Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition)

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

By the time we get to the postmodernist account, reason is seen not only as subjective, but also as incompetent, highly contingent, relative, and collective.

"Highly contingent" i.e context depdendent.

Postmodernism is thus the supplanting of the Enlightenment with its roots in seventeenth-century English philosophy by the Counter-Enlightenment with its roots in late eighteenth-century German philosophy.

Three broad strains of post-Kantian philosophy emerged. What shall we do, members of each strain asked, about the gulf between subject and object that Kant has said cannot be crossed by reason?

1. Kant’s closest followers decided to accept the gulf and live with it.

Structuralism was a linguistic version of Kantianism, holding that language is a self-contained, non-referential system, and that the philosophical task was to seek out language’s necessary and universal structural features, those features taken to underlie and be prior to the empirical, contingent features of language.

2. The speculative metaphysical strain, best represented by Hegel, was dissatisfied with the principled separation of subject and object.

3. The irrationalist strain, best represented by Kierkegaard, was also dissatisfied by the principled separation of subject and object.

Kantian philosophy thus set the stage for the reign of speculative metaphysics and epistemological irrationalism in the nineteenth century.

For Kant, preserving faith led him to deny reason, while for Hegel preserving the spirit of Judeo-Christian metaphysics led him to be more anti-reason and anti-individualist than Kant ever was.

For Hegel, the realist element drops out entirely: the subject generates both content and form. The subject is in no way responsive to an external reality; instead, the whole of reality is a creation of the subject.

The Matrix is a Hegelian nightmare.

Realists had seen the universe as a whole as an object or set of objects within which there are some subjects.

Hegel agreed with Kant that our minds supply necessity and universality, but said that all of reality is a product of mind, the Mind that contains all of our little minds within it. Since reality comes from us, we can know all of reality in all of its glorious necessity.

We are now, however, talking about a very different Reason than the Enlightenment one. Hegel’s reason is fundamentally a creative function, not a cognitive one. It does not come to know a pre-existing reality; it brings all of reality into existence.

Aristotelian reason cannot countenance a god that creates something out of nothing, that is both three and one, that is perfect but creates a world that contains evil.

Kant’s purpose there was to show that reason is out of its depth when it tries to figure out noumenal truths about reality. He did so by developing four pairs of parallel arguments on four metaphysical issues and by showing that in each case reason leads to contradictory conclusions. One can prove that the universe must have had a beginning in time, but one can equally soundly prove that the universe must be eternal. One can prove the world must be made up of simplest parts and also that it cannot be, that we have free will and that strict determinism is true, that God must exist and that He does not exist.[49]

Such a conception of contradictory evolution is compatible with Judeo-Christian cosmology. That cosmology begins with a creation ex nihilo, posits a perfect being that generates evil, believes in a just being that gives humans independent judgment but punishes them for using it, includes accounts of virgin births and other miracles, says that the infinite becomes finite, the immaterial becomes material, the essentially unitary becomes plural, and so on. Given the primacy of that metaphysics, reason must give way. Reason, for example, must be adapted to the demands of this metaphysics of creation: As yet, there is nothing and there is to become something. The beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; therefore being, too, is already contained in the beginning. The beginning, therefore, contains both, being and nothing, is the unity of being and nothing; or is non-being which is at the same time being, and being which is at the same time non-being.[50]

Just as the Judeo-Christian cosmology sees everything as God working out His plan for the world in, around, and through us, for Hegel individuals’ minds and whole being are a function of the deeper forces of the universe operating upon them and through them. Individuals are constructed by their surrounding cultures, cultures that have an evolutionary life of their own, those cultures themselves being a function of yet still deeper cosmic forces. The individual is a tiny emergent aspect of the largest whole, the collective Subject’s working itself out, and the creation of reality occurs at that level with little or no regard for the individual.

The opening line of dialogue in The Departed.

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.

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.

