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Stephen R.C. Hicks
Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault
(Tempe, AZ: Scholargy Publications, 2004)
Introduction
This excellent little volume, by an objectivist philosopher possessed of acute
understanding and broad learning, asks and answers two pertinent questions: First, why
have “postmodernist” intellectuals of the kind you find in English departments and
Women Studies programs, but not the Chemistry department, rejected Enlightenment
belief in reason while embracing epistemological relativism and metaphysical nihilism
instead? Second, why does postmodernist rhetoric display blatant disregard for accuracy
and obvious contempt for civility?
These questions are pertinent for two reasons. First, the epistemological relativist
says, in effect “I know a truth; no truth is known,” and the metaphysical nihilist says in
effect “The reality we must recognize is that there is no reality to recognize.” So, both
doctrines are pretty plainly self-refuting, which makes one doubt whether they can be
sincerely held. Second, “postmodernism” is a fashionable name for the political left,
where the superiority of socialism to capitalism was originally declared to be a corollary,
not a contrary, of reason. So, postmodernism is not only self-refuting; it also represents a
complete turnabout, and this is cause for puzzlement.
Hicks has solved the puzzle and done so in fine style. According to his analysis,
which I find entirely convincing, socialist hopes and ideals optimistically proclaimed in
the 19th century by such intellectual luminaries as Karl Marx got mugged in the 20th
century by the dark and dismal reality of socialist practice. In the Soviet Union and
elsewhere, socialist regimes killed or starved to death an estimated 110 million of their
own people and terrorized the rest before collapsing from inefficiency and ineptitude, a
failure of unprecedented proportion.
At the same time, capitalist regimes in the United States and elsewhere
flourished and their free-wheeling populations prospered, falsifying confident socialist
predictions of a contrary fate. In addition, the seemingly firm grounds on which Marx
and other 19th century thinkers had confidently built their condemnations of capitalism
and their apologies for socialism were shown by such 20th century critics as Von Mises
and Hayek to be quicksand. Socialism has been resoundingly refuted both in practice and
in theory.
This ought to have been the end for socialism, but that is not how things have
turned out. Unable either to deny the damning facts or to refute capitalist logic, many
leftists have chosen another option: they have kept their faith in socialism and their
animosity towards capitalism while abandoning, or pretending to abandon, their belief in
fact and logic. Where, formerly, they had touted socialist “truth” as Truth absolute, they
now say that there is no such thing as truth, just so many different interpretations, each
true for the person who believes it, none true absolutely. As for logic, they declare it to
be just one more device that clever folk use to exploit the poor and the weak; what we
need in their opinion is less logic and more compassion, less attention to fact and more
concern for feeling.
In short, although they have lost the game, the socialists have refused to concede.
Instead, declaring that the rules were rigged, they have kicked over the board.
Practitioners of the hard sciences scoff at such childishness, but it has become the
dominant fashion in many university departments of humanities and social science.
What Hicks wants to tell us is how this state of affairs came about. Because
postmodernism is reminiscent of the skepticism and relativism that were introduced into
Western thought by the sophists of ancient Greece, he could have begun there. But for
good reasons, Hicks begins his story with Immanuel Kant, who formulated the
epistemology that became the basis for German, then French, and now American
rejection of Enlightenment (viz., Western) ideals.
German Gibberish
Hicks’s focus on Kant will surprise those who believe that the “sage of
Konigsberg” was himself a devotee of the Enlightenment; but Hicks has read objectivist
philosopher Leonard Peikoff with profit. Like the estimable Peikoff, he understands that
Kant did not write his famous critiques to promote reason. As Kant said himself, he
wrote to save faith by cutting reason down to size. If, despite this, Kant is sometimes
counted as an Enlightenment rationalist, it is perhaps because he confused the issue when
he divided “reason” into vernunft, which he preferred, and verstehen, which he regarded
as needing restraint. But the Enlightenment had the reverse priority; it favored verstehen
(understanding attendant on ratiocination) over vernunft (intuitive, or unreasoning, grasp
of first principles).
In my opinion, Hicks’s summary of Kant’s epistemology is excellent and very
much to the point. As Hicks emphasizes, Kant denied that human reason can encompass
reality. What the human being can know, said Kant, is phenomena, the appearances of
things; the things themselves are forever beyond human ken. Natural, or physical,
science makes a systematic study of phenomena, but it cannot reach behind them to their
causes, the reality of which must be taken on faith, because it cannot be proved.
