How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
Kierkegaardian postmodernism
In Chapter Four, I sketched one postmodern response to the problems of theory and evidence for socialism. For an intelligent, informed socialist confronted with the data of history, a crisis of belief has to occur. Socialism is to many a powerful vision of the beautiful society, one that envisages an ideal social world that will transcend all the ills of our current one. Any such deeply held vision comes to form part of the very identity of the believer, and any threat to the vision has to be experienced as a threat to the believer.
Socialism/Communism are trickier objectivist fonts. Why? Because unlike any number of idealists, materialists actually attempt to be more empirical in their analysis and assessment. "
Scientific socialism" they call it.
What Marx and Engels did was to explore the actual historical evolution of human economic interactions. And then to connect the dots between that and the social and political "superstructure". Nomadic, slash and burn, hunter and gatherer, agriculturists, mercantilist, captialist, socialist. In that exact historical order by and large.
As opposed to, say, Ayn Rand who rooted capitalism in philosophy itself. To be a free-market capitalist was to literally embrace the most rational and virtuous understanding of yourself in the world around you. A "metaphysical" grasp of the One True Path. No thesis, antithesis, synthesis for her and her ilk.
But either way, the "psychology of objectivism" generally pertains. Thus, "any such deeply held vision comes to form part of the very identity of the believer, and any threat to the vision has to be experienced as a threat to the believer."
Sound familiar?
To wit:
From the historical experience of other visions that have run into crises of theory and evidence, we know that there can be a powerful temptation to block out theoretical and evidentiary problems and simply to will oneself into continuing to believe.
You "will" yourself to see what you believe. Everything contrary to the One True Path is explained away. And everything that others argue that is contrary to your own authoritarian dogma merely demonstrates their own foolish ignorance.
On the other hand, what to do with someone like me? I'm not arguing against them so much as encouraging them to explore how [existentially] they came to acquire their dogmatic convictions in the first place. And how these convictions may well revolve more around the psychological satisfaction -- the comfort and consolation -- that comes with of having found an objectivist font to anchor
I in.
Then choose your "methodology":
Religion, for example, has provided many such instances. “Ten thousand difficulties,” wrote Cardinal Newman, “do not make one doubt.” Fyodor Dostoevsky made the point more starkly, in a letter to a woman benefactor: “If anyone had written to me that the truth was outside of Christ, I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.” We also know from historical experience that sophisticated epistemological strategies can be developed precisely for the purpose of attacking the reason and logic that have caused problems for the vision. Such were part of the explicit motivations of Kant’s first Critique, Schleiermacher’s On Religion, and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
God and religion by and large, but, "deontologically", philosophers have come up with their own "theoretical" contraptions.
https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175006