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July 20 - August 12, 2021
Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s own character—in
Modern thinkers emphasize the individual, seeing the individual as the unit of reality, holding that the individual’s mind is sovereign, and that the individual is the unit of value—in
Postmodernism rejects the entire Enlightenment project.
And here we are going to have a problem.
Whether social conflicts should be defused by encouraging the principle that individuals should be judged according to their individual merits and not according to morally irrelevant features such as race or sex—or whether group identities should be affirmed and celebrated, and whether those who balk at doing so should be sent for mandatory sensitivity training.
Disagreements are met—not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail—but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force.
Why have themes of exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism come to have the cultural dominance they do? And how can those intellectual themes coexist with a broader culture that is richer, freer, and more vigorous than any culture at any other point in history?
Why is it that the leading postmodern thinkers are Left in their politics—in most cases, far Left? And why is it that that prominent segment of the Left—the same Left that traditionally defended its positions on the modernist grounds of reason, science, fairness for all, and optimism—is now voicing themes of anti-reason, anti-science, all’s-fair-in-love-and-war, and cynicism?
Because we have labelled them as such. The left-right spectrum is not of much help anymore. Left used to mean liberal enlightenment ideas, now that is right... see what I mean?
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.
The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality—or is it not?
Or is it close enough that it gets us closer to eudaimonia?
If reason could be shown to be limited to the merely phenomenal realm, then the noumenal realm—the realm of religion—would be off limits to reason, and those arguing against religion could be told to be quiet and go away.[31]
Non-overlapping magisteria.
Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitutive mechanism. He held that the mind—and not reality—sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosophy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard.
Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason.
Consistency with no connection to reality is a game based on subjective rules. If the rules of the game have nothing to do with reality, then why should everyone play by the same rules? These were precisely the implications the postmodernists were to draw eventually.
With Kant, then, external reality thus drops almost totally out of the picture, and we are trapped inescapably in subjectivity—and that is why Kant is a landmark. Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one then enters a different philosophical universe altogether.
Seems like binary thinking to me. Is there no room for middle ground?
Hegel’s reason operates by dialectical and contradictory means, and not in accordance with the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction.
So here we have a different kind of reason. But using the same word. That's not confusing at all.
Hegel’s place historically is to have institutionalized four theses in nineteenth-century metaphysics. 1. Reality is an entirely subjective creation; 2. Contradictions are built into reason and reality; 3. Since reality evolves contradictorily, truth is relative to time and place; and 4. The collective, not the individual, is the operative unit.
3 is a stretch to apply it universally. 4 does not follow from 1-3.
1. An agreement with Kant that reason is impotent to know reality; 2. an agreement with Hegel that reality is deeply conflictual and/or absurd; 3. a conclusion that reason is therefore trumped by claims based on feeling, instinct, or leaps of faith; and 4. that the non-rational and the irrational yield deep truths about reality.
3) except for the things that CAN be understood by reason. and 4) sometimes they do, sometimes science does.
Heidegger believed reason to be a superficial phenomenon, and he adopted the Kantian view of words and concepts as obstacles to our coming to know reality, or Being. However, like Hegel, Heidegger believed that we can get closer to Being than Kant allowed, though not by adopting Hegel’s abstracted third-person pretense of Reason. Setting aside both reason and Reason, 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. And like all good German philosophers, Heidegger agreed that
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Discard reason, and embrace your shadow material. Doesn't sound like a good approach to live by.
This sense of dread that comes with a sense of the dissolution of all beings along with oneself was for Heidegger a metaphysically potent state, for in effect one gets a foretaste of one’s own death, a sense of one’s being annihilated, a sense of going into nothingness—and thus a sense of getting to the metaphysical center of Being.
He's hinting at a lot of what some Eastern traditions have tackled differently. IT doesn't have to descend into dread, it could be Enlightenment in the Buddhist sense.
In dread we come to feel that Being and Nothing are identical. This is what all philosophy based on the Greek model had missed, and what all philosophies not based on the Greek model had been struggling toward.
The dissolution of self or ego.