Furthermore, said Kant, such meaning as phenomena have is invested in them by
the mind itself, not put there by the things that are presumed to cause them. In other
words, the world studied by the scientist is his construction and exists only in his mind.
This doctrine was so far from being an expression of Enlightenment rationalism as to be a
deliberate and self-conscious challenge to Enlightenment confidence in the power of
reason to penetrate below the surface to the essence of physical nature.
Kant at least paid lip service to the existence of a “noumenal” world outside his
mind and independent of it, even as he maintained that we can know nothing about it.
The same cannot be said of Kant’s German followers. Anxious to buttress Christian
dogma against doubts raised by the atheists who had initiated the French Enlightenment,
the philosopher Fichte and the theologian Schliermacher declared that, since Kant had
shown that empirical scientists live in a glass house, they should not throw stones at
religion. In the opinion of these two thinkers, the world of physical phenomena studied
by the scientist was inferior to the spiritual and moral “reality” that had been revealed by
Christian faith. So, “religious truth” had to be regarded as a higher form of truth than
“scientific truth,” and feeling and instinct had to count as better ways of discovering
truth than the methods of natural science.
Hegel agreed but added that, to think of something is to have it in mind. Then,
taking this metaphor literally, he concluded that talk of a world external to mind is
nonsense; mind necessarily encompasses all that can be known. Furthermore, he said,
mind is governed not by the static principle of non-contradiction, as had previously been
thought, but by the dialectic of history, the moving principle of which is conflict, which
Hegel confusedly mislabeled contradiction. Reveling in paradox (e.g., “Being is
nothing.”), Hegel rejected belief that a self-contradiction is a sign of faulty logic.
Instead, he took it as proof of profundity. Hegel believed that all “contradiction” would
eventually be resolved by the development of the German state; but, in the meanwhile, it
was necessary to acknowledge that what is true at one time and place might be false at
another.
This endorsement of relativism was music to the ears of the Danish thinker and
writer Soren Kierkegaard, who admitted that his Christian faith might be “objectively
false” but assured his readers that it was “subjectively true”—true for the Christian
believer. Kierkegaard had been troubled by the fact that Christianity required belief in
impossibilities. Now his heart was at peace. Denying that conformity to logic was
necessary to subjective truth, Kierkegaard praised belief in self-contradiction (e.g.,
“Christ is at once divine and human.” or “God is three persons in one.”—his examples)
as indication of the depth and sincerity of true faith. Thus, relativism gave birth to
irrationalism.
Schopenhauer, the atheist in the crowd, found proof of an external world in
resistance to our wills, which was an improvement over Kant and Hegel; but, even he
remained confined to the solipsistic prison to which Kant had consigned German
philosophizing.
Therefore, after nearly a century of some of the most obscure and tortured
writing ever produced, German philosophy would come down to the “phenomenology”
of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, who would search for salvation in “the ground
of one’s being,” viz., the contents of one’s own consciousness. Philosophy, which had
begun as an effort by rationalist minded Greeks to understand the world they lived in,
had been turned by the Germans into narcissistic navel gazing. Such was Kant’s
philosophical legacy.
Having recounted this legacy, Hicks has an easy time showing how postmodernist
relativism, skepticism, and nihilism grew out of German philosophy. For this purpose,
Hicks pays most attention to the French “deconstructionists” Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard and the American pragmatist Richard Rorty—all of
whom were introduced at the beginning of Hicks’s book. As Hicks points out, all were
directly influenced by Heidegger and all deny, or appear to deny, that there is any such
thing as a free standing truth or an independent reality. According to the three French
intellectuals, every group “constructs” its own “reality,” presumably out of whole cloth,
to suit itself. According to Rorty, “truth” is just a laudatory name for whatever one
chooses to believe, and “proof” is just a name for rhetoric that one finds convincing.
Anglophonic Analysis
Although all four of these men were trained as philosophers, and Rorty once
taught at Princeton, I think it is noteworthy that the method and metaphysics they preach
have not found homes in philosophy departments in America, Britain, or Australia. If
you want a deconstructionist, go to the English Department. Philosophy departments in
Anglophonic countries, are still predominantly homes for linguistic and logical analysis,
the whole tone and tenor of which are very much in opposition to subjectivist nihilism.
