Explaining Postmodernism

Explaining Postmodernism - Stephen R.C. HIcks

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This is an essential book for understanding the current moment. Author Stephen Hicks takes the reader on a Cooke's tour of the history of political philosophy. The first part of this book spends a lot of time on the thinkers that most of us find far too obscure to properly digest, i.e., Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Marcuse. What these thinkers share is a rejection of the Enlightenment. The hallmark of the Enlightenment was empiricism and rationalism, i.e., humans could experience the world as it is and use their reason to understand truth. Confidence in such things led to a belief that political liberalism and free market capitalism.

The history of the Anti-Enlightenment involves philosophers denying the reality of external existence (or our ability to know external existence) because of some other agenda. For example, Kant was Anti-Enlightenment and denied man's ability to grasp the external world in itself out of a commitment to carve off a regime for “faith.” Similarly, Rousseau believed that civilization was degrading and the source of that degradation was human reason. For Rousseau, natural human passion was a far surer guide to human flourishing than human reason.

The Anti-Enlightenment was collectivist rather than individualistic.

“We thus find in Rousseau an explicitly Counter-Enlightenment set of themes, attacking the Enlightenment's themes of reason, the arts and sciences, and ethical and political individualism and liberalism. Rousseau was a contemporary of the American revolutionaries of the 1770s, and there is an instructive contrast between the Lockean themes of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in the Americans' Declaration of Independence and Rousseau's social contract oath for his projected constitution for Corsica: “I join myself— body, goods, will and all my powers— to the Corsican nation, granting to her the full ownership of me— myself and all that depends upon me.”[ 154]

Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (p. 92). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

Rousseau and Kant were succeeded by Hegel, who subsumed liberty and progress into the liberty and progress of the State as the basic unit of humanity. Hegelians divided into rightwing Hegelians and leftwing Hegelians. The distinction between the two was based on what form of collectivism the state would make primary:

“The National Socialists recognized that they were on the Right and that the Social Democrats and the Communists were on the Left. But they found little practical difficulty wooing voters away from both parties by emphasizing the socialist elements of National Socialism. And they did not find that the theoretical goals of the three parties were that far apart. Hitler, for example, declared that “basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.”[ 242] And Josef Goebbels, who had a Ph.D. in philology and perhaps a better claim to understand the theoretical issues, argued the same point.

Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (p. 118). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

The Communists made class primary and the Nazis made the Volk primary, but both were equally committed to overthrowing the bourgeoisie culture, particular capitalism and retraining social values.

“Thus Goebbels had often been more than willing to make speeches and write conciliatory essays to the Communists, asking them to recognize that the National Socialists' and Communists' major goals of overthrowing capitalism and achieving socialism were the same— and that the only significant difference between the two was that the Communists believed that socialism could be achieved at the international level, while the National Socialists believed that it could and should occur at the national level.[ 245] The differences between National Socialism and Communism boiled down to a choice between the dictatorship of the Volk and the dictatorship of the proletariat.[ 246]

Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (pp. 118-119). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

World War II took the right-wing collectivists off the table of history, leaving the continuing fight between liberals and socialists.

The problem for the socialists, though, was that their theories were failures. Capitalism and individualism were able to produce the goods and security that made for a flourishing culture.

Faced with this failure, the postmodern shifted to a ground where facts didn't matter. In fact, the denial of human inability to know facts through language was a core principle:

“For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rhetoric: Rhetoric is persuasion in the absence of cognition.

Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (p. 157). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

Post-modern epistemology was put in the service of a post-modern political agenda:

“Most other postmodernists, however, see the conflicts between groups as more brutal and our prospects for empathy as more severely limited than does Rorty. Using language as a tool of conflict resolution is therefore not on their horizon. In a conflict that cannot reach peaceful resolution, the kind of tool that one wants is a weapon. And so given the conflict models of social relations that dominate postmodern discourse, it makes perfect sense that to most postmodernists language is primarily a weapon. This explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanley Fish, as noted in Chapter Four, calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan.[ 298] Andrea Dworkin calls all heterosexual males rapists[ 299] and repeatedly labels “Amerika” a fascist state.[ 300] With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language's effectiveness. If we now add to the postmodern epistemology of language the far Left politics of the leading postmodernists and their firsthand awareness of the crises of socialist thought and practice, then the verbal weaponry has to become explosive.

Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (p. 158). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

Well, that certainly sounds familiar.

Equally familiar:

“In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims. On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is. On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad. Values are subjective— but sexism and racism are really evil. Technology is bad and destructive— and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others. Tolerance is good and dominance is bad— but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows. There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next. Postmodernists are well aware of the contradictions— especially since their opponents relish pointing them out at every opportunity. And of course a postmodernist can respond dismissingly by citing Hegel—“ Those are merely Aristotelian logical contradictions”— but it is one thing to say that and quite another to sustain Hegelian contradictions psychologically.

Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (p. 163). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

But post-modern relativism is an argument strategy, not a philosophical position:

“The first option can be ruled out as a possibility. Subjectivism and its consequent relativism cannot be primary to postmodernism because of the uniformity of the politics of postmodernism. If subjectivity and relativism were primary, then postmodernists would be adopting political positions across the spectrum, and that simply is not happening. Postmodernism is therefore first a political movement, and a brand of politics that has only lately come to relativism.

Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (pp. 164-165). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

This book is worth reading if only to avoid the gaslighting that we see. Likewise, it offers an explanation for why we see such obviously bad faith arguments screamed at the highest volume by subintellectuals.

It should be said up front that this book is a critique of postmodernism as well as an explanation. There is a tone of “postmodernism as failed project” throughout the writing, which will no doubt raise hackles among the far left and academics in the humanities, particularly in critical theory. Because postmodernism is bound to Marxist thought and to anti-capitalism, Hicks will no doubt be painted as some sort of libertarian or devotee of Ayn Rand. This may or may not be fair, though this book is much more rigorous and dispassionate than simple free market propaganda. He indeed uses examples of unsuccessful Socialist experiments, but only to illustrate how this modified philosophical thought into the postmodernism of the late 20th century.

The central theme here is the history of anti-rationalism and the lineage of the counter-enlightenment throughout continental philosophy into postmodernism. To put it very simply, the postmodernists argue that the the Enlightenment project has somehow perverted Reason to fraudulently describe a reality that cannot be described. They argue that there are only competing narratives and the West has allowed a dominant narrative of oppression and power to become ingrained in civilization. The rationalists who favor democracy, capitalism, science, and analysis would argue that nearly every prediction by the counter-enlightenment and postmodernists have not happened. This collision with history puts postmodernism on the retreat, forever modifying definitions to justify their claims.

It's a really good book if you are wanting to understand this issue. But the one you need to read more importantly is Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay