[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment
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. He was an admirer of all things Spartan—the Sparta of militaristic and feudal communalism—and a despiser of all things Athenian—the classical Athens of commerce, cosmopolitanism, and the high arts.
Civilization is thoroughly corrupting, Rousseau argued—not only the oppressive feudal system of eighteenth-century France with its decadent and parasitical aristocracy, but also its Enlightenment alternative with its exaltation of reason, property, the arts and sciences. Name a dominant feature of the Enlightenment, and Rousseau was against it.
In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau started his attack at the foundation of the Enlightenment project: Reason. The philosophes were exactly right that reason is the foundation of civilization. Civilization’s rational progress, however, is anything but progress, for civilization is achieved at the expense of morality. 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.
The root of our moral degradation is reason, the original sin of humankind.[6] Before their reason was awakened, humans were simple beings, mostly solitary, satisfying their wants easily by gathering from their immediate environment. That happy state was the ideal: “this author should have said that 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.”[7]
But by some unexplainable, unfortunate occurrence, reason was awakened[8]; and once awakened it disgorged a Pandora’s Box of problems upon the world, transforming human nature to the point that we can no longer return to our happy, original state. As the philosophes were heralding the triumph of reason in the world, Rousseau wanted to demonstrate that “all the subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species.”[9] Once their reasoning power was awakened, humans realized their primitive condition, and this led them to feel dissatisfied. So they started to make improvements, those improvements culminating most strikingly in the agricultural and metallurgical revolutions. Undeniably, those revolutions improved mankind’s material lot—but that improvement has in fact destroyed the species: “it is iron and wheat that have civilized men and ruined the human race.”[10]
The ruin took many forms. Economically, agriculture and technology led to surplus wealth. Surplus wealth in turn led to the need for property rights.[11] Property, however, made humans competitive and led them to see each other as enemies.
Physically, as humans became wealthier they enjoyed more comforts and luxuries. But those comforts and luxuries caused physical degradation. They began to eat too much food and to eat decadent food, and thus became less healthy. They came increasingly to use tools and technologies, and thus became physically less strong. What was once a physically hardy species thus became dependent upon doctors and gadgets.[12]
Socially, with luxuries came an awakening of aesthetic standards for beauty, and those standards transformed their sex lives. What was once a straightforward act of copulation became tied to love, and love is messy and exclusive and preferential. Love, accordingly, awakened jealousy, envy, and rivalry[13]—more things that set human beings against each other.
Thus reason led to the development of all of civilization’s features—agriculture, technology, property, and aesthetics—and these made mankind soft, lazy, and in economic and social conflict with itself.[14]
But the story gets worse, for the ongoing social conflicts generated a few winners at the top of the social heap and many oppressed losers beneath them. Inequality became a prominent and damning consequence of civilization. Such inequalities are damning because all inequalities “such as being richer, more honored, more powerful” are “privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of others.”[15]
Civilization, accordingly, became a zero-sum game along many social dimensions, the winners gaining and enjoying more and more while the losers suffered and were left increasingly far behind.
But civilization’s pathologies became even worse, for the reason that made civilization’s inequalities possible also made the better-off uncaring about the suffering of the less fortunate. Reason, according to Rousseau, is opposed to compassion: 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.’”[16]
In contemporary civilization, this lack of compassion becomes more than a sin of omission. Rousseau argues that, having succeeded in the competitions of civilized life, the winners now have a vested interest in preserving the system. Civilization’s advocates—especially those who are living at the top of the heap and therefore insulated from the worst of the harms—go out of their way to praise civilization’s advances in technology, art, and science. But these advances themselves and the praise heaped upon them serve only to mask the harms civilization does. Foreshadowing Herbert Marcuse and Foucault, 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.” Such acquired tastes within a people “are so many chains binding it.” “The sciences, letters, and arts”—far from freeing and elevating mankind—“spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples.”[17]
So corrupt, accordingly, is the whole edifice of civilization that no reform is possible. Against the timid moderates who want to achieve the good society in piecemeal fashion, Rousseau called for revolution. “People were continually patching it [the state] up, whereas they should have begun by clearing the air and putting aside all the old materials, as Lycurgus did in Sparta, in order to raise a good edifice later.”[18]
References
[6] Rousseau 1755, 37.
[7] Rousseau 1755, 35.
[8] Rousseau 1755, 28.
[9] Rousseau 1755, 50.
[10] Rousseau 1755, 51.
[11] Rousseau 1755, 44, 52.
[12] Rousseau 1755, 20, 22, 48.
[13] Rousseau 1755, 49.
[14] Rousseau 1755, 54-55.
[15] Rousseau 1755, 16.
[16] Rousseau 1755, 37.
[17] Rousseau 1749, 36.
[18] Rousseau 1755, 58-9.
[Next relevant post: Rousseau's collectivism and statism.]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 7 months, 4 weeks ago at 3:19 pm. 4 comments
[This excerpt is from Chapter 3 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition
Martin Heidegger took Hegelian philosophy and gave it a personal, phenomenological twist.
