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On university campuses today we see an increasing atmosphere of self-righteous intolerance. Consider just a few recent events:- Feb. 1, 2017 - Conservative gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos, scheduled to speak at Berkeley, is met by 1500 protesters. Initially peaceful, the protest is taken over by 150 people identified as BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) who "set fires, damaged property, threw fireworks, attacked members of the crowd, and threw rocks at the police". The speech is cancelled.
- Mar. 2, 2017 - hecklers disrupt a discussion involving conservative/libertarian social scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont. A professor is injured in the ensuing melee.
- May 2017 - Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington holds an annual Day of Absence in which students of colour (the student population is 25 percent non-white) boycott the campus for a day followed by a Day of Presence in which the college community is reunited. This year the university decided to change the format and instead of students and staff of colour leaving the campus for a day, white students and staff would leave. Bret Weinstein, a Professor of Biology, objected, arguing that leaving the campus was a voluntary activity and forcing people to leave amounted to segregation. Ironically, Weinstein was not a right winger like Yiannopoulos or Murray but a Bernie Sanders supporter. He was met by a "loud and profane" group of protestors and the campus erupted in controversy and violence. Weinstein and his family had to go into hiding and the college's commencement proceedings had to be moved off campus because of security concerns. (More on this story.)
A website called FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has been monitoring campus intolerance extensively and has a database of protests and, as they call it, "disinvitations" of speakers by those intolerant of dissenting opinions. Campus disinvitations set a record in 2016, the website reports. The database goes back to 2000. The database notes whether the protest against the speaker originated from the left or the right and while left wing protests have predominated in recent years, there are also a significant number of right wing protests.
Where does this intolerance come from? And why the violence?
If it seems reminiscent of the violence on campuses in the late sixties when campus radicals stormed and occupied the computer labs at Sir George Williams University in Montreal causing millions of dollars of damage or the so-called free speech movement at Berkeley, that is no accident.
The intolerance then and the intolerance now stem from the same source - philosophy. As arcane as that may seem, a radical anti-realist, anti-reason philosophy has gripped the radical left, a philosophy that is nihilist to the core with all that that entails.
That philosophy is postmodernism and in his brilliant little book, Explaining Postmodernism, neo-Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks does a masterful job of tracing its development from Rousseau and Kant through Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marcuse and down to to its modern exponents, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and Rorty. Well-documented, a quarter of the book is bibliography and footnotes (320 of them).
Hicks starts with an overall discussion of postmodernism and its tenets. He then proceeds to compare postmodernism with what it is trying to replace - modernism. Modernism is the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Its major influences, notes Hicks, are Francis Bacon and René Descartes in epistemology and John Locke "for his influence in all aspects of philosophy".
"Bacon, Descartes, and Locke are modern because of their philosophical naturalism, their profound confidence in reason, and, especially in the case of Locke, their individualism. Modern thinkers start from nature - instead of starting with some form of the supernatural, which had been the characteristic starting point of pre-modern, Medieval philosophy. Modern thinkers stress that perception and reason are the human means of knowing nature - in contrast the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s own character - in contrast to the pre-modern emphasis upon dependence and original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual, seeing the individual as the unit of reality, holding that the individual’s mind is sovereign, and that the individual is the unit of value - in contrast to the pre-modernist, feudal subordination of the individual to higher political, social, or religious realities and authorities."
By contrast, postmodernism rejects the real world (the natural world) as fundamentally unknowable. This undercuts reason as the means of gaining knowledge about and an understanding of the world. And so postmodern philosophy has turned to emotionalism and feelings as a means, not of cognition - they reject the very idea of cognition - but of deciding what actions to take. As Hicks puts it, "postmodernism rejects the entire Enlightenment project".
Hicks, in fact, notes two distinct threads that lead to postmodernism. One is the epistemological thread noted above. The other is political. Postmodernism is profoundly collectivist and anti-individualist. This blend is the result of the anger, frustration and hostility bred from the historical failure of Marxism and communism. It is this marriage of irrationalism in epistemology and collectivism in politics that makes it a potent and dangerous hybrid.
Hicks's book is a thorough history of counter-Enlightenment philosophy. The first half traces its epistemology and metaphysics. The second half looks at the evolution of its politics.
Chapter Two is called The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason. Today, he notes, the essence of modernist philosophy is so well entrenched in our society it is almost taken for granted - "liberal politics and free markets, scientific progress and technological innovation". All depend on confidence in the power of reason. Confidence in the individual's ability to use his reason. "Institutionalizing confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment".
But, Hicks writes, there were weaknesses in the Enlightenment's confidence in reason which were soon exploited. The thirty-five years from 1780 to 1815 were pivotal in the history of philosophy. It was bifurcated into two main streams - "Anglo-American culture and German culture split decisively from each other, one following a broadly Enlightenment program, the other a Counter-Enlightenment one".
