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I did not discuss the details of the two hundred year journey from Kant through Hegel, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and others to the postmodernist end product. So let me discuss this briefly before moving on to Hicks's second thesis.
Discussing the descent into nihilism, Hicks notes the "Heideggerian Question of all questions: Why is there even Being at all? Why is there not rather Nothing?"
"And like all good German philosophers," Hicks notes, "Heidegger agreed that when we get to the core of Being we will find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things."
What we are left with is our feelings since reason and logic are impotent. In particular, "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".
Not surprisingly, today's leading postmodernists, Derrida and Foucault, identify as followers of Heidegger. Hicks discusses Heidegger in considerable detail and it is a fascinating discussion. Hicks moves on through the collapse of Logical Positivism as a force to Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. Kuhn's thesis in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, avers Hicks, is that "science, one of the Enlightenment’s prized children, is merely an evolving, socially subjective enterprise with no more claim to objectivity than any other belief system. The idea that science speaks of reality or truth is an illusion. There is no Truth; there are only truths, and truths change".
Hicks quotes Richard Rorty, the leading American postmodernist, "To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest, or ‘true’ as a term which repays ‘analysis.’ ‘The nature of truth’ is an unprofitable topic, resembling in this respect ‘the nature of man’ and ‘the nature of God’."
Michel Foucault wrote that "All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence."
But further discussion of postmodern philosophy requires us to move to Hicks's second thesis. "If a deep skepticism about reason and the consequent subjectivism and relativism, were the most important parts of the story of postmodernism," Hicks notes, "then we would expect to find that postmodernists represent a roughly random distribution of commitments across the political spectrum".
But this is not the case. "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".
This is unusual because socialism, for much of its "intellectual history... has almost always been defended on the modernist grounds of reason and science". Marxists even referred to it as "scientific socialism". A part of this puzzle is the question as to why postmodernists are "most likely to be hostile to dissent and debate, the most likely to engage in ad hominem argument and name-calling, the most likely to enact 'politically correct' authoritarian measures, and the most likely to use anger and rage as argumentative tactics".
"Why," he asks, "is it that among the far Left - which has traditionally promoted itself as the only true champion of civility, tolerance, and fair play - that we find those habits least practiced and even denounced?"
Thus we have Hicks's second thesis. "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".
Classical Marxist scientific socialism argued that:
- Capitalism is exploitative: The rich enslave the poor; it is brutally competitive domestically and imperialistic internationally.
- Socialism, by contrast, is humane and peaceful: People share, are equal, and cooperative.
- 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.
- Socialist economies, by contrast, will be more productive and usher in a new era of prosperity.
But as Hicks points out, the exact opposite transpired. "The empirical evidence has been much harder on socialism. Economically, in practice the capitalist nations are increasingly productive and prosperous, with no end in sight. Not only are the rich getting fantastically richer, the poor in those countries are getting richer too. And by direct and brutal contrast, every socialist experiment has ended in dismal economic failure—from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, to North Korea and Vietnam, to Cuba, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.
"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 are capable of".
Even the great hope that the Great Depression would prove capitalism's undoing came to nought. The Soviet Union's sending in of tanks to Hungary in 1956 to crush a nascent liberalism proved that communism's commitment to humanism was a sham. This was further borne out by Khrushchev's revelations that Stalin had slaughtered tens of millions of people." The crisis for the far Left was that the logic and evidence were going against socialism".
The Left faced the same crisis religion faced during the Enlightenment. "Faith requires the crucifixion of reason," wrote Kierkegaard. "Confronted by the continued flourishing of capitalism and the continued poverty and brutality of socialism," writes Hicks, "they (the Left) could either go with the evidence and reject their deeply cherished ideals - or stick by their ideals and attack the whole idea that evidence and logic matter".
And so we have postmodernism, a blend of epistemological irrationalism and Leftist angst to salvage socialism, or more to the point, to destroy liberal capitalism. Thus the Leftist reply to the crisis of confidence in the fifties: "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".
As Hicks puts it, "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".
Hicks then goes into a detailed account of the history of socialist thought beginning with Rousseau. The Frenchman was profoundly anti-individualist and anti-liberal. As I showed in previous articles, Rousseau, not Kant, probably deserves the title as the most evil man in history.
