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July 17, 2024
logical and mathematical propositions are analytic or a priori, and necessary. On this account, Twice two makes four, for example, has to be true, and we can determine its truth without appeal to experience, simply by analyzing the meanings of its constituent concepts.
Beverly’s car is white is synthetic—neither “car” nor “white” is contained in the other concept’s meaning; so the connection between the two has to be established by experience;
Concepts are merely nominal, based on subjective human choices about how to carve up the flow of phenomenal experience.
Postmodernism is the first ruthlessly consistent statement of the consequences of rejecting reason, those consequences being necessary given the history of epistemology since Kant.
Once we set aside reality and reason, what are we left with to go on? We can, as the conservatives would prefer, simply turn to our group’s traditions and follow them. Or we can, as the postmodernists will prefer, turn to our feelings and follow them.
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.
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.
Postmodernist reactions to the prospects of a brutal post-modern social world then fall into three main categories, depending on whether Foucault’s, Derrida’s, or Rorty’s variant is given primacy.
The postmodern options, in short, are to plunge into the fray, or withdraw and insulate oneself from it, or try to ameliorate its excesses.
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.
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty are all far Left. And so are Jacques Lacan, Stanley Fish, Catharine MacKinnon, Andreas Huyssen, and Frank Lentricchia. Of the major names in the postmodernist movement, there is not a single figure who is not Left-wing in a serious way.
Leftist thought has dominated political thought among twentieth-century intellectuals, particularly among academic intellectuals.
Classical Marxist socialism made four major claims: 1. Capitalism is exploitative: The rich enslave the poor; it is brutally competitive domestically and imperialistic internationally. 2. Socialism, by contrast, is humane and peaceful: People share, are equal, and cooperative. 3. Capitalism is ultimately less productive than socialism: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer; and the ensuing class conflict will cause capitalism’s collapse in the end. 4. Socialist economies, by contrast, will be more productive and usher in a new era of prosperity. These propositions were first enunciated by
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Morally and politically, in practice every liberal capitalist country has a solid record for being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives. Socialist practice has time and time again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history prior to the twentieth century. Each socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and begun killing people on a huge scale. Each has produced dissident writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nien Cheng who have documented what those regimes
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From The Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 to the revelations of 1956 was over a century of theory and evidence. The crisis for the far Left was that the logic and evidence were going against socialism. Put yourselves in the shoes of an intelligent, informed socialist confronted with all this data. How would you react? You have a deep commitment to socialism: You feel that socialism is true; you want it to be true; upon socialism you have pinned all your dreams of a peaceful and prosperous future society and all your hopes for solving the ills of our current society. This is a moment
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Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.
“I had to deny knowledge,” wrote Kant in the Preface to the first Critique, “in order to make room for faith.”
Postmodernism is born of the marriage of Left politics and skeptical epistemology.
Postmodernism is a response to the crisis of faith of the academic far Left. Its epistemology justifies the leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism, and that same epistemology justifies using language not as a vehicle for seeking truth but as a rhetorical weapon in the continuing battle against capitalism.
The first great frontal assault on the Enlightenment was launched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau has a well-deserved reputation as the bad boy of eighteenth-century French philosophy. In the context of Enlightenment intellectual culture, Rousseau’s was a major dissenting voice.
Name a dominant feature of the Enlightenment, and Rousseau was against it.
The root of our moral degradation is reason, the original sin of humankind.[124] Before their reason was awakened, humans were simple beings, mostly solitary, satisfying their wants easily by gathering from their immediate environment.
since the state of nature is the state in which the concern for our self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others, that state was consequently the most appropriate for peace and the best suited for the human race.”
“it is iron and wheat that have civilized men and ruined the human race.”
Rousseau wrote in the essay that made him famous, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts: “Princes always view with pleasure the spread, among their subjects, of the taste for arts of amusement and superfluities.”
“The sciences, letters, and arts”—far from freeing and elevating mankind— spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened,
Foreshadowing Marx.
“I took another guide, and I said to myself, ‘Let us consult the inner light; it will lead me astray less than they lead me astray.’“
So important is religion to a society, wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract, that the state cannot be indifferent to religious matters. It cannot pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or even view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject the Enlightenment’s dangerous notions of religious toleration and the separation of church and state. Further: so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers: While the state can compel no one to believe it can banish not for impiety, but as an antisocial
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“the individual particularity of each contracting party is surrendered to a new moral and collective body which has its own self, life, body, and will.” The will of each individual is no longer that individual’s own, but becomes common or general, and under the direction of the spokesmen for the whole. In moral society, one “coalesces with all, [and] in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society’s leaders.”
to counteract these socially destructive individualistic tendencies, the state is justified in using compulsion: “whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.”[151] The power of the general will over the individual will is total. “The state … ought to have a universal compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole.”[152] And if the leaders of the state say to the citizen, “‘it is expedient for the state that you should die,’ he should die.”
“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.”
Gary's constitution.
The liberals, however, were in their turn no match for the vigor of the most radical members of the Revolution.
Worth remembering regardless of context.
Maximilien Robespierre expressed the prevailing adoring opinion of the great man: “Rousseau is the one man who, through the loftiness of his soul and the grandeur of his character, showed himself worthy of the role of teacher of mankind.”
the Jacobins found it expedient that many die. The guillotine was busy as the radicals ruthlessly killed nobles, priests, and just about anyone whose politics was suspect.
the Enlightenment had made a few inroads among intellectuals in the German states. Politically and economically, Germany was a set of feudal states. Serfdom would not be abolished until the nineteenth century. The majority of the population was uneducated and agrarian. Most were deeply religious, dominantly Lutheran. Unthinking obedience to God and to one’s feudal lord had been ingrained for centuries.
From the perspective of the Germans, Napoleon was not only a foreign conqueror, he was a product of the Enlightenment. Where he conquered and ruled, he extended equality before the law, opened government offices to the middle class, and guaranteed private property.
Napoleon outraged many powerful forces in doing so. He abolished guilds. He angered the clergy by abolishing church courts, tithes, monasteries, convents, ecclesiastical states, and he seized much church property.
He functioned, in effect from the Enlightenment perspective, as a benevolent dictator, as one who embraced many of the modern ideals but who used the full force of government to impose them.
So now most German intellectuals faced a serious crisis. The Enlightenment, as they saw it, was not merely a foreign disaster across the Rhine—it was a dictatorial presence ruling Germany in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte.
After Rousseau, collectivist political thinking divided into Left and Right versions, both versions drawing inspiration from Rousseau.
the collectivist Right was pursuing the same broadly anti-liberal-capitalist themes that the collectivist Left was.
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.
Yet for all of their differences, 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.
The defeat of the collectivist Right in World War II then meant that the Left was on its own to carry the socialist mantle forward. Accordingly, when the Left ran into its own major disasters as the twentieth century progressed, understanding its fundamental commonality with the collectivist Right helps to explain why in its desperation the Left has often adopted “fascistic” tactics.
Kant had been raised as a Pietist, a version of Lutheranism that emphasized simplicity and eschewed external decoration. Kant therefore had no pictures or paintings hanging anywhere on the walls of his house—with one exception: over his desk in his study hung a picture of Rousseau.[157] Wrote Kant, “I learned to honor mankind from reading Rousseau.”
In the context of Enlightenment liberalism, however, Kant diverged from liberalism in two major respects: his collectivism and his advocacy of war as a means to collectivist ends.
“Nature is utterly unconcerned that man live well.”[164]
In fact, Kant argued, man should suffer, and deservedly so. Man is a sinful creature, a creature that is inclined to follow its own desires and not the demands of duty. Echoing Rousseau, Kant blamed mankind for having chosen to use reason when our instincts could have served us perfectly well.
Another force to straighten the warped wood is political. Man is “an animal that, if he lives among other members of his species, has need of a master.” And that is because “his selfish animal propensities induce him to except himself from [moral rules] wherever he can.” Kant then introduced his version of Rousseau’s general will. Politically, man “thus requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will.”
Still a popular view, notably held by peoples like Will.
