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

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Individualism applied to politics yields liberal democracy. Liberalism is the principle of individual freedom, and democracy is the principle of decentralizing political power to individuals.

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.

Institutionalizing confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment.

Postmodernism is the end result of the Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason.

Thus Kant, that great champion of reason, asserted that the most important fact about reason is that it is clueless about reality.

that great champion of reason, asserted that the most

Of those five features of reason—objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty—Kant concluded that the sad experience of recent philosophy demonstrated that the most fundamental of them, objectivity, must be abandoned. The failures of empiricism and rationalism had shown that objectivity is impossible. For reason to be objective, it must have contact with reality. The most obvious candidate for such direct contact is sense-perception. On realist accounts, the senses give us our most direct contact with reality, and they thereby provide the material that reason then organizes and integrates into concepts, those concepts in turn becoming integrated into propositions and theories. If, however, the senses give us only internal representations of objects, then an obstacle is erected between reality and reason. If reason is presented with an internal sensory representation of reality, then it is not aware directly of reality; reality then becomes something to be inferred or hoped for beyond a veil of sense-perception.

The rationalists and the empiricists had jointly struck a blow to the Enlightenment confidence in reason. Reason works with concepts. But now we were to accept either that reason’s concepts have little to do with the world of sense experience—in which case, science’s conception of itself as generating universal and necessary truths about the world of sense-experience was in big trouble—or we were to accept that reason’s concepts are merely provisional and contingent groupings of sense-experiences—in which case science’s conception of itself as generating universal and necessary truths about the world of sense-experience was in big trouble. Thus, 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.

But there is also the Kantian trade-off. The objects that science explores exist “only in our brain,”[40] so we can never come to know the world outside it. Since the phenomenal world’s necessary and universal features are a function of our subjective activities, any necessary and universal features that science discovers in the phenomenal world have application only in the phenomenal world. Science must work with experience and reason, and on Kantian grounds this means that science is cut off from reality itself.

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.

Hegel’s contribution to postmodernism 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.

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.

Following Hamann, Schleiermacher held that feeling, especially religious feeling, is a mode of cognition, one that gives us access to noumenal reality. Except, argued Schleiermacher, these feelings are not so much directed outward as inward. One cannot grasp noumena directly, but one can phenomenologically inspect oneself, one’s deepest feelings, and therein find indirect senses of the divine ultimate.[55] As Hamann had stated, directly confronted religious feeling reveals one’s essential nature.

On Heidegger’s account, what one finds when starting so is a sense of projection into a field of experience and change. Do not think objects, Heidegger counseled, think fields. Do not think subject, think experience. We start small and local, with Da-sein’s being projected into reality.

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.

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.

In postmodernism we find metaphysical antirealism, epistemological subjectivity, the placing of feeling at the root of all value issues, the consequent relativism of both knowledge and values, and the consequent devaluing or disvaluing of the scientific enterprise.

Rage, power, guilt, lust, and dread constitute the center of the postmodern emotional universe.

Nasty political correctness as a tactic then makes perfect sense. 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.

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 socialists in the nineteenth century, and repeated often into the twentieth before disaster struck. The disaster was that all four of socialism’s claims were refuted both in theory and in practice.

Here, then, is my second hypothesis about postmodernism: 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.

Confronted by harsh evidence and ruthless logic, the far Left had a reply: That is only logic and evidence; logic and evidence are subjective; you cannot really prove anything; feelings are deeper than logic; and our feelings say socialism.

There is an inverse relationship between cultural and moral development: Culture does generate much learning, luxury, and sophistication—but learning, luxury, and sophistication all cause moral degradation.

Man’s deepest passions should set the direction of his life, and reason should always give way before them.

Only that will which obeys law, is free; for it obeys itself—it is independent and so free.”[216] Freedom is thus the individual’s absolute submission to and worship of the state.

