the language of postmodernism

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A Review of Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
Matt McManus

The Enlightenment and Its Discontents

The book’s problems begin on the very first page, with Hicks’ list of seminal postmodern authors. He includes obvious picks such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, three of Hicks’ four horsemen of postmodernity. But others—Richard Rorty and Jacques Lacan—have a debatable association with postmodernity and some of those included were even outright critics of postmodernism, such as the feminist legal scholar Catherine Mackinnon, author of “Points Against Postmodernism,” and Luce Irigaray, whose work is a frequent target of postmodern feminists due to its alleged essentialism.

Actually, the problem begins with the title of the book itself. It assumes that postmodernism itself can be explained such that it does not just involve the author's own accumulated collection of moral and political and philosophical prejudices. All rooted existentially in dasein given the manner in which the trajectory of his life predisposed him to one set of prejudices rather than another.

That's why I ask those like Satyr who embrace much of Hick's own political bigotries to explore an assessment of postmodernism in regard to a particular set of circumstances. Race, gender, sexual preferences, abortion, guns, the role of government. How are they encompassed in a postmodern frame of mind?

Or how about this:

These problems persist throughout the book. Hicks completely misinterprets Lyotard’s quotation about Saddam Hussein in his 1997 book Postmodern Fables. Lyotard claims that, “Saddam Hussein is a product of Western departments of state and big companies,” which Hicks interprets to mean that Hussein is a “victim and spokesman for victims of American imperialism the world over.”

Indeed, how does one go about examining American foreign policy in the Middle East as a postmodernist? As opposed to, say, a Marxist? Where from the Marxist frame of mind, the American government [Democratic or Republican] has always been utterly preoccupied with the oil there. Political economy in a nutshell.

To wit:

"The irony was that Saddam had been a close American ally ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran removed the Shah in 1979 and all through during the 1980s. Iraq was seen as an essential bulwark against the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The Americans had poured money and aid into Iraq to help it fight the Iranians during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988." WORLD

And, of course, the only reason that Iran became an enemy to the American government [Democratic and Republican] revolves around this:

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/69036340 ... -four-days

"On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh."

We installed the autocratic Shah. Which eventually led to the Ayatollah Khomeini and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

Thus...

In fact, Lyotard’s essay discusses the early support Hussein received from the American government during his prolonged war against Iran in the 1980s. These interpretive problems immediately make one suspicious that this book may be less about explaining postmodernism in a liberal and charitable way and more about lumping together and dismissing all forms of left-wing criticism that may owe an intellectual debt to continental European thought.

Exactly. It's not postmodern thinking that is explained so much as why the right wing/conservative objectivists are clearly deemed more rational and virtuous than the left wing/liberal objectivists.

By Hicks. By Satyr.

By Alexis Jacobi here?

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A Review of Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
Matt McManus

Hicks claims that postmodernism is defined by four features. First, it is a metaphysically anti-realist position, which holds that it is “impossible to speak meaningfully about an independent reality.”

Of course, this takes us back to the mysteries of mind itself. The human mind in particular. And here there are any number of theologians and philosophers and scientists able to propose all manner of "explanations" regarding a reality independent of the human mind. Here I accept both "the gap" and "Rummy's rule" as the starting point. There are just some things we don't now know -- can't ever know? -- about the existence of existence itself and where and how and why mere mortals here on planet Earth fit into it.

So, given that, what's left? Well, to the best of our ability, to make that crucial distinction between what we believe [about anything] in our head and what we are able to demonstrate that other rational people are obligated to believe as well.

Here, Hicks then takes his own rooted existentially in dasein leap to the political prejudices embedded in the right, in capitalism, in objectivism. While insisting that those who do not are "one of them"...the fools!

Second, postmodernism is epistemologically skeptical of the possibility of acquiring objective knowledge about the world.

Again, here it all revolves around how far out on the epistemological/metaphysical limb you go. All the way to solipsism? to determinism? to sim worlds? to dream worlds? to the Matrix? to God?

Third, it is methodologically collectivist, regarding human nature as primarily defined by group affiliations.