In fact, analytic philosophy of all styles began in self-conscious opposition to such
Germanic gobbledegook. Rorty was very much alone at Princeton and has left to become
a professor of humanities at Stanford.
Despite this fact, Hicks says that leading English and American philosophers
promoted a Kantian epistemology when they declared that perception is “theory laden,”
and he adds that some of them have encouraged subjectivism by arguing that truth is
relative to conceptual schemes. Hicks also cites Thomas Kuhn’s talk of scientific
“paradigms” as evidence of the pervasiveness of relativism, and he claims that the
nominalism and conventionalism of such as Goodman and Quine entails radical
relativism.
But although Rorty has promoted the same conclusion, I think it is dubious. That
perception is theory laden just means that our beliefs influence how we perceive things,
not that we don’t sometimes perceive them correctly, much less that we don’t perceive
them at all. As for the pragmatists, the best among them—e.g., Peirce and Quine—have
always insisted that conceptual schemes have to be tested against reality and that some
such schemes work better in practice because they get us closer to the truth than others.
Although Kuhn carelessly said things that encouraged the postmodernists, he has
explicitly repudiated the kind of silly relativism that leads some of them to declare that
witchcraft is as good as quantum mechanics.
It is a complicated issue and cannot be settled with a sentence or two, but I have
to conclude that Hicks’s all too sketchy account of Anglophonic philosophy is the least
satisfactory part of his book. Postmodernism can’t be blamed on analytic philosophy or
pragmatism. To find its roots, we have to go back to Heidegger.
Romantic Fantasies
But while the connection to Heidegger tells us where the postmodernists got their
subjectivist epistemology and nihilist metaphysics, Hicks knows and says that we must
look elsewhere for an explanation of their leftist politics. The old left got its politics from
Marx. As Hicks observes, the new left sometimes skips over Marx to go back to
Rousseau. We shall see why later.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the “father of romanticism,” lived during the French
Enlightenment and knew its leading figures, but he disliked everything about their
project, which was to build a social order of rational individuals who, freed from the
superstitions of religion, would use science, technology, and capitalist economics to make
themselves prosperous.
As Rousseau explained in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, he
believed that this project would exacerbate the competition for wealth, power, and status
that seemed to him to be the source of all evil, because it had destroyed compassion.
According to Rousseau’s highly speculative history, human beings in an aboriginal state
of nature had been equal and care free. The growth of civilization, which came with the
institution of property, had changed that, making the propertied few indifferent to the
plight of the destitute many, who were forced to become slaves, serfs, or servants in order
to survive. What is worse, the rise of civilization had also destroyed other natural virtues
—e.g., the strength, hardiness and physical agility that men had when they lived, as God
had intended, without luxuries, mindlessly eating acorns from the trees, drinking water
from the streams, and coupling with any woman who happened by.
Rousseau saw no way of returning to this idyllic state, but in The Social Contract,
he spelled out what he thought would be a workable compromise—a social order in
which citizens would surrender their persons and property to a collective body in
exchange for a promise of economic and political security. In this new society, citizens
would contribute according to their ability and be provided according to their needs. To
manage public affairs, they would elect magistrates who would seek not their personal
well being but the general welfare and enact not their personal wishes but the general
will. To prevent anybody in the society from acquiring markedly greater property and
power than others, “excess” wealth would be confiscated and given to those who needed
it most.
In Rousseau’s utopia, emphasis would be on the prosperity of the collective; not,
as in capitalist economies, on the prosperity of the individual who had earned it; and the
guiding principle of the whole would be the preservation of equality, without regard for
personal desert. People would be motivated by humane concern for each other, not by
calculations of how to get rich or attain rank. A state religion would help to promote
conformity with this altruistic morality and willing compliance with the dictates of the
ruling authorities.
As Hicks emphasizes, everything about this fantasy is in opposition to the ideals
of the Enlightenment, which favored not religion but reason, not socialism but capitalism,
not collectivism but individualism, not submission to nature but technological mastery of
nature. Regarding the Enlightenment, Rousseau was a complete reactionary. So, his
writings naturally became holy texts for the leaders of the French revolution, especially
during the Terror, when heads were lopped off and estates confiscated so that the lands of
the aristocracy could be redistributed in small parcels to common folk, who lacked
knowledge of how to use them profitably.
