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July 17, 2024
Leading intellectuals tell us that modernism has died, and that a revolutionary era is upon us—an era liberated from the oppressive strictures of the past, but at the same time disquieted by its expectations for the future.
The difficulty faced by a philosopher who, like myself, is sympathetic to this suggestion [e.g., Foucault’s]—one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the poet rather than to the physicist—is to avoid hinting that this suggestion gets something right, that my sort of philosophy corresponds to the way things really are. For this talk of correspondence brings back just the idea my sort of philosopher wants to get rid of, the idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature.[3]
Deconstruction, Stanley Fish confesses happily, “relieves me of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting.”[5] Many postmodernists, though, are less often in the mood for aesthetic play than for political activism.
“Reason and power are one and the same,” Jean-François Lyotard states. Both lead to and are synonymous with “prisons, prohibitions, selection process, the public good.”[6]
Postmodernism, Frank Lentricchia explains, “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”
Our social reality is constructed by the language we use,
serene
?
postmodern themes in ethics and politics are characterized by an identification with and sympathy for the groups perceived to be oppressed in the conflicts, and a willingness to enter the fray on their behalf.
understanding what the movement sees itself as rejecting and moving beyond will be helpful in formulating a definition of postmodernism.
modernism’s essentials are located in the formative figures of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650), for their influence upon epistemology, and more comprehensively in John Locke (1632-1704),
Modern thinkers start from nature—instead of starting with some form of the supernatural, which had been the characteristic starting point of pre-modern, Medieval philosophy.
Locke’s A Letter concerning Toleration (1689) and Two Treatises of Government (1690) are landmark texts in the modern history of individualism.
the prohibition of force against another’s independent judgment or action, individual rights, political equality, limiting the power of government, and religious toleration.
Liberalism is the principle of individual freedom, and democracy is the principle of decentralizing political power to individuals.
1791 and 1792 saw the publication of Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Women and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, landmarks in the push for women’s liberty and equality.
Individualism applied to economics yields free markets and capitalism. Capitalist economics is based on the principle that individuals should be left free to make their own decisions about production, consumption, and trade.
With the development of free markets came a theoretical grasp of the productive impact of the division of labor and specialization and of the retarding impact of protectionism and other restrictive regulations.
Advances in obstetrics both established it as a separate branch of medicine and, more strikingly, contributed to the significant decline of infant mortality rates. In London, for example, the death rate for children before the age of five fell from 74.5 percent in 1730-49 to 31.8 percent in 1810-29.
While the modern world continues to speak of reason, freedom, and progress, its pathologies tell another story.
Instead of valuing individualism in values, markets, and politics—calls for communalism, solidarity, and egalitarian restraints. Instead of prizing the achievements of science and technology—suspicion tending toward outright hostility.
In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world. That view of education is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity.
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
Postmodernism implies that race and sex are not morally irrelevant. It implies thst they are at least morally linked and at most they are the basis of morality itself.
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 is it, for example, that skeptical and relativistic arguments have the cultural power that they now do? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why have themes of exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism come to have the cultural dominance they do?
The Enlightenment reshaped the entire world, and postmodernism hopes to do the same.
Contemporary second-tier postmodernists, when looking for philosophical support, cite Rorty, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida. Those figures in turn, when looking for heavy-duty philosophical support, cite Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx—the modern world’s most trenchant critics and its most prophetic voices about the new direction.
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.
Trusting science’s results cognitively is an act of confidence in reason, as is trusting one’s life to its technological products.
the three men, all of them English, most often identified as being most influential in making the Enlightenment possible are: Francis Bacon, for his work on empiricism and scientific method; Isaac Newton, for his work on physics; and John Locke, for his work on reason, empiricism, and liberal politics.
Enlightenment reason, the critics charged, undermined traditional religion. The leading Enlightenment thinkers were deists, having abandoned the traditional theistic conception of God. 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.
A distant architect is a far cry from a personal God who is there looking after us or checking up on us day to day—he is not someone we pray to or look to comfort from or fear the wrath of. The deists’ god is a bloodless abstraction—not a being that is going to get people fired up in church on Sunday morning and give them a sense of meaning and moral guidance in their lives.
But what happens, worried the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, to traditional values of community and sacrifice, of duty and connectedness, if individuals are encouraged to calculate rationally their own gain? Will not such rational individualism encourage cold-blooded, short-range, and grasping selfishness? Will it not encourage individuals to reject long-standing traditions and to sever communal ties, thus creating a non-society of isolated, rootless and restless atoms?
Postmodernism is the end result of the Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason.
Immanuel Kant is the most significant thinker of the Counter-Enlightenment. His philosophy, more than any other thinker’s, buttressed the pre-modern worldview of faith and duty against the inroads of the Enlightenment;
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.
I've been tempted towards this argument myself.
Rusell Brand made this exact case explicitly when he had a public discussion with Mehdi Hassan in 2013.
If, however, the senses give us only internal representations of objects, then an obstacle is erected between reality and reason.
by the time of Kant, the Enlightenment philosophers’ account of reason was faltering on two counts. Given their analysis of sense-perception, reason seemed cut off from direct access to reality. And given their analysis of concepts, reason seemed either irrelevant to reality or limited to merely contingent truths.
Kant began by identifying a premise common to both empiricists and rationalists. They had assumed that knowledge must be objective. That is, they took for granted that the object of knowledge sets the terms and that therefore it was up to the subject to identify the object on the object’s terms. In other words, the empiricists and the rationalists were realists: they believed that reality is what it is independently of consciousness, and that the purpose of consciousness is to come to an awareness of reality as it is. In Kant’s terms, they assumed that the subject is to conform to object.
Sam Harris' view in a nutshell.
If we say that “the object alone must make the representation possible,” then we imply that the subject must have nothing to do with the process.
In the relativity-of-senses argument, the diaphanous assumption plays out as follows. We notice that one person reports seeing an object as red while another reports seeing it as gray. This puzzles us because it draws our attention to the fact that our sense organs differ in how they respond to reality. This is an epistemological puzzle, however, only if we assume that our sense organs should have nothing to do with our awareness of reality—that somehow awareness should occur by a pure stamping of reality upon our transparent minds. That is, it is a problem only if we assume our senses should
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Kant generalized this point to all organs of consciousness. The subject’s mind is not diaphanous. It has identity: it has structures that limit what the subject can be aware of,
This is true when discussing the detection of sound. I can only hear 20Hz - c. 18kHz
On the Kantian model, our minds’ structures are seen not as existing for the purpose of registering or responding to structures that exist in reality, but as existing for the purpose of imposing themselves upon a malleable reality.
universality,
I never noticed that the opposite of 'universal' is 'particular', and that particular is related to 'particle'.
Universe and Particle. Polar opposites in the physical realm.
We often use cosmic language casually.
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.
Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism.
the conclusion of those skeptical arguments would be merely that we cannot be sure that we are right about the way reality is. We might be, but we cannot guarantee it, the skeptics would conclude. Kant’s point was deeper, arguing that in principle any conclusion reached by any of our faculties must necessarily not be about reality.
Kant went a step further and redefined truth on subjective grounds.
Is this a pushback to the Harris-Peterson debate?
if our minds are in principle disconnected from reality, then to speak of truth as an external relationship between mind and reality is nonsense. Truth must be solely an internal relationship of consistency.
The point for any advocate of reason is that there is a whole world outside our skulls, and reason is essentially about knowing it.
Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason—objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty—Kant rejects objectivity.