Well, if you are a Marxist you note the evolution of human communities as revolving around the need to sustain a particular means of production...nomadic communities, slash and burn communities, hunter and gatherer communities, agricultural communities, feudal communities, mercantile communities, capitalist communities, socialist communities. It's not that these communities, down through the ages, using the tools of philosophy, decided that collectivism or individualism was more rational, more virtuous. It's that "we" or "I" simply made more sense historically given the nature of the community itself going about the task of subsisting.

Whereas, if you are an Ayn Randroid objectivist none that matters. No, instead, superior minds simply "thought up" capitalism as not only the best of all possible worlds but as the only possible world if you wish to be thought of as rational and virtuous. Hicks "the philosopher" embodies just another rendition of this mentality. As do those like Satyr here. They all simply start with a different set of political prejudices rooted existentially in the lives they lived. And then manage to convince themselves that dasein has nothing to do with it at all. No, their convictions are superior because as philosopher kings themselves, they are able to "think up" the wisest deontological/ideological moral narratives and political agendas.

And, fourth, postmodernism is politically committed to protecting those groups which postmodernists regard as victims.

Here of course what they do is to start with the assumption that there are no victims. Everyone has an equal opportunity to rise to the top. Racism? Sexism? Heterosexism? Classism? Nope. The only reason anyone comes to think of themselves and others as victims is because they refuse to accept the fact that it is always their own damn fault for not rising to the top.

Or, of course, those here who argue that if one is to be thought of as a victim it all comes back to genes. Yes, the white race is naturally superior to all other races. Men are naturally superior to women. Some men are naturally gifted with a superior intellect.

Nature's way let's call it.

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A Review of Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
Matt McManus

The Counter-Enlightenment

Perhaps the single weakest part of Hicks’ book is his account of the so-called Counter-Enlightenment. Hicks claims that Counter-Enlightenment thinkers attacked the foundations of reason, therefore laying the intellectual foundations of postmodernism. But his reading of many of these thinkers is very shoddy.

What did the Enlightenment revolve around first and foremost if not the historical advent of capitalism? And the need to create a superstructure -- social and political institutions -- much more in sync with these entirely new components of economic exchange. It's not as though a bunch of philosophers sat around during the Feudal era and "thought up" this new way of doing things. "Let's scrape the 'other worldly' Divine right of Kings running their feudal fiefdoms and, instead, create a market economy that would be sustained by a new kind of government that focused more on individuals competing with other individuals for market share."

This really is how those like Ayn Rand imagined the world unfolding. Great Men thinking it all into existence.

Instead, a burgeoning mercantile economy along with crafts guilds created and then sustained an equally bustling world trade that over time evolved organically into capitalism itself. And then right in line came the Reformation...a "spiritual"/"religious" frame of mind that reconfigured from thinking solely about saving one's soul on the other side of the grave to a "this side" frame of mind. The more you prospered here and now the more God actually favored you.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of Immanuel Kant, whom Hicks argues is somehow a Counter-Enlightenment thinker. This is all the more ironic, given Kant’s argument in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that, “man—and in general every rational being—exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion.”

Come on. Kant may have thought this but only given his own rendition of a Divine theistic foundation. A transcendent font -- God -- commanding deontological moral prescriptions such that ultimately good and evil rested on the assumption that God Himself would be around and, on Judgment Day, save your soul for all the rest of eternity.

Take God out of the picture and what on Earth would motivate anyone to "do the right thing" categorically regardless of the consequences?

Hicks makes the baffling argument that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a skeptical epistemological attack on empirical realism and the possibility of true knowledge of the real world, designed to shore up Kant’s religious faith against the attacks of Enlightenment science. This is simply not true. Kant’s entire project was to show that empirical reason was an essential part of how human beings develop a comprehensive understanding of the world.

From my frame of mind, this is the sort of intellectual bullshit that all too many "serious philosophers" exchange here on a daily basis. What does any of it mean out in the world of actual human interactions.

Again, I challenge the "serious philosophers" here -- the Harry Bairds and the Alexis Jacobis -- to translate this world of words above into an assessment of a moral/political conflict that is of particular importance to them.

Empirical realism/reason in regard to what potent issue that has rent the species now for centuries?