Ironically, then, by the 1930s large segments of the radical Left had come to agree with what national socialists and fascists had long argued: that socialism needs an aristocracy. Granted—the far Right and much of the far Left now agreed—socialism must be for the people. But it cannot be by the people. The people must be told what they need and how to get it; and for both the direction and impetus must come from an elite.

From need to equality A new ethical standard was therefore necessary. With great fanfare, then, much of the Left changed its official ethical standard from need to equality. No longer was the primary criticism of capitalism to be that it failed to satisfy people’s needs. The primary criticism was to be that its people did not get an equal share.

On this analysis, the conflict between economic production and environmental health, then, is not merely in the short-run; it is fundamental and inescapable. The production of wealth itself is in mortal conflict with environmental health. And capitalism, since it is so good at producing wealth, must therefore be the environment’s number one enemy.

The intellectual capacity of the masses is much more limited, so appealing to and mobilizing the masses requires speaking to them about what matters to them and on a level that they can grasp. What the masses can understand and what they do get fired up about are their sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Both epistemological modesty and effective communication strategy, then, dictated a move from universalism to multiculturalism.[276]

So the first task of the revolutionary is to seek out those individuals and energies on the margins of society: the outcast, the disorderly, and the forbidden—anyone and anything that capitalism’s power structure has not yet succeeded in commodifying and dominating totally. All such marginalized and outcast elements will be “irrational,” “immoral,” and even “criminal,” especially by capitalist definition, but that is precisely what the revolutionary needs. Any such outcast element could “break through the false consciousness [and] provide the Archimedean point for a larger emancipation.”[286]

Marcuse looked especially to the marginalized and outcast Left intellectual leadership—especially those trained in critical theory.[287] Given the pervasiveness of capitalism’s domination, the revolutionary vanguard can come only from those outcast intellectuals—especially among the younger students[288]—those who are able to “link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception”[289] and who thereby can see through the appearance of peace to the reality of oppression, who have retained enough of their humanity not to have been turned into Joe Sixpack—and above all who have the will and the energy to do anything it takes, even to the point of being “militantly intolerant and disobedient,”[290] to shock the capitalist power structure into revealing its true nature, thus toppling and smashing the system to pieces, leaving the way open for a renewal of humanity through socialism.

Marcuse’s reign as the pre-eminent philosopher of the New Left signaled a strong turn towards irrationality and violence among younger Leftists. “Marx, Marcuse, and Mao” became the new trinity and the slogan to rally under. As was proclaimed on a banner of students involved in closing the University of Rome: Marx is the prophet, Marcuse is his interpreter, and Mao is the sword. Many in the new generation listened attentively and sharpened their swords.

This explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanley Fish, as noted in Chapter Four, calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan.[298] Andrea Dworkin calls all heterosexual males rapists[299] and repeatedly labels “Amerika” a fascist state.[300] With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.

This is not what we find in postmodern reflections on contemporary politics. Truth and rationality are subjected to attack, and the prevailing attitude about moral responsibility is again best stated by Rorty: “I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn’t care much about our past sins.”[301]

One could, after doing some philosophy, come to be a true believer in subjectivism and relativism. Accordingly, one could come to believe that reason is derivative, that will and desire rule, that society is a battle of competing wills, that words are merely tools in the power struggle for dominance, and that all is fair in love and war. That is the position the Sophists argued 2400 years ago. The only difference, then, between the Sophists and the postmodernists is whose side they are on. Thrasymachus was representative of the second and cruder generation of Sophists, marshalling subjectivist and relativistic arguments in support of the political claim that justice is the interest of the stronger. The postmodernists—coming after two millennia of Christianity and two centuries of socialist theory—simply reverse that claim: Subjectivism and relativism are true, except that the postmodernists are on the side of the weaker and historically-oppressed groups. Justice, contrary to Thrasymachus, is the interest of the weaker.[304]

Here it is useful to recall Lentricchia: Postmodernism “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”[305]

Postmodernism is therefore first a political movement, and a brand of politics that has only lately come to relativism.