So after abandoning reason and logic, after experiencing real boredom and terrifying dread, we unveil the final mystery of mysteries: Nothing. In the end, all is nothing and nothing is all. With Heidegger, we reach metaphysical nihilism.
It's the grasping at nihilism that is the wrong path. Too bad Heidegger hadn't been exposed to buddhism (or similar) he might have discovered it could be nirvana.
1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality; 2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality; 3. Reason’s elements—words and concepts—are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked; 4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all; 5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;
Taking the path of your shadow material for a deeper guide seems a wrong path to take. Are we trying to become Sith Lords?
6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy—whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian—based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to be overcome.
Logical consistence is the enemy?
Nor is it to make explicit, as Heidegger did, his strong anti-science and anti-technology views.[86] Nor is it yet to discuss his anti-humanism,[87]
Heidegger sounds like a really nice guy, lets build our metaphysical approach on his ideas?
But now they had to ask, as Paul Feyerabend urged them to ask, Why is science special? Why not analyze theology’s concepts and methods? Or poetry’s? Or witchcraft’s?[112]
Perhaps because science actually produces real world results.
Postmodernism is the first ruthlessly consistent statement of the consequences of rejecting reason, those consequences being necessary given the history of epistemology since Kant.
Too bad it didn't just stay as an intellectual exercise, instead of people trying to build it a life philosophy on it.
From Kierkegaard and Heidegger, we learn that our emotional core is a deep sense of dread and guilt. From Marx, we feel a deep sense of alienation, victimization, and rage. From Nietzsche, we discover a deep need for power. From Freud, we uncover the urgings of dark and aggressive sexuality. Rage, power, guilt, lust, and dread constitute the center of the postmodern emotional universe.
In either case, however, individuals are not in control of their feelings: their identities are a product of their group memberships, whether economic, sexual, or racial. Since the shaping economic, sexual, or racial experiences or developments vary from group to group, differing groups have no common experiential framework. With no objective standard by which to mediate their different perspectives and feelings, and with no appeal to reason possible, group balkanization and conflict must necessarily result.
I've definitely met people that are not in control, mostly children, but some adults. But I've met a lot of other people that are in control.
And why those particular groups? I get that this is how we have traditionally categorized people, but is that a historical accident or is there something to it? (there isn't anything to it)
Having rejected reason, we will not expect ourselves or others to behave reasonably. Having put our passions to the fore, we will act and react more crudely and range-of-the-moment. Having lost our sense of ourselves as individuals, we will seek our identities in our groups. Having little in common with different groups, we will see them as competitive enemies. Having abandoned recourse to rational and neutral standards, violent competition will seem practical. And having abandoned peaceful conflict resolution, prudence will dictate that only the most ruthless will survive.
In short we will act like children.
This has the spiral dynamics pre/post fallacy written all over it.
Foucault, following Nietzsche more closely in having reduced knowledge to an expression of social power, urges us to play the brutal power politics game—though contrary to Nietzsche he urges that we play it on behalf of the traditionally disempowered.[116]
Why the traditionally disempowered? Seems almost like a contrarian attitude. And will it ultimately results in how the world "ought" to be? Why not subject the power structures to the dialectic and deal with the disfunctional parts? This approach would appear to add fuel to an already raging fire.
Postmodernists are not individuals who have reached relativistic conclusions about epistemology and then found comfort in a wide variety of political persuasions. Postmodernists are monolithically far Left-wing in their politics.
the leading thesis is that some form of liberalism in the broadest sense is essential to protecting civil rights and civil society in general—and the liveliest debates are about whether a conservative version of liberalism, a libertarian one, or a modified welfarist one is best.
Again, the story has its modern roots in the battle of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. This time the battle is over the Enlightenment’s individualism and liberalism, best represented by the Lockeans, and the anti-individualism and anti-liberalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers.
