Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

of those constructions. Postmodern accounts of human nature are consistently collectivist, holding that individuals’ identities are constructed largely by the social-linguistic groups that they are a part of, those groups varying radically across the dimensions of sex, race, ethnicity, and wealth.

Individualism and science are thus consequences of an epistemology of reason. Both applied systematically have enormous consequences. Individualism applied to politics yields liberal democracy. Liberalism

While the modern world continues to speak of reason, freedom, and progress, its pathologies tell another story.

Postmodernism rejects the reason and the individualism that the entire Enlightenment world depends upon. And so it ends up attacking all of the consequences of the Enlightenment philosophy, from capitalism and liberal forms of government to science and technology.

For the pragmatist version of post-modernism, any abstract and universal theory of the law is to be distrusted.

Objectivity is a myth; there is no Truth, no Right Way to read nature or a text. All interpretations are equally valid. Values are socially subjective products.

The Enlightenment developed those features of the modern world that many now take largely for granted—liberal politics and free markets, scientific progress and technological innovation. All four of those institutions depend upon confidence in the power of reason.

One gives political power and economic freedom to individuals only to the extent one thinks they are capable of using it wisely. That confidence in individuals is fundamentally a confidence in the power of reason—reason being the means by which individuals can come to know their world, plan their lives, and interact socially the way that reasonable people do—by trade, discussion, and the force of argument.

Trusting science’s results cognitively is an act of confidence in reason, as is trusting one’s life to its technological products. Institutionalizing confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment confidence in reason, however, upon which all progress had been based, had always been philosophically incomplete and vulnerable.

God was no longer a personal, caring creator—he was now the supreme mathematician who had aeons ago designed the universe in terms of the beautiful equations that Johannes Kepler and Newton had discovered. The deists’ God operated according to logic and mathematics—not will and whim. The deists’ God also seemed to have done his work a long time ago, and to have done it well—meaning he was no longer needed on the scene to operate the machinery of the universe.

The Enlightenment’s championing of reason and individualism thus confronted the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers with the specter of a godless, spiritless, passionless, and amoral future.

Enlightenment conception of reason—that human reason is a faculty of the individual, that it is competent to know reality objectively, that it is capable of functioning auto-nomously and in accordance with universal principles. Reason so conceived underlay their confidence in science, human dignity, and the perfectibility of human institutions.

The empiricists had drawn from this analysis of sense-perception the conclusion that while we must rely on our sense perceptions, we must always be tentative with regard to our confidence in them. From sense-perception we can draw no certain conclusions.

The parallel argument in the case of general and necessary propositions was that there is no way to account for their generality and necessity empirically: Since what is given empirically is particular and contingent, generality and necessity must be subjectively added. Institutionalizing this premise is crucial for postmodernism, since what has been added subjectively can be taken away subjectively. Postmodernists, struck by and favoring contingency and particularity for a host of reasons, accept the Humean/Kantian premise that neither abstractness nor generality can be derived legitimately from the empirical.

Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitutive mechanism.

And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa.

Truth must be solely an internal relationship of consistency.

One form was Structuralism, of which Ferdinand de Saussure was a prominent exponent, representing the broadly rationalist wing of Kantianism. The other was Phenomenology, of which Edmund Husserl was a prominent representative, representing the broadly empiricist wing of Kantianism.

Instead, taking a cue from Johann Fichte, Hegel’s strategy was to assert boldly an identity of subject and object, thus closing the gap metaphysically.

For Hegel, the realist element drops out entirely: the subject generates both content and form.

Hegel reversed that: the universe as a whole is a subject, and within the subject are objects.

Hegel’s strategy was to accept that Judeo-Christian cosmology is rife with contradictions—but to alter reason in order to make it compatible with contradiction.

That was Kant’s mistake—he was too trapped in the old Aristotelian logic of non-contradiction.

reason. For all of Hegel’s talk of the ultimate Universal perspective of the Absolute, from any other perspective nothing holds for long: dialectic injects contradiction into reality at any given time as well as across eras. If everything is evolving by the clash of contradictions, then what is metaphysically and epistemologically true in one epoch will be contradicted by what is true in the next, and so on.