While Kant is the key figure in the epistemological counter-Enlightenment, "Rousseau is the most significant figure in the political Counter-Enlightenment. His moral and political philosophy was inspirational to Immanuel Kant, Johann Herder, Johann Fichte, and G. W. F. Hegel, and from them transmitted to the collectivist Right. It was perhaps more inspirational to the collectivist Left: Rousseau’s writings were the Bible of the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution, absorbed by many of the hopeful Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century, and influential upon the more agrarian socialists of the twentieth century in China and Cambodia. In the theoretical world of academic socialism, Rousseau’s version of collectivism was eclipsed by Marx’s version for most of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Yet a large part of the explanation of postmodern thought is a shift toward Rousseauian themes by thinkers who were originally inspired by Marx but who are now increasingly disillusioned".
In a detailed deconstruction, Hicks points out Rousseau's hatred of reason as a corrupting influence and his admiration for tribalism. Rousseau was also a very religious man and resented reason's demoralizing effect on faith. "The arguments of the philosophers about God," writes Hicks, "not only did not clarify matters, they made things worse: 'The more I think about it,' Rousseau wrote, 'the more I am confused.' So he resolved to ignore the philosophers - 'suffused with the sense of my inadequacy, I shall never reason about the nature of God' - and to let his feelings guide his religious beliefs, holding that feelings are a more reliable guide than reason".
Rousseau was a through-going statist, believing that the state represented what he called the general will. And, he argued that the leaders of the state needed to invoke a religious sanction. "The society’s founding leaders may not always genuinely believe in the religious sanctions they invoke, but their invoking them is nonetheless essential. If the people believe that their leaders are acting out the will of the gods, they will obey more freely and 'bear with docility the yoke of the public good.' Enlightenment reason, by contrast, leads to disbelief; disbelief leads to disobedience; and disobedience leads to anarchy. This is a further reason why, according to Rousseau, 'the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and the man who meditates is a depraved animal.' Reason, accordingly, is destructive to society, and should be limited and replaced with natural passion.
"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 being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, if needed, his life to his duty. If, after having publicly recognized these dogmas, a person acts as if he does not believe them, he should be put to death.'"
Hicks continues his analysis of Rousseau concluding, "We thus find in Rousseau an explicitly Counter-Enlightenment set of themes, attacking the Enlightenment’s themes of reason, the arts and sciences, and ethical and political individualism and liberalism".
Hicks then elaborates on Rousseau's influence on the Jacobins and the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. Post-French Revolution the counter-Enlightenment shifted to Germany.
Hicks has an interesting take on Napoleon. Arising from the ashes of the French Revolution, a revolution started with a Lockean Enlightenment sensibility and corrupted by the Rousseauian radicals, Napoleon represented a swing back to the Enlightenment.
"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. On matters of religion, he destroyed the ghettoes, gave Jews freedom of religion, and gave them the right to own land and practice all trades. He opened secular public schools, and modernized Europe’s transportation network.
"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 angered the nobles by abolishing feudal estates and feudal dues, by breaking up large estates, and generally by lessening the power of the nobles over the peasantry. 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."
But Napoleon was still a dictator and taxed and conscripted subjugated peoples to fight France's wars. The Germans couldn't fathom losing to Napoleon. And so counter-Enlightenment collectivism took a rightward turn, becoming increasingly nationalistic and culminating in Nazism.
Hicks notes the rift of socialism into left and right wing factions. Brothers under the skin united by a hatred of liberal capitalism, but differing over how best to achieve it. The left took a universalist approach and the right a nationalist approach. Hicks digresses on the right wing variant before tackling Marxism and the Left. It is informative and fascinating so I will follow his digression, partly because I see its influence as well as the influence of postmodernism itself in the so-called alt-right.
Hicks notes the rift of socialism into left and right wing factions. Brothers under the skin united by a hatred of liberal capitalism, but differing over how best to achieve it. The left took a universalist approach and the right a nationalist approach. Hicks digresses on the right wing variant before tackling Marxism and the Left. It is informative and fascinating so I will follow his digression, partly because I see its influence as well as the influence of postmodernism itself in the so-called alt-right.
Hicks traces Rousseau's influence on Kant as well as on Johann Herder. Herder developed a philosophy of multicultural relativism. "Enlightenment thinkers had posited a universal human nature, and they had held that human reason could develop equally in all cultures. From this they inferred that all cultures eventually could achieve the same degree of progress, and that when that happened humans would eliminate all of the irrational superstitions and prejudices that had driven them apart, and that mankind would then achieve a cosmopolitan and peaceful liberal social order.
