...Postmodernism, as a philosophy and as an intellectual movement, is characterized by strong skepticism and subjectivism, and consequently by ethical relativism....
...postmodernism holds that our identities are constructed by our race or gender or class identities—that is the collectivized part of it: You exist only as part of a collective group. The zero-sum part is that those groups are in a life-and-death conflict with each other. So, society is made up of blacks versus whites, men versus women, rich versus poor. Generally, the political philosophy of postmodernism is left collectivism. The aesthetic view is very fragmented and rather nihilistic.
In philosophy, modernism was the great break with the traditional, medieval past, and it came in the seventeenth century, in my judgment. What that break brought was a shift to a naturalistic worldview. Modernism emphasized experience and reason as our fundamental cognitive capacities, as opposed to the medieval emphasis on faith and authority. ...In the value branches of philosophy, you found a much more individualistic approach. In ethics, you found increasing emphasis on the pursuit of happiness as man’s natural birth right, as opposed to the traditional notion that we are here to do our duty. That played out in political revolutions that emphasized individual liberty and the development of freer markets. Modernism’s this-worldly outlook spilled over into the nineteenth century as the flowering of Romanticism, which was a naturalistic and optimistic aesthetic.
The term “modernism” is broader than “Enlightenment,” which refers to the eighteenth century, when all those modernistic trends—naturalism, optimism about human progress, the institutionalization of science, free markets, and so forth—came to dominate intellectual and cultural life. The counter-Enlightenment began toward the end of the eighteenth century and is essentially a reaction to those trends. Its major proponents are the Swiss-French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German thinker Immanuel Kant. What they are concerned with, in different ways, is that the modernist, Enlightenment movement undermines traditional institutions and values. ...in the view of counter-Enlightenment thinkers, the modern emphasis on individualism and on the pursuit of happiness was and is a threat to the traditional ethical values of duty and communal ties.
...beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, the modernist strain of epistemology came under siege from counter-Enlightenment thinkers, who tended to skepticism and relativism. The major early figures here were David Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. The battle was waged throughout the nineteenth century, and the skeptical and relativistic side got the upper hand....
...The world of academic philosophy in the twentieth century, at least during its first two-thirds, was characterized by a split between the Continental approach and the Anglo-American approach. If you look at the major figures on the Continental side, particularly by the middle part of the twentieth century, the philosophers everybody is reading are Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. All of them are strongly anti-reason. If you come over to the Anglo-American side of the divide, by the time you get to the middle of the twentieth century, the major intellectuals at that time are also people who are strongly non-rationalistic. Think of the later Wittgenstein and people like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, as well as, to a significantly lesser degree, Karl Popper. Skeptical forms of pragmatism are also prominent in the 1960s. So, by the middle part of the twentieth century, nobody is defending objectivity.
...Kant did not abandon reason wholesale. He gave up on the idea of objectivity. But he still maintained the universality of reason. And he maintained that reason was a function of the individual mind. In the subsequent history of philosophy, however, we see that once objectivity was gone, there was no way to maintain the defense of the universality of reason and there was no way to defend the individuality of reason. So, over the course of the next century and a half, up to postmodernism, the implication of Kant’s abandoning objectivity was played out until we got to the postmodernists, who said: “Forget objectivity. Forget individual reason. Forget the universality of reason.” What we got is their subjectivist, relativist, collectivist account of human cognition.
The dimension or axis that I am using is collectivism, and along that dimension it is possible to speak of right and left versions. Right versions are more nationalistic. Left versions, like Marx’s, are more internationalistic. Another point of variation is religion. Right versions of German collectivism want more of a state-and-religion marriage. Hegel is an example of this. He opposed, on principle, the separation of church and state, so that will put him on the right side. On the left side, Marx is the clearest example, being vigorously atheistic and secular in his orientation.
...liberal individualism and collectivist socialism were the two modernist answers to the question of replacing feudalism. But the socialist side of that divide split into two approaches. I’ll give them historical names here. One follows a Rousseauian strategy, and the other follows a Marxist strategy.
The Rousseauian strategy was the earlier one. It placed its emphasis on passion rather than on reason, and on small tribal groups rather than on large-scale industrial or cosmopolitan enterprises. It also placed more emphasis on staying close to nature than on high-tech industrial development. That movement fed directly into the Romanticism of the nineteenth century and was associated with the right collectivism that I mentioned earlier.
Marxism had the same communal aims and altruistic themes as the Rousseauians, but it drew more on Enlightenment themes. It had a materialistic metaphysics; it claimed to favor a scientific epistemology of sorts; and it was much friendlier to technological development. And for the next century or so, it was the Marxist version of socialism that dominated socialist discourse. As I see it, Marxism is a compound. It draws on some Enlightenment themes of reason and science and naturalistic metaphysics and so forth. But at the same time it holds onto that traditional altruistic and communalistic ethic. That’s why it turned out to be unstable.
...The postmodernists who came to greatest fame in the 1970s, 1980s, and later—people such as Foucault and Derrida and Lyotard and Richard Rorty and so forth—had all been young men in the 1950s and 1960s, and so they lived through the crisis of socialism. All of them were, in their youth, advocates of a fairly far-left politics. ...Now it is being buffeted by theoretical arguments that seem to be unanswerable and by practical events that provide tons of evidence undermining it and showing that the hated capitalist system is superior. How are you going to deal with that crisis, psychologically and intellectually?
My hypothesis is that postmodernism is the way a significant number of far-left socialists dealt with that crisis.
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Originally Posted by Dr. Strangelove
