we're just going to go off and do a whole bunch of other things and so i said okay skepticism well end of the argument we don't have an answer to it but let's go do some applied ethics and so applied ethics is booming or let's go and do uh classical philosophy and so aristotle scholarship is booming and so on so the philosophers are mostly going off doing other things can you can you refute the claim that our perceptions are authorizing yes i can now oh you i that is uh i thought i mean i wrote in my dissertation um most of a chapter that was on that very topic and i think my very first talk to the iowa summer seminar was on that very issue and there i talked for about an hour and a half so what i would suggest is that we pursue that in outside of this session since that's a narrow topic within epistemology and here today we're doing more intellectual history but i would love to i love that topic you

Channel: Atlas Society

Views: 267,949

Rating: 4.7527022 out of 5

Keywords: Postmodernism (Literary School Or Movement), philosophy, objectivism, reality, the matrix, skepticism, ayn rand, capitalism, gender studies, Literary Theory (Field Of Study), descartes, the enlightenment, the counter-enlightenment, Truth, Michel Foucault (Author), socialism, modernism

Id: ZhK6XOT3uAA

Length: 63min 47sec (3827 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2015