Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Why Kant is the turning point

[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]

Why Kant is the turning point

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.

Wait a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about that? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason. That Kant was in favor of consistency and universality is of derivative and ultimately inconsequential significance. Consistency with no connection to reality is a game based on subjective rules. If the rules of the game have nothing to do with reality, then why should everyone play by the same rules? These were precisely the implications the postmodernists were to draw eventually.

Kant was thus different from previous skeptics and religious apologists. Many earlier skeptics had denied that we can know anything, and many earlier religious apologists had subordinated reason to faith. But earlier skeptics had never been as sweeping in their conclusions. Earlier skeptics would identify particular cognitive operations and raise problems for them. Maybe a given experience is a perceptual illusion—thus undermining our confidence in our perceptual faculties; or maybe it is a dream—thus undermining our confidence in be distinguishing truth from fantasy; or maybe induction is only probabilistic—thus undermining our confidence in our generalizations; and so on. But the conclusion of those skeptical arguments would be merely that we cannot be sure that we are right about the way reality is. We might be, but we cannot guarantee it, the skeptics would conclude. Kant’s point was deeper, arguing that in principle any conclusion reached by any of our faculties must necessarily not be about reality. Any form of cognition, because it must operate a certain way, cannot put us in contact with reality. On principle, because our minds’ faculties are structured in a certain way, we cannot say what reality is. We can only say how our minds have structured the subjective reality we perceive. This thesis had been implicit in the works of some earlier thinkers, including Aristotle’s, but Kant made it explicit and drew the conclusion systematically.

Kant is a landmark in a second respect. Earlier skeptics had, despite their negative conclusions, continued to conceive of truth as correspondence to reality. Kant went a step further and redefined truth on subjective grounds. Given his premises, this makes perfect sense. Truth is an epistemological concept. But if our minds are in principle disconnected from reality, then to speak of truth as an external relationship between mind and reality is nonsense. Truth must be solely an internal relationship of consistency.

With Kant, then, external reality thus drops almost totally out of the picture, and we are trapped inescapably in subjectivity—and that is why Kant is a landmark. Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one then enters a different philosophical universe altogether.

This interpretive point about Kant is crucial and controversial. An analogy may help drive the point home. Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a woman’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices—whether to cook or clean, whether to cook rice or potatoes, whether to decorate in blue or yellow. She is sovereign and autonomous. And the mark of a good woman is a well-organized and tidy kitchen.” No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of woman’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. He gives reason lots to do within the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason. The point for any advocate of reason is that there is a whole world outside our skulls, and reason is essentially about knowing it.

Kant’s contemporary Moses Mendelssohn was thus prescient in identifying Kant as “the all-destroyer.”[21] Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason—objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty—Kant rejects objectivity. Once reason is so severed from reality, the rest is details—details that are worked out over the next two centuries. 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. Between Kant and the postmodernists comes the successive abandonment of the rest of reason’s features.

References

[21] Quoted in Beck 1969, 337.

Bibliography

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

After Kant: reality or reason, but not both

[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.

Bibliography

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

Talk at BGSU

I will be giving a talk next week to a graduate philosophy class at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The theme of my talk is: What Philosophers Need to Know about Economics.

Over the past generation BGSU has developed one of the country’s strongest programs in applied ethics and political philosophy, so it will be an honor as well as a pleasure. Thanks to Professor Fred Miller and Professor Pam Phillips, the course’s instructors, for the invitation.

I will be discussing philosophy’s contributions to the debates over economics as a social science. What is a science? Since economics is about valuing, how does one (or can one) bridge the is-ought gap in ethics? Since individual economic agents can be irrational in their values, how epistemologically can there be a science involving such agents? Great issues that take us to landmark influential philosophers in conflict with each other — e.g., Hume versus Aristotle, the Logical Positivists versus the Postmodernists — and landmark influential economists in conflict with each other — e.g., the neoclassicals versus the Austrians.

The Climate of Collectivism: Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism

At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Four of my book is now available online. This chapter chronicles the rise of Counter-Enlightenment, collectivized social and political thought on the European continent, from Rousseau and Kant in the eighteenth century, through Fichte and Hegel in the nineteenth (Marx is treated separately in Chapter 5), setting the stage for the great battle between Right and Left versions of collectivism early in the twentieth century.

Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:

Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [pdf]

From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics 84
The argument of the next three chapters 86
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence 89
Back to Rousseau 91
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment 92
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism 96
Rousseau and the French Revolution 100
Counter-Enlightenment Politics: Right and Left collectivism 104
Kant on collectivism and war 106
Herder on multicultural relativism 110
Fichte on education as socialization 113
Hegel on worshipping the state 120
From Hegel to the twentieth century 124
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century 126
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? 131

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason

At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Two of my book is now available online. This chapter traces the decline of epistemology from Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” to the dominance of speculation and irrationalism in the nineteenth-century, setting the stage for the collapse of reason in the twentieth century, which is the subject of Chapter Three.

Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:

Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [pdf]

Enlightenment reason, liberalism, and science 23
The beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment 24
Kant’s skeptical conclusion 28
Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism 29
Kant’s essential argument 33
Identifying Kant’s key assumptions 36
Why Kant is the turning point 39
After Kant: reality or reason but not both 42
Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche 44
Dialectic and saving religion 47
Hegel’s contribution to postmodernism 50
Epistemological solutions to Kant: irrationalism from
Kierkegaard to Nietzsche 51
Summary of irrationalist themes 57

The Crisis of Socialism: Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism

At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Five of my book is now available online. The chapter traces the evolution of socialism from classical Marxism in the mid-nineteenth century through the post-World War II crisis of socialism that helped set the stage for postmodernism.

Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:

Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [pdf]

Marx and waiting for Godot 135
Three failed predictions 136
Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson
of the German Social Democrats 138
Good news for socialism: depression and war 141
Bad news: liberal capitalism rebounds 143
Worse news: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary 146
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard 150
From need to equality 151
From Wealth is good to Wealth is bad 153
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology 156
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud,
or oppression plus repression 159
The rise and fall of Left terrorism 167
From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism 171

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

Explaining Postmodernism: Chapter One online

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.

[Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

“Postmodernism Unpeeled” discussion with David Thompson

David Thompson is a critic and commentator with strong interests in pop culture and postmodernism. His interview with me based on my book Explaining Postmodernism is now posted at his site.

Previous interviews I’ve done on postmodernism’s themes and roots were published in Navigator and New Individualist magazines.

The following scholarly reviews of the book have been published:
Professor Curtis Hancock in The Review of Metaphysics (and can be read online here);
Professor Gary Jason in Liberty;
Professor Marcus Verhaegh in The Independent Review;
Dr. David Gordon in The Mises Review;
Professor Max Hocutt in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies;
Professor Steven M. Sanders in Reason Papers.

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