The Enlightenment troubled German thinkers on a number of counts, not least its undermining of religion. Many Enlightenment thinker were deists if not outright atheists. Moreover the continental philosophers feared individualism. "The individual is an end in himself, the Enlightenment thinkers taught, not a slave or servant of others. His happiness is his own to pursue, and by giving him the tools of education, science, and technology he can be set free to set his own goals and to chart his own course in life. But what happens, worried the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, to traditional values of community and sacrifice, of duty and connectedness, if individuals are encouraged to calculate rationally their own gain? Will not such rational individualism encourage cold-blooded, short-range, and grasping selfishness? Will it not encourage individuals to reject long-standing traditions and to sever communal ties, thus creating a non-society of isolated, rootless and restless atoms?"
Inspired by Hume's skepticism and Rousseau's collectivism, the German thinkers "wanted to reinvigorate the German traditions of faith, duty, and ethnic identity that had been undermined by the Enlightenment’s emphasis upon reason, the pursuit of happiness, and cosmopolitanism".
"Postmodernism’s extreme skepticism, subjectivism, and relativism are the results of a two-centuries-long epistemological battle," concludes Hicks, a struggle in which pro-reason philosophers ceded the field in epistemology.
The most important architect of this change was Immanuel Kant. While some argue that Kant was an advocate of reason and should be considered part of the Enlightenment, Hicks maintains this is an error. "The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason".
Kant's motivation was religious. A firm man of faith, he saw that Enlightenment reason undermined religious belief. And so, as he put it in the second preface to his Critique, "“I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith".
Kant seized on the questions raised by both empiricism and rationalism about the ability of the senses to apprehend reality directly. But whatever their doubts, both schools still held to the belief in an objective world. Their doubts were about how we can know what is in the objective world - the real world. "In other words, the empiricists and the rationalists were realists: they believed that reality is what it is independently of consciousness, and that the purpose of consciousness is to come to an awareness of reality as it is".
As Hicks explains it, Kant postulated that there are two things - the object to be known and the subject that examines the object and does the knowing. However, the subject has an identity or nature which imposes itself on what it observes. The realist position was that the object is permanent and immutable - it is. And we observe it in order to know it. Or in Francis Bacon's terminology , "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." Kant denied this. "Given that the knowing subject has an identity, we must abandon the traditional assumption that the subject conforms to the object. Accordingly, the converse must be true: the object must conform to the subject, and only if we make that assumption - i.e., only if we abandon objectivity for subjectivity - can we can make sense of empirical knowledge".
On the other hand, Kant argues that we do have certain knowledge of some things - such as mathematical truths. But since these cannot be known from sense experience, they must be a priori. "Necessity and universality must be functions of the knowing subject, not items impressed upon subjects by objects. If we assume that our identity as knowing subjects is implicated in constructing our experiences, then we can assume that our identity will generate certain necessary and universal features of our experiences". Kant goes on to enumerate fourteen such universal truths, but they are not part of reality - they are creations of the mind.
While Kant thought he had rescued science and reason, his own words, quoted by Hicks, imply otherwise. "Everything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts". And if there is a real world out there, it must remain forever unfathomable and unknowable.
This, of course, is his famous analytic-synthetic dichotomy. And it suited Kant just fine because, as Hicks puts it, "Reason and science are now limited to playing with phenomena, leaving the noumenal realm untouched and untouchable. Having denied knowledge, room was made for faith. For who can say what is or is not out there in the real world?"
Kant, argues Hicks, is the first major break with the Enlightenment. "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.
Countering defenders of Kant who say he was not anti-reason but a defender of reason, that he believed in consistency and universal principles, Hicks says 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".
Previous skeptics, he avers, maintained a belief that truth was a matter of conforming to reality. Kant was revolutionary in divorcing reason from reality. "Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one then enters a different philosophical universe altogether".
Enlightenment reason has five primary primary features, argues Hicks - "objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty". Kant took the important first step - he rejected 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."
The first half of the book continues with an account of the development of the counter-Enlightenment over those two centuries. Hicks covers in some detail the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietszche, Heidegger, Logical Positivism, Kuhn and Rorty.
This book is stunning in its clarity and its vigor. A joy to read.
The second part of my review will look at Hicks argument that the angst over the failure of Marxism meshed perfectly with the epistemological legacy of Kant to form postmodernism.
Below is a table from the book, one of several, that show the philosophical progression of philosophic thought.
By contrast, postmodernism rejects the real world (the natural world) as fundamentally unknowable. This undercuts reason as the means of gaining knowledge about and an understanding of the world. And so postmodern philosophy has turned to emotionalism and feelings as a means, not of cognition - they reject the very idea of cognition - but of deciding what actions to take. As Hicks puts it, "postmodernism rejects the entire Enlightenment project".
Hicks, in fact, notes two distinct threads that lead to postmodernism. One is the epistemological thread noted above. The other is political. Postmodernism is profoundly collectivist and anti-individualist. This blend is the result of the anger, frustration and hostility bred from the historical failure of Marxism and communism. It is this marriage of irrationalism in epistemology and collectivism in politics that makes it a potent and dangerous hybrid.
Hicks's book is a thorough history of counter-Enlightenment philosophy. The first half traces its epistemology and metaphysics. The second half looks at the evolution of its politics.