Whatever the variations, the metaphysical themes of clash and conflict, of truth as relative, of reason as limited and constructed, and of collectivism were dominant. For all of their differences with Hegel, postmodernists adopt all four of these theses.

When one discovers one’s essential nature, the core self-feeling that one is forced to accept is that of absolute dependence.

passionately, all the while knowing that we are choosing in ignorance. For Kierkegaard, the core lesson from Kant was that one must not try to relate to reality cognitively—what is needed is action, commitment, a leap into that which one cannot know but which one feels is essential to give meaning to one’s life.

Schopenhauer’s feelings had revealed to him that reality is Will—a deeply irrational and conflictual Will, striving always and blindly toward nothing.

Only via our own wills, our passionate feelings—especially those evoked in us by music—can we grasp the essence of reality. But most of us are too cowardly

This is why we cling to reason so desperately—reason allows us to tidy things up, to make ourselves feel safe and secure, to escape from the swirling horror that, in our honest moments, we sense reality to be.

Of course, having intuited the cruel horror of the seething flow, Schopenhauer wished for self-annihilation.[59] This was the weakness that his disciple, Nietzsche urged us to overcome.

yea-sayer—the man of the future—will not be tempted to play word-games but will embrace conflict.

Heidegger agreed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer that by exploring his feelings—especially his dark and anguished feelings of dread and guilt—he could approach Being.

Heidegger agreed that when we get to the core of Being we will find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things.

Phenomenology becomes philosophically important once we accept the Kantian conclusion that we cannot start as realists and scientists do by assuming that we are aware of an external, independent reality that is made up of objects that we are trying to understand.

Do not think objects, Heidegger counseled, think fields.

Heidegger explained his choice of “Da-sein” by defining it as follows: “Da-sein means being projected into Nothing.”

here Da-sein has a conflict: Logic and reason say that the question is contradictory and so should be set aside, but Da-sein’s feelings urge Da-sein to explore the question in a non-verbal, emotional way. So which does Da-sein choose: contra-diction and feeling—or logic and reason? Fortunately, as we have learned from Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, this contradiction and conflict is yet another sign that logic and reason are impotent.

Deep feeling about Nothing trumps logic any day.

For Heidegger, the special effort that is required is emotional, an exploratory letting oneself go into the revelatory emotions of boredom, fear, guilt, and dread.

In the end, all is nothing and nothing is all. With Heidegger, we reach metaphysical nihilism.

Positivism accepted as firm philosophical principles the Humean dichotomy of facts and values, the Humean and Kantian analytic/synthetic dichotomy, and as a premise the Kantian conclusion that while seeking metaphysical truths about the universe may be fruitless and meaningless, science could at least make progress with organizing and explaining the flow of phenomena. In the

The mistake earlier philosophers had made was in thinking that philosophy was about its own unique subject matter.

Philosophy is not a content discipline but a method discipline. The function of philosophy is analysis, elucidation, clarification.

Philosophy is not a subject: its only role is to be an analytical assistant to science.

Scientists perceive, organize their observations linguistically in concepts and propositions, and then they structure those linguistic units using logic. Philosophy’s job, accordingly, is to figure out what perception, language, and logic are all about.

Putting their point in Kant’s original language, our perceptual intuitions do not conform to objects but rather our intuition conforms to what our faculty of knowledge supplies from itself. This conclusion about perception is devastating for science: If our percepts are theory-laden, then perception is hardly a neutral and independent check upon our theorizing. If our conceptual structures shape our observations as much as vice versa, then we are stuck inside a subjective system with no direct access to reality.

This standard Humean/Kantian dichotomy of analytic and synthetic propositions immediately yields a very problematic implication: Logical and mathematical propositions are dis-connected from experiential reality. Propositions about the world of experience such as Beverly’s car is white are never necessarily true, and propositions of logic and mathematics such as Twice two makes four, being necessarily true, must not be about the world of experience.

Logic and mathematics, then, are on their way to becoming mere games of symbolic manipulation.