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. Derrida and Foucault identify themselves as followers of Heidegger.[1] Rorty cites Heidegger as one of the three major influences on his thinking, the other two being Dewey and Wittgenstein.[2]
Heidegger absorbed and modified the tradition of German philosophy. Like Kant, 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 when we get to the core of Being we will find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things.
So what is new? Heidegger’s distinctiveness was his use of phenomenology to get us there.
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. But, from the phenomenological standpoint, we must also realize that Kant took only a timid half-step. While Kant was willing to give up the noumenal object, he held onto the belief in an underlying, noumenal self with a specific nature available to us for our investigation. But a noumenal self underlying the flow of phenomena is just as problematic a notion as the notion of noumenal objects underlying the flow. Recognizing this, Heidegger therefore wanted to start, following Nietzsche’s occasional but undeveloped suggestions, without making the assumption of the existence of either an object or a subject.
So we start phenomenologically—that is, by simply and clearly describing the phenomena of experience and change.
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.
“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.”[3] Ignoring the “Nothing” for now, it is the being projected that is Da-sein—not that, if anything, which is projected or does the projecting. The emphasis is on activity, thus avoiding assumptions that there are two things, a subject and an object, that enter into a relationship. There is simply action, the action of being out there, being thrust into.
The being projected reveals and clothes successively over time various semi-stable fields or “beings”—what we would call “objects” if we had not already shed our naïve realism.
Yet the long process of describing the phenomena of beings, Heidegger found, led him inexorably to a question—the question that has haunted all of philosophy: What is the Being of the various beings? The beings differ and change, come and go, yet for all their changeability and difference they still manifest a oneness, a commonality: They all are. What is that Being underlying or behind or common to all beings? What makes the beings Be? Or, raising the stakes to the Heideggerian Question of all questions: Why is there even Being at all? Why is there not rather Nothing?[4]
This is no ordinary question. With a question like this, Heidegger pointed out, reason quickly finds itself in trouble—the same kind of trouble that Kant had pointed out with his antinomies: reason always reaches contradictions whenever it attempts to explore deep metaphysical issues. A question such as “Why is there Being and not rather Nothing?” is therefore repugnant to reason. For Heidegger, this meant that if we are to explore the question, then reason—the “most stiff-necked adversary of thought”[5]—was an obstacle that had to be discarded.
Setting aside reason and logic
The Question is repugnant to reason, as Heidegger wrote in An Introduction to Metaphysics, because we reach logical absurdity whichever way we go in attempting to answer it.[6] 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. But if, on the other hand, we say that Being is for a reason, then what could that reason be? We would have to say that that reason, whatever it is, is outside of Being. But outside of Being is nothing—which means that we would have to try to explain Being from nothingness, which is also absurd. So either way we go in trying to answer the Question, we are deeply into absurdity.
Logic wants at this point to forbid the Question. Logic wants to say that the absurdity shows that the question is ill-formed and so should be set aside: Logic wants instead to make the existence of reality its axiom, and to proceed from there with discovering the identities of the various existents.[7]
On the other hand, switching back to a Heideggerian perspective, the questions spawned by the Question strike very deep feelings in Da-sein. What about the Nothingness that Being would have come from? Could Being not have been? Could Being return once again to the Nothing? Such questions are compellingly awesome, and yet at the same time they fill Da-sein with a sense of disease and anxiety. So here Da-sein has a conflict: Logic and reason say that the question is contradictory and so should be set aside, but Da-sein’s feelings urge Da-sein to explore the question in a non-verbal, emotional way. So which does Da-sein choose: contradiction and feeling—or logic and reason?
Fortunately, as we have learned from Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, this contradiction and conflict is yet another sign that logic and reason are impotent. As we all know by now, we should expect to find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things—contradiction is the sign that we are on to something important.[8] So mere logic, Heidegger concluded—an “invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers”[9]—cannot and should not get in the way of probing the ultimate mystery that is Being. We must reject entirely the assumption “that in this enquiry ‘logic’ is the highest court of appeal, that reason is the means and thinking the way to an original comprehension of Nothing and its possible revelation.” Again:
“If this [contradiction] breaks the sovereignty of reason in the field of enquiry into Nothing and Being, then the fate of the rule of ‘logic’ is also decided. The very idea of ‘logic’ disintegrates in the vortex of a more original questioning.”[10]
And again, in case we have missed the point: “Authentic speaking about nothing always remains extraordinary. It cannot be vulgarized. It dissolves if it is placed in the cheap acid of merely logical intelligence.”[11] Deep feeling about Nothing trumps logic any day.
Emotions as revelatory
Having subjected reason and logic to Destruktion and then set them aside as merely one superficial way of thinking—one that the Greeks had established fatefully for all subsequent Western thought[12]—we need another route to Being and Nothing. We can try to explore language without the presuppositions of reason and logic, but even 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.
Boredom is a good mood to start with. When we are bored—really, really, really bored—we are no longer engaged with the ordinary, trivial, day-to-day things that occupy most of our time. When we are bored, “drifting hither and thither in the abysses of existence like a mute fog,”[13] all beings become a matter of indifference, undifferentiated from one another. Everything merges or dissolves into an un-distinguished unity.