The dictator Napoleon Bonaparte would later set aside such reforms in the name
of Enlightenment, but Rousseau’s ideas would then just go to Germany, where they
would be welcomed, partly out of nationalistic fervor, by the very same intellectuals that
Hicks introduced earlier. Having preached subjective idealism Fichte, Hegel, and
Heidegger would also preach collectivism. Following Kant, the Germans would argue
that duty to the state should take precedence over the lives and desires of individuals.
Evolutionary Politics
Unless I missed something, Hicks does not undertake to explain why belief in
collectivist altruism and authoritarian statism finds a home in the very same minds that
reject Enlightenment reason and calculation in favor of Romantic sentiment and feeling.
He does not tell us why socialism had, and still has, such appeal to a certain kind of
intellectual. Therefore, with your forbearance, I will now give it a try. My explanation
will differ from that of Nietzsche and that of Hayek.
By some estimates, fully evolved human beings have been on this earth for about
a million years. For all but the last 10,000 years of that time, they lived in nomadic
kinship groups—in other words, extended families, tribes run by a patriarch, clans.
Furthermore, tribalism continued to be the dominant pattern even after settled agriculture
was established. In the tribal group, the rule was indeed “From each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs.” Except for small personal possessions, private
property was unknown; the stock of the clan belonged to every member alike; there was
no distinction between mine and thine; there was only ours. In this situation, the
collective welfare took precedence over the individual’s well being, and love of one’s kin
was strong. Willingness to sacrifice oneself for the welfare of the group was the principal
virtue; clans in which this virtue was lacking did not survive long.
So, for 99% of the time we human beings have existed, we have been
conditioned by the harsh logic of evolutionary selection to life in a community of persons
governed by collectivist values and usually run by a single paternalistic authority. That
has made a difference. The altruistic sentiments and faith in paternalism necessary for
life in such a community have been hard wired, as it were, into our very genes. These
sentiments and emotions are part of the warp and woof of the human nature in which we
all share. So, it is not surprising that these same sentiments find expression in the
utopian fantasies of intellectuals, who have convinced themselves that they and their
societies should be governed not by such latecomers as impersonal reason and objective
science but by archaic family feeling. Nor is it surprising that, seen from such a
perspective, capitalist individualism and commercial self-seeking look to be not merely
unnatural but the very embodiments of moral evil.
I think this evolutionary hypothesis explains why most intellectuals (and most
people) find socialism so appealing and unrestricted capitalism so appalling. Of course,
when constructing their socialist utopias, intellectuals must overlook two critically
important facts. First, larger societies, which typically embrace many clans, have
members who are not bound to each other by close ties of blood or kinship. So, the
morality that is appropriate for an exclusionary clan cannot be expanded so readily to
more inclusive social units, because affection for cousins will not be extended so easily to
foreigners.
Second, as the human population has increased in number, it has expanded its
range, bringing separate kinship groups into increasing contact with each other. If these
contacts are not to take the form of mutually destructive conflict and war, they must take
the form of mutually advantageous commercial exchange, which means that friendly
relations must be maintained with strangers. This new situation requires a new morality.
In fact, it requires the virtues—e.g., prudence, sobriety, industry, trustworthiness, and
self-restraint—associated with capitalism and a market economy.
But I have been free wheeling. Before this digression, I was reviewing Hicks’s
account of the intellectual provenance of postmodernism, and I had taken note of the fact
that the very same German intellectuals who disliked Enlightenment commitment to
reason also disliked its commitment to capitalist individualism; the very same men who
thought sentiment and feeling would provide better access to reality also thought that
socialist collectivism would accord better with natural morality. German epistemology
and German politics were two sides of one and the same coin. Let us now look at what
that coin bought.
The Crises of Socialism
As Hicks says, it bought the colossal disasters of the twentieth century, the most
destructive century in history.
All of these disasters were brought about by one of two opposed varieties of
socialists. Some were communists, who endorsed international socialism; others were
fascists, who advocated national socialism. Seeking to create “heaven on earth” socialists
of both the left and the right created the most tyrannical hells ever known to man.
Promising to guarantee that men would be not only safe but also well fed, they murdered
or starved tens of millions of their own citizens. In the name of what Kant had called
perpetual peace, they caused some of the most vicious and devastating wars ever known.
Guaranteeing to foster prosperity, they spread poverty and destitution wherever they
went. Of course, WWII got rid of rightist socialism, leaving only leftist socialism. Hicks
tells this story very well indeed.