Chapter Two is called The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason. Today, he notes, the essence of modernist philosophy is so well entrenched in our society it is almost taken for granted - "liberal politics and free markets, scientific progress and technological innovation". All depend on confidence in the power of reason. Confidence in the individual's ability to use his reason. "Institutionalizing confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment".
But, Hicks writes, there were weaknesses in the Enlightenment's confidence in reason which were soon exploited. The thirty-five years from 1780 to 1815 were pivotal in the history of philosophy. It was bifurcated into two main streams - "Anglo-American culture and German culture split decisively from each other, one following a broadly Enlightenment program, the other a Counter-Enlightenment one".
The Enlightenment troubled German thinkers on a number of counts, not least its undermining of religion. Many Enlightenment thinker were deists if not outright atheists. Moreover the continental philosophers feared individualism. "The individual is an end in himself, the Enlightenment thinkers taught, not a slave or servant of others. His happiness is his own to pursue, and by giving him the tools of education, science, and technology he can be set free to set his own goals and to chart his own course in life. But what happens, worried the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, to traditional values of community and sacrifice, of duty and connectedness, if individuals are encouraged to calculate rationally their own gain? Will not such rational individualism encourage cold-blooded, short-range, and grasping selfishness? Will it not encourage individuals to reject long-standing traditions and to sever communal ties, thus creating a non-society of isolated, rootless and restless atoms?"
Inspired by Hume's skepticism and Rousseau's collectivism, the German thinkers "wanted to reinvigorate the German traditions of faith, duty, and ethnic identity that had been undermined by the Enlightenment’s emphasis upon reason, the pursuit of happiness, and cosmopolitanism".
"Postmodernism’s extreme skepticism, subjectivism, and relativism are the results of a two-centuries-long epistemological battle," concludes Hicks, a struggle in which pro-reason philosophers ceded the field in epistemology.
The most important architect of this change was Immanuel Kant. While some argue that Kant was an advocate of reason and should be considered part of the Enlightenment, Hicks maintains this is an error. "The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason".
Kant's motivation was religious. A firm man of faith, he saw that Enlightenment reason undermined religious belief. And so, as he put it in the second preface to his Critique, "“I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith".
Kant seized on the questions raised by both empiricism and rationalism about the ability of the senses to apprehend reality directly. But whatever their doubts, both schools still held to the belief in an objective world. Their doubts were about how we can know what is in the objective world - the real world. "In other words, the empiricists and the rationalists were realists: they believed that reality is what it is independently of consciousness, and that the purpose of consciousness is to come to an awareness of reality as it is".
As Hicks explains it, Kant postulated that there are two things - the object to be known and the subject that examines the object and does the knowing. However, the subject has an identity or nature which imposes itself on what it observes. The realist position was that the object is permanent and immutable - it is. And we observe it in order to know it. Or in Francis Bacon's terminology , "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." Kant denied this. "Given that the knowing subject has an identity, we must abandon the traditional assumption that the subject conforms to the object. Accordingly, the converse must be true: the object must conform to the subject, and only if we make that assumption - i.e., only if we abandon objectivity for subjectivity - can we can make sense of empirical knowledge".
On the other hand, Kant argues that we do have certain knowledge of some things - such as mathematical truths. But since these cannot be known from sense experience, they must be a priori. "Necessity and universality must be functions of the knowing subject, not items impressed upon subjects by objects. If we assume that our identity as knowing subjects is implicated in constructing our experiences, then we can assume that our identity will generate certain necessary and universal features of our experiences". Kant goes on to enumerate fourteen such universal truths, but they are not part of reality - they are creations of the mind.
While Kant thought he had rescued science and reason, his own words, quoted by Hicks, imply otherwise. "Everything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts". And if there is a real world out there, it must remain forever unfathomable and unknowable.
This, of course, is his famous analytic-synthetic dichotomy. And it suited Kant just fine because, as Hicks puts it, "Reason and science are now limited to playing with phenomena, leaving the noumenal realm untouched and untouchable. Having denied knowledge, room was made for faith. For who can say what is or is not out there in the real world?"
Kant, argues Hicks, is the first major break with the Enlightenment. "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.
Countering defenders of Kant who say he was not anti-reason but a defender of reason, that he believed in consistency and universal principles, Hicks says 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".
Previous skeptics, he avers, maintained a belief that truth was a matter of conforming to reality. Kant was revolutionary in divorcing reason from reality. "Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one then enters a different philosophical universe altogether".
Enlightenment reason has five primary primary features, argues Hicks - "objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty". Kant took the important first step - he rejected 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."
The first half of the book continues with an account of the development of the counter-Enlightenment over those two centuries. Hicks covers in some detail the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietszche, Heidegger, Logical Positivism, Kuhn and Rorty.
This book is stunning in its clarity and its vigor. A joy to read.
The second part of my review will look at Hicks argument that the angst over the failure of Marxism meshed perfectly with the epistemological legacy of Kant to form postmodernism.
Below is a table from the book, one of several, that show the philosophical progression of philosophic thought.
Postscript: Originally I had planned to finish this review in two parts but it evolved into four. Below are the links to the rest of this review.
- Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism Part 2
- Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism Part 3
- Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism Part 4
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