Progress has thus been made: “This boredom reveals what-is in totality.”[14] Real boredom takes one away from one’s normal focus on particular beings and one’s cares for them and diffuses one’s awareness into a sense of Being-as-a-whole’s being revealed to one.
But this revelation also brings with it anxiety and dread. For part of the process of the dissolution of particular beings into a state of undifferentiation is the dissolution of one’s own sense of being a unique, individual being. One has the feeling of beings being dissolved into an undifferentiated Being—but at the same time one has the feeling of one’s self-identity as also slipping into a state of being nothing-in-particular—that is, of becoming nothing. This is distressing.
In dread we are ‘in suspense’ (wir schweben). Or, to put it more precisely, dread holds us in suspense because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us. Hence we too, as existents in the midst of what-is, slip away from ourselves along with it. For this reason it is not ‘you’ or ‘I’ that has the uncanny feeling, but ‘one.’[15]
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.
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”[16] is the emotional state that prepares one for the ultimate revelation. That ultimate revelation is of the truth of Judeo-Christian and Hegelian metaphysics.
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.
“Nothing,” wrote Heidegger, “not merely provides the conceptual opposite of what-is but is also an original part of essence.”[17] Heidegger credited Hegel with having reclaimed this lost insight for the Western tradition: “‘Pure Being and pure Nothing are thus one and the same.’ This proposition of Hegel’s (‘The Science of Logic,’ I, WW III, p. 74) is correct.” Hegel of course got it from trying to resuscitate the Judeo-Christian account of creation, in which God created the world out of nothing. As Heidegger put it in re-affirming that Judeo-Christian claim, “every being, so far as it is a being, is made out of nothing.”[18]
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.
Heidegger and postmodernism
Heidegger’s philosophy is the integration of the two main lines of German philosophy, the speculative metaphysical and the irrationalist epistemological. After Kant, the Continental tradition quickly and gleefully abandoned reason, putting wild speculation, clashing wills, and troubled emotion at the forefront. In Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition, we can see clearly many of the ingredients of postmodernism. 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.
This is not yet to introduce Heidegger’s strong social and political collectivism, which is also part of his inheritance from the main lines of German philosophy. Nor is it to make explicit, as Heidegger did, his strong anti-science and anti-technology views.[19] Nor is it yet to discuss his anti-humanism,[20] with his regular calls for us to be obedient to Being, to feel guilty before Being, to pay homage to Being, and even to “sacrifice man for the truth of Being”[21]—which, if we are still allowed to be logical, means sacrificing ourselves to Nothing. (Those elements in Heidegger’s philosophy will arise in Chapter Four, in the context of discussing the political background to postmodernism.)
What the postmodernists will do in the next generation is abandon the remnants of metaphysics in Heidegger’s philosophy, along with his occasional streaks of mysticism. Heidegger was still doing metaphysics, and he spoke of there being a truth out there about the world that we must seek or let find us. The postmodernists, by contrast, are anti-realists, holding that it is meaningless to speak of truths out there or of a language that could capture them. As anti-realists, accordingly, they will reject the formulation of (1) above as a metaphysical assertion, and instead reformulate its assertion of the reign of conflict and contradiction as descriptive merely of the flow of empirical phenomena; and while they will accept (3) above, they will accept it while abandoning Heidegger’s faint hope that ultimate ur-concepts connecting us to reality may be revealed at the end of the unmasking.
The postmodernists will effect a compromise between Heidegger and Nietzsche. Common to Heidegger and Nietzsche epistemologically is a contemptuous rejection of reason. Metaphysically, though, the postmodernists will drop the remnants of Heidegger’s metaphysical quest for Being, and put Nietzschean power struggles at the core of our being. And especially in the cases of Foucault and Derrida, most major postmodernists will abandon Nietzsche’s sense of the exalted potential of man and embrace Heidegger’s anti-humanism.
References
[1] Foucault 1989, 326.
[2] Rorty 1979, 368.
[3] Heidegger 1929/1975, 251.
[4] Heidegger 1953, 1.
[5] Heidegger 1949, 112.
[6] Heidegger 1953, 23, 25.
[7] E.g., Rand 1957, 1015-ff.
[8] See, for example, Heidegger 1929/1975, 245-246.
[9] Heidegger 1953, 121.
[10] Heidegger 1929/1975, 245, 253.
[11] Heidegger 1953, 26.
[12] Heidegger 1929/1975, 261.
[13] Heidegger 1929/1975, 247.
[14] Heidegger 1929/1975, 247.
[15] Heidegger 1929/1975, 249.
[16] Heidegger 1929/1975, 253.
[17] Heidegger 1929/1975, 251.
[18] Heidegger 1929/1975, 254-255.
[19] Heidegger 1949.
[20] Heidegger 1947.
[21] Heidegger 1929/1975, 263.
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 9 months ago at 1:53 am. 3 comments
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. He was an admirer of all things Spartan—the Sparta of militaristic and feudal communalism—and a despiser of all things Athenian—the classical Athens of commerce, cosmopolitanism, and the high arts. 