He also tells how reluctant realization of the failure and crimes of leftist socialism
caused crises of faith that led to a redefinition of socialism and a reordering of its
priorities. The first crisis occurred with realization that capitalist economies were not
collapsing from internal contradictions as Marx had predicted but were outstripping
socialist economies in their provision for the poor; so the increasingly contented workers
were not overthrowing their employers as expected. This tested faith in the accuracy of
Marxist analysis and the efficiency of socialist organization. The second crisis occurred
when Nikita Khrushchev revealed the extent of Joseph Stalin’s murderous tyranny, which
had exceeded that of Adolph Hitler in perpetrating evil. This tested faith in the superior
morality of socialist polity.
The typical socialist response to the first crisis was to redefine poverty. It was no
longer absolute but relative. Maybe capitalism fed and clothed the poor better than
socialism, but socialism did not allow such great disparities of wealth. Besides,
capitalism fostered a wasteful and environmentally destructive consumerism, with its
resulting conformity to shallow convention—the one dimensional man of Herbert
Marcuse. So, socialists changed their goals, giving up the eradication of poverty for the
elimination of inequality. Along the way, they also changed their identification of
exploited groups. Where formerly they had talked of oppressed workers, they now talked
about oppressed females and oppressed people of color. Proletarian mentality gave way
to multiculturalism.
Socialist response to the second, and more serious moral, crisis was twofold.
Some apologists for socialism denied that it had ever existed in the Soviet Union,
although they had not said so before it collapsed. Others replied that what mattered was
not the past but the future, and the ideal of socialist equality held out hope for a brighter
future than the racially and sexually repressive societies that presently existed. Hicks
does a nice job detailing and documenting both responses.
As Hicks notes, however, these responses to the crises of socialism were not
always convincing, even to socialists. If capitalism was to be defeated, more extreme
measures would be needed. Taking up guns, socialists outside the academy turned to
terrorism; they constituted the Weathermen, the Black Panthers and other violent groups.
Possessing only words, socialists inside the academy decided to use them as weapons;
they would wreak verbal and intellectual havoc by attacking capitalist social order at its
intellectual foundations, the ideals of truth and logic and the related ideal of individual
liberty. Both the gun wielders and the rhetoricians would undertake a relentless and all
out assault on “Western,” meaning capitalist, society and institutions. Nothing would go
unscathed. Everything would be condemned, including the supermarkets, refrigerators,
and automobiles of which the friends of capitalism were so proud.
Enter postmodernism and the demise of civilized debate. Since, according to the
postmodernist, there is no necessary connection between words and things, the political
rhetorician could now use words as she pleased, without regard for accuracy. All whites
would be called racists; all men rapists; all soldiers terrorists; all hunters murderers; etc.
Never mind that such hyperbolic claims were not true; truth was in the eye of the
beholder. Besides, the aim was not to establish the facts but to intimidate and silence
one’s opponents.
Never mind, either, that there is self-refutation in saying “On the one hand, all
truth is relative and all reality is a social construction; on the other hand, we tell it like it
is” or “All values are subjective, but racism and sexism really are evils.” As Hegel had
showed, contradiction could itself be a weapon in verbal wars, enabling one to have it
both ways. Never mind, finally, that some postmodernist claims (e.g., that the West is
racist and sexist) are refuted by plain fact (e.g., that the Western societies have done more
than any others to eliminate sexism and racism). The more absurd the claim the better it
would serve to throw one’s opponents off balance.
In short, never mind the inconvenient fact that relativism and nihilism are
philosophically and psychologically untenable. They are verbal bombs that the leftist can
throw into any conversation that is going in a direction she does not like.
Conclusion
Stephen Hicks has written a very fine book, one that reveals both the historical
roots and the current strategies of postmodernism. As he acknowledges, his account has
done little or nothing to refute the skeptical and relativist epistemology on which
postmodernism rests. Nor, I suspect, has he done much to counter the baneful influence
postmodernism has had on the departments of humanities and social science of most
universities. He has, however, helped to reduce the puzzlement of those of us who have
wondered how the truly amazing form of madness called postmodernism has managed to
take over the minds of people who in other ways seem both sane and intelligent.
Buy two copies and give one to a postmodernist acquaintance. It will ruin his
week.
November 25, 2005
Max Hocutt Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
The University of Alabama
Author of Grounded Ethics: The Empirical Bases of Normative Judgments (Newark:
Transaction, 2000)