Stephen Hicks comments on several quotations from Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and other postmodernists. This is from Part 14 of his Philosophy of Education course.
Clips 1-2:
Previous: Post-modernism’s themes.
Next: Problems from Marxism.
Return to the Philosophy of Education page.
Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
After Kant: reality or reason, but not both
Kant’s legacy to the next generation is a principled separation of subject and object, of reason and reality. His philosophy is thus a forerunner of postmodernism’s strong anti-realist and anti-reason stances.
After Kant, the story of philosophy is the story of German philosophy. Kant died early in the nineteenth century, just as Germany was beginning to replace France as the world’s leading intellectual nation, and it was German philosophy that set the program for the nineteenth century.
Understanding German philosophy is crucial to understanding the origins of postmodernism. Continental postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida will cite Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel as their major formative influences—all of them German thinkers. American postmodernists such as Rorty emerged primarily from the collapse of the Logical Positivist tradition, but will also cite Heidegger and pragmatism as major formative influences. When we look to the roots of Logical Positivism we find cultural Germans such as Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle. And when we look at pragmatism, we find it to be an Americanized version of Kantianism and Hegelianism. 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.
Kant is central to that story. By the time of his death Kant’s philosophy had conquered the German intellectual world,[22] and so the story of German philosophy became the story of extensions and reactions to Kant
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. Neo-Kantianism evolved during the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century two main forms had emerged. One form was Structuralism, of which Ferdinand de Saussure was a prominent exponent, representing the broadly rationalist wing of Kantianism. The other was Phenomenology, of which Edmund Husserl was a prominent representative, representing the broadly empiricist wing of Kantianism. 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. Phenomenology’s focus was upon careful examination of the contingent flow of the experiential given, avoiding any existential inferences or assumptions about what one experiences, and seeking simply to describe experience as neutrally and as clearly as possible. In effect, the Structuralists were seeking subjective noumenal categories, and the Phenomenologists were content with describing the phenomena without asking what connection to an external reality those experiences might have.
Structuralism and Phenomenology came to prominence in the twentieth century, however, and so my focus next will be on the two strains of German philosophy that dominated the nineteenth century. For those two strains, Kant’s philosophy set a problem to be solved—though one to be solved within the constraints of Kant’s most fundamental premises.
2. The speculative metaphysical strain, best represented by Hegel, was dissatisfied with the principled separation of subject and object. This strain granted Kant’s claim that the separation cannot be bridged epistemologically by reason, and so proposed to bridge it metaphysically by identifying the subject with the object.
3. The irrationalist strain, best represented by Kierkegaard, was also dissatisfied by the principled separation of subject and object. It granted Kant’s claim that the separation cannot be bridged epistemologically by reason, and so proposed to bridge it epistemologically by irrational means.
Kantian philosophy thus set the stage for the reign of speculative metaphysics and epistemological irrationalism in the nineteenth century.
References
[22] See, e.g., Wood, in Kant 1996, vi; also Meinecke 1977, 25.
[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.]
[This is Section 21 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
Part 5. Nietzsche’s Life and Influence
21. Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” “Live dangerously!”[46]
Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century German philosopher famous for his worship of human potential and for encouraging individuals to seek great heights and make real their creative dreams. He is also famous for his absolute loathing of all things small, cowardly, or mediocre.
In his writings we find a corresponding reverence of all things great, noble, heroic. He spoke directly and passionately to the best within each of us: “Do not throw away the hero in your soul” and “Hold holy your highest hope.”[47] And for those of us who sense we have a creative spark that must be honored and nurtured—“the noble soul has reverence for itself.”[48]
One indication of the importance of Nietzsche is the pantheon of major twentieth century intellectuals whom he influenced.
He was an influence on Jean-Paul Sartre and Hermann Hesse, major writers, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. He was an influence on thinkers as diverse in their outlooks as Ayn Rand and Michel Foucault. Rand’s politics are classically liberal—while Foucault’s are far Left, including a stint as a member of the French Communist Party. There is the striking fact that Nietzsche was an atheist, but he was an influence on Martin Buber, one of the most widely-read theologians of the twentieth century. And Nietzsche said harsh things about the Jews, as we will see—but he was nonetheless admired by Chaim Weizmann, a leader of the Zionist movement and first president of Israel.
So what is the attraction of Nietzsche? There is the exciting, sometimes scorching prose—Nietzsche was a stylist par excellence. There is his romanticism of life as a great, daring adventure. And of importance to serious intellectuals, there is the fundamentality and sheer audacity of the questions he raises about the human condition.
According to his teachers and professors, the young Friedrich Nietzsche showed extraordinary intellectual promise. He was appointed professor at University of Basel in Switzerland—at the age of twenty-four, which is unusually young for a professor. Even more unusually, he was appointed before finishing his doctoral degree, which was almost unheard of.
As brilliant as Nietzsche was, he was not suited for academic life. By most accounts he was a terrible lecturer, and he suffered from chronic health problems, which contributed to a general nervous collapse in 1870.
From the late 1870s, he wandered mostly alone and lonely over Europe, surveying the cultural landscape.
And when we take stock of the world in the late nineteenth century, what do we learn?
References
[46] EH “Why I Am So Wise” 2 and GS 283.
[47] Z I.
[48] BGE 287.
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
[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.]
At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Six of my book is now available online. This final chapter integrates the epistemological material from chapters two and three with the political material from chapters four and five to show how the distinctive contemporary postmodern strategies follow.
Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [pdf]
Connecting epistemology to politics 174
Masks and rhetoric in language 175
When theory clashes with fact 178
Kierkegaardian postmodernism 179
Reversing Thrasymachus 182
Using contradictory discourses as a political strategy 184
Machiavellian postmodernism 186
Machiavellian rhetorical discourses 187
Deconstruction as an educational strategy 188
Ressentiment postmodernism 191
Nietzschean ressentiment 193
Foucault and Derrida on the end of man 195
Ressentiment strategy 198
Post-postmodernism 201
My Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault has, gratifyingly, had two hardcover printings and eight softcover printings from 2004-2009.
Over the next while I will be making portions of the book available online at this new Explaining Postmodernism page here at my site.
To start, here are the Table of Contents [pdf] and Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [pdf]. Hope you enjoy.
And, of course, it’s available at Amazon.
The Continental Origins of Postmodernism.
Essays on Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty. Online course archived at The Objectivist Center.
.
.
RSS Feed