Perhaps Kant had prohibited access to reality—but he had shown only that reason could not get us there. That left other options open to us: faith, feeling, and instinct.

Schleiermacher held that feeling, especially religious feeling, is a mode of cognition, one that gives us access to noumenal reality.

Petersonian 'Meaning' probably belongs in this category.

“Knowledge is power,” wrote Bacon.

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.

I relate to this.

Like Abraham, we do not know and we cannot know. What we must do is jump blindly into the unknown.

Schopenhauer’s feelings had revealed to him that reality is Will—a deeply irrational and conflictual Will, striving always and blindly toward nothing.[60]

No wonder then that reason had no chance of comprehending it: Reason’s rigid categories and neat organizational schemes are wholly inadequate for a reality that is the opposite of that. Only like can know like. 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 to try, for reality is cruel and frightening. 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. Only the bravest few have the courage to pierce through the illusions of reason to the irrationality of reality. Only a few individuals of special sensitivity are willing to pierce reason’s veil and intuit passionately the seething flow.

Nietzsche began epistemologically by agreeing with Kant: “When Kant says: ‘reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature,’ this is, in regard to the concept of nature, completely true.” All of the problems of philosophy, from the decadent Socrates[62] to that “catastrophic spider” Kant,[63] are caused by their emphasis on reason. The rise of the philosophers meant the fall of man, for once reason took over, men no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ![64]

The legacy of the irrationalists for the twentieth century included four key themes: 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.

Heidegger is notorious for the obscurity of his prose and for his actions and inactions on behalf of the National Socialists during the 1930s, and he is unquestionably the leading twentieth-century philosopher for the postmodernists.

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.

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.

a noumenal self

I think this means something like: the essential "you". The self that meditation is hypothetically supposed to liberate. The essential person beneath all the noise of thoughts and judgements.

without making the assumption of the existence of either an object or a subject.

Do not think objects, Heidegger counseled, think fields. Do not think subject, think experience.

“Da-sein” is Heidegger’s substitute concept for “self,” “subject,” or “human being,” all of which he thought carried undesirable baggage from earlier philosophy. Heidegger explained his choice of “Da-sein” by defining it as follows: “Da-sein means being projected into Nothing.”[70]

reason—the “most stiff-necked adversary of thought”[72]

If we say, on the one hand, that there is no answer to the question of why there is Being—if Being just is for no reason—then that makes Being absurd: something that cannot be explained is an absurdity to reason.

mere logic, Heidegger concluded—an “invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers”[76]—cannot and should not get in the way of probing the ultimate mystery that is Being.

the elements of language, words, have evolved over time and become so twisted and crusted over with layers of meaning that they almost entirely hide Being from us. Their original force and contact with reality has been lost. We can therefore try to strip away from our language the encrusted layers to reveal the ur-words that had original and genuine connective force to Being, but that will require special efforts.

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.

One must absolutely not, therefore, give into one’s overpowering sense of distress and run away from dread and back to the safety of one’s petty, day-to-day life. One must embrace one’s dread and surrender to it, for “the dread felt by the courageous”[83] is the emotional state that prepares one for the ultimate revelation. That ultimate revelation is of the truth of Judeo-Christian and Hegelian metaphysics.

After Kant, the Continental tradition quickly and gleefully abandoned reason, putting wild speculation, clashing wills, and troubled emotion at the forefront.

Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications: 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; 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.

In Europe, if one was a philosophically-trained intellectual in the middle part of the twentieth century, one’s training was primarily in Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Those thinkers set the philosophical framework of discussion for European intellectuals, and that framework goes a long way toward accounting for the rise of postmodernism.

Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else—which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.[90]

Can we find an objective basis for morality? Definitely not.

Russell concluded that philosophy cannot answer its questions and so came to believe that any value philosophy might have cannot lie in being able to offer truth or wisdom.[94]

Hence “analytic” philosophy. The new purpose of philosophy is only to analyze the perceptual, linguistic, and logical tools that science uses. 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.

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.