"Not so, says Herder. Instead, each Volk is a unique 'family writ large.' Each possesses a distinctive culture and is itself an organic community stretching backward and forward in time. Each has its own genius, its own special traits. And, necessarily, these cultures are opposed to each other. As each fulfills its own destiny, its unique developmental path will conflict with other cultures’ developmental paths."
Herder held that cultures were often incompatible. "To be vigorous, creative, and alive, Herder argued, one must avoid mixing one’s own culture with those of others, and instead steep oneself in one’s own culture and absorb it into oneself."
The German was not meant for Enlightenment culture, Herder asserted. As Hicks describes it, "The German is not suited for sophistication, liberalism, science, and so on, and so the German should stick to his local traditions, language, and sentiments. For the German, low culture is better than high culture; being unspoiled by books and learning is best. Scientific knowledge is artificial; instead Germans should be natural and rooted in the soil. For the German, the parable of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden is true: Don’t eat of that tree! Live! Don’t think! Don’t analyze!"
Although a minor figure today, Herder was hugely influential on German philosophers that followed him. One of these was Johann Fichte who harkened back to the days of German feudalism when German burghers were characterized by a "spirit of piety, of honour, of modesty, and of the sense of community.” The modern German had been corrupted by "self-seeking". Like his predecessors, Fichte blamed the Enlightenment and reason. Fichte's solution was national public education but of a specific sort.
"Real education must start by getting to the source of human nature. Education must exert 'an influence penetrating to the roots of vital impulse and action.' Here was a great failing of traditional education, for it had relied upon and appealed to the student’s free will. 'I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system.' Compulsion, not freedom, is best for students: On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty."
Of course, parents were also a corrupting influence so Herder advocated removal of children from the care of parents and placing them in the hands of the teachers. Hicks's description of Fichte's plan is truly horrifying. Fichte proposed nothing less than a miniature Marxist socialist school society with strict discipline and an ethos of the more able student helping the needy student, an ethos born out of a Kantian sense of duty. The system was to eradicate all notions of self-interest. Duty was to rule supreme. If successful, the pupil would emerge a "fixed and unchangeable machine." (Fichte's words)
This was mixed in with a fervent nationalism. "Only the German is capable of true education," comments Hicks, "The German is the best that the world has to offer and is the hope for the future progress of mankind."
Fichte's star rose and he was appointed head of the philosophy department at the University of Berlin. 100 years later, Friedrich Ebert, first president of Germany after the Great War, invoked Fichte in his first speech to the Weimar Republic. A speech that could be said to rally the people to make Germany great again.
Hicks goes on to discuss Hegel and his anti-individualism - "A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole... Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it." - and his rhapsodizing on "world-historical figures", great men who are agents of the Absolute and will shake things up.
The world-historical figure is above morality. "It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower - crush to pieces many an object in its path."
These four men - Kant, Herder, Fichte and Hegel - formed the vanguard of right wing socialism and collectivism. But left and right were united in their hatred for liberal values, for individualism, for bourgeois capitalism. The advent of World War I was significant to the collectivist Right. "The war would destroy the decadent liberal spirit, the bland spirit of shopkeepers and traders, and make way for the ascent of social idealism."
Oswald Spengler's anti-capitalist screed, The Decline of the West, written in 1914 but published after the war, had a huge influence on Wittgenstein and Heidegger. His subsequent book, Prussianism and Socialism, tried to "wrest the label 'socialist' away from the Marxists and to demonstrate that socialism required a national and organic focus."
"Socialism means power, power and more power," Spengler railed.
Then a wold-historical figure of epic proportions appeared. Hitler declared that "basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same". Josef Goebbels was the architect of Hitler's economic plan. Goebbels was influenced by the Left socialists and hated both capitalism and money.
The outcome of this is well known. "During the war and its aftermath, the National Socialists and the collectivist Right were wiped out physically and discredited morally and intellectually," writes Hicks. "The new battle lines were simplified and starkly clear: liberal capitalism versus Left socialism."
I had planned to do this review in two parts but this part has been long enough already and so I'll continue with a third part next week a look at Hicks account of the evolution of left wing socialism to today's postmodernism.
Postscript: This review ended up as four separate posts. Links to the other parts are below:
Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism Part 1 Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism Part 3 Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism Part 4
Postscript: This review ended up as four separate posts. Links to the other parts are below:
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