Here is an example. Kate Ellis is a radical gender feminist. Ellis, as she writes in Socialist Review, believes that sexism is evil, that affirmative action is good, that capitalism and sexism go hand in hand, and that achieving equality between the sexes requires an overthrow of existing society. But she finds that she has a problem when she tries to teach these themes to her students. She finds that they think like liberal capitalists—they think in terms of equality of opportunity, in terms of simply removing artificial barriers and judging everyone by the same standards, and they think that by personal effort and ambition they can overcome most obstacles and achieve success in life.[309] But this means that her students have bought into the whole liberal capitalist framework that Ellis thinks is dead wrong. So, Ellis writes, she will enlist deconstruction as a weapon against those old-fashioned Enlightenment beliefs.[310] If she can first undermine her students’ belief in the superiority of capitalist values and of the idea that people make or break themselves, then their core values will be destabilized.[311] Pushing relativism, she finds, helps achieve this. And once their Enlightenment beliefs are hollowed out by relativistic arguments, she can fill the void with the correct Left political principles.[312]

In the modern world, Left-wing thought has been one of the major breeding grounds for destruction and nihilism. From the Reign of Terror to Lenin and Stalin, to Mao and Pol Pot, to the upsurge of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s, the far Left has exhibited repeatedly a willingness to use violence to achieve political ends and exhibited extreme frustration and rage when it has failed. The Left has also included many fellow-travelers from the same political and psychological universe, but without political power at their disposal. Herbert Marcuse, with his explicit call to use philosophy to achieve the “‘absolute annihilation’ of the common sense world,”[316] was only a recent and unusually explicit voice. It is that history of Left thought and practice that more moderate Left voices such as Michael Harrington’s took pains to warn us about. Reflecting on that history, Harrington wrote, “I want to avoid that absolutist view of socialism that makes it so transcendent that true believers are driven to a totalitarian rage in the effort to create a perfect order.”[317]

And so the weak invent a rationalization—a rationalization that tells them they are the good and the moral because they are weak, humble, and passive. Patience is a virtue, they say, and so is humility, and so is obedience, and so is being on the side of the weak and the downtrodden. And of course the opposites of those things are evil—aggressiveness is evil, and so is pride, and so is independence, and so is being physically and materially successful.

And so, Nietzsche argued, the weakling becomes extremely clever with words.[319]

In our time, the world created by the Enlightenment is strong, active, and exuberant. For a while in the past century, socialists could believe the revolution was coming, that woe would come to them that are rich, and that blessed would be the poor. But that hope has been dashed cruelly. Capitalism now seems like a case of “twice two makes four,” and like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man it is easy to see that the most intelligent socialists would just hate that fact. Socialism is the historical loser, and if socialists know that, they will hate that fact, they will hate the winners for having won, and they will hate themselves for having picked the losing side. Hate as a chronic condition leads to the urge to destroy.

But there was always socialism. As bad as the philosophical universe became in metaphysics, epistemology, and the study of human nature, there was still the vision of an ethical and political order that would transcend everything and create the beautiful collectivist society. The failure of Left politics to achieve that vision was merely the last straw. To the postmodern mind, the cruel lessons of the modern world are that reality is inaccessible, that nothing can be known, that human potential is nothing, and that ethical and political ideals have come to nothing. The psychological response to the loss of everything is anger and despair.

But again postmodernism’s only weapons are words.[325]

That deconstructive techniques are arrayed primarily against works that do not square with postmodern commitments then makes sense. The strategy is not new. If you hate someone and want to hurt him, then hit him where it counts. Do you want to hurt a man who loves his children and hates child molesters? Drop hints and spread rumors that he is fond of child pornography. Do you want to hurt a woman who takes pride in her independence? Spread the word that she married the man she did because he is wealthy. The truth or falsity of the rumors does not matter, and whether those you tell believe you does not really matter. What matters is that you score a direct, damaging hit to someone’s psyche. You know that those accusations and rumors will cause tremors, even if they come to nothing. You get the wonderfully dark glow inside of knowing that you did it. And the rumors might just come to something after all.