Reason generates civilization, which is the ultimate cause of the sufferings of the victims of inequality, but reason also then creates rationales for ignoring that suffering. “Reason is what engenders egocentrism,” wrote Rousseau, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns man in upon himself. Reason is what separates him from all that troubles him and afflicts him. Philosophy is what isolates him and what moves him to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering man, ‘Perish if you will; I am safe and sound.’[134]
This is a further reason why, according to Rousseau, “the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”[145]
Wow. So Buddha was wrong about the 4 noble truths and 8-fold path according to Rousseau.
In the new society, the leadership expresses the “general will” and enacts policies that are best for the whole, thus enabling all individuals to achieve their true interests and their true freedom. The requirements of the “general will” absolutely override all other considerations, so a “citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.”[149]
The leadership does this, not the individual. Reminds me of a Jim Rohn quote.“If you don’tdesign your own lifeplan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan, and guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”
What links the Right and the Left is a core set of themes: anti-individualism, the need for strong government, the view that religion is a state matter (whether to promote or suppress it), the view that education is a process of socialization, ambivalence about science and technology, and strong themes of group conflict, violence, and war.
both the collectivist Left and the collectivist Right have consistently recognized a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its limited government, its separation of church and state, its fairly constant view that education is not primarily a matter of political socialization, and its persistent Whiggish optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups.
By the early twentieth century, accordingly, the dominant issues for most Continental political thinkers were not whether liberal capitalism was a viable option—but rather exactly when it would collapse—and whether Left or Right collectivism had the best claim to being the socialism of the future.
What meaning, he asks, can we discern in history? Is there a plan or is it merely a random happening of chance events? There is a plan.[179] History, Herder argues, is moved by a necessary dynamic development that pushes man progressively toward victory over nature. This necessary development culminates in the achievements of science, arts, and freedom.
There is no plan, it's just one fucking thing after another.
However, according to Herder, attempting to understand other cultures is not really a good idea.
No empathy or understanding here. You can't walk a mile in someone else's shoes, don't try.
Herder is relevant because of his enormous influence on the nationalist movements that were shortly to take off all over central and eastern Europe.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to do this under contemporary living arrangements, in which children go to school and then return to corrupting influences in their homes and their neighborhoods at the end of the day. “It is essential,” Fichte then urged, “that from the very beginning the pupil should be continuously and completely under the influence of this education, and should be separated altogether from the community, and kept from all contact with it.”[197]
Kind of like the Residential School system in Canada? That turned out well didn't it?
And again, just in case we have missed Hegel’s point: “A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.” And again echoing Rousseau: “Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender
In the nineteenth century the question of the true meaning of socialism was a live issue among collectivists of all stripes. Kant, Herder, Fichte, and Hegel were dominant mainstream voices. Yet clearly none was a conservative. Conservatives of the nineteenth century favored returning to or re-invigorating feudal institutions. Our four figures, by contrast, all favored significant reforms and a jettisoning of traditional feudalism. Yet none was an Enlightenment liberal. Enlightenment liberals were individualistic, the center of their political and economic gravity tending toward limited
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Marxism was and is a class analysis, pitting economic classes against each other in a zero-sum competition.
Except it's not zero-sum. It's not a finite game (thanks Simon Sinek).
if the fight against capitalism were to be carried on, the first order of business was to distance socialism from the Soviet Union. Just as the disaster of National Socialism in Germany was not socialism, the disaster of Communism in the Soviet Union was not socialism. In fact, there were no real socialist societies anywhere, so pointing fingers of moral condemnation was simply meaningless.
Abandoning the traditional economic class analysis’s implication that effort should be focused upon achieving a universal class consciousness, Left thinkers and activists focused on narrower sub-divisions of the human species, concentrating their efforts on the special issues of women and of racial and ethnic minorities.
Common to all of these variations was a new emphasis on the principle of equality and a de-emphasis on the principle of need. In effect, in changing the ethical standard from need to equality, all of these new varieties of Left-socialism had resolved to quote Marx less and to quote Rousseau more.
From each according to their ability, to each according to equality (of outcome)!
But that presupposed that capitalism would drive the proletariat into economic misery, which capitalism had failed to do. Instead, capitalism had produced great amounts of wealth and—here is the innovation—capitalism had used that wealth to oppress the proletariat.
Here the goal posts have been moved.
