This is the second chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Enlightenment reason, liberalism, and science [mp3] [YouTube]
The beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s skeptical conclusion [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s essential argument [mp3] [YouTube]
Identifying Kant’s key assumptions [mp3] [YouTube]
Why Kant is the turning point [mp3] [YouTube]
After Kant: reality or reason but not both [mp3] [YouTube]
Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche [mp3] [YouTube]
Dialectic and saving religion [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel’s contribution to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Epistemological solutions to Kant: irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche [mp3] [YouTube]
Summary of irrationalist themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.
Reading Beiser’s ‘The Fate of Reason’ I’m struck by how many themes postmodernists picked up from the immediate philosophic responders to Kant, perhaps most importantly the attempt to paint reason as merely another faith, something I believe ‘Explaining Postmodernism’ underscores.
It has to be asked why it is that achieving political power men of faith have always burned books written by men of reason, but one never hears of men of reason burning books written by men of faith.
Or why men of faith struggle to impute that men of reason are in fact practicing a faith of their own, but men of reason do not struggle to impute that men of faith are actually rational.
Just listened to Stephen Hicks’ Youtube one-hour-plus lecture, and praise its excellence. I don’t know of a more accurate or more succinct version of philosophy-history than this. He keeps the varied threads of logic and thought from snarling together. The reaction against “Reason” needs, however, continual refinement. Philosophy, or the “love of wisdom” (more than “love of knowledge”) is an ongoing act and drama; likewise, reason is a process and action of thought, according to logic and its parameters, which involves both objective reality and the “inner self,” and in this latter case, I could call it poetry. I have offered before to Prof. Hicks that he ought to learn more about the ethnic context (German versus English versus French, etc) because the meanings of “reason” and many Kantian (or otherwise) arguments depend on it. It’s not that we’re in a Hegelian process of thesis and anti-thesis, but that the march of reason should always be lit by thought. Each of the philosophers Hicks examines has some very truthful mouthfuls, each fails in some aspect of his reason. In my very prejudiced view, we should all be forced to have a daily dose of Aristotle. Had the Stagyrite been granted a lifespan of 2000 years, there wouldn’t be all this “modern” controversy!
SRD
P.S. Readers should note that I am a distant cousin of Mr. Hicks, and that we Hicksites are a “Great People.”
Mr. Dahl, the language of philosophy can at times be difficult and translation is perhaps never 100%.
But if the perceived hostility of the German centered tradition to every core Enlightenment value i.e. by its anti-rationalism, anti-individualism, anti-liberalism, statism, militarism and enmassment of society by collectivism – from socialism and communism on the left to the racist, nationalist völkisch (volk or folk) movements of the right – resulted from misperceptions on the part of Germans and foreigners this is unfortunate as I think a strong case can be made that these led to two world wars and a succession of totalitarian regimes of unprecedented apocalyptic fury, including the Holocaust.
I find the prose style of the German tradition suspect.
“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity” Nietzsche had said, “Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.” Many, encountering the writings of the German anti-liberal reaction conclude its dense, convoluted, obscure, almost unreadable jargon to be nonsense. A few, of which I am one, think much of it was written not to facilitate understanding but to paralyze it in order to float through its lethal premises – put forward with uncharacteristic lucidity: The “proof” blurred, the conclusions starkly clear.
“Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple,” Einstein had said, “and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.” If this is true for science, it is doubly so for philosophy, for, in contrast to the special sciences, philosophy ought to have been a guide for all men and women by identifying the self-evident first principles of their existence. When it becomes so convoluted, murky and abstruse as to befuddle even fellow philosophers I think suspicion is in order.
Lack of clarity concerning meanings of key terms, concepts and arguments plague Kant’s work, acerbated by a plethora of neologisms and highly specialized, individuated and non-standard uses of standard terms, including compound – a sort of philosophic legalese, but lacking its precision. In my view his kaleidoscopic, labyrinthine, gelatinous writings tend to leave more sediments than hard conclusions. Schools of thought cluster around different interpretations of key aspects of his thought to take positions on “what he was really trying to say,” but all seem to agree that whatever it is it is important. The attempt to arrive at a consensus on them poses a cardinal challenge for Kantian exegesis. As with those expounding rival Bible-based doctrines each has scriptures to quote. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s in-depth, scholarly and, in my view: valiant series of articles attempting to explicate Kant’s thought repeatedly refer to the difficulty of interpreting it. In a typical example Andrew Janiak’s article on Kant’s controversial views on space and time begin thus, “Two aspects of Kant’s views on space and time are immediately evident: they are widely regarded as central to Kant’s so-called critical philosophy, and there is no consensus on how they ought to be characterized and explicated.” Graciela De Pierris and Michael Friedman’s article in the same series on Kant’s response to Hume’s critique of the idea of causality notes, “There is no consensus, of course, over whether Kant’s response succeeds, but there is no more consensus about what this response is supposed to be. There has been sharp disagreement concerning Kant’s conception of causality…” In a general plea for academic clarity, after citing a model of what he thinks academic prose could be, Will Henley writes in ‘The Boar’, “… Compare this to Immanuel Kant whose work haunts every philosophy student. It is fair to say there is as much material interpreting Kant’s writing as there is reflection on what he actually wrote.” One commentator after another refers to his writings as almost unreadable, though it varies with the work in question. When reading ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’, I often kept another book by my side for when I felt the need to come up gasping for the air of clarity and honest purpose, and I’m no stranger to technical and specialized writing. In an article titled ‘The Real Meaning of Kant’ Theodore Plantinga perhaps unwittingly offers as succinct a summary of the predicament facing Kantian scholars as any: “The disappointed reader may finally pose the bold question whether there is a ‘real meaning’ of Kant. The answer to this question, it seems to me, is both yes and no.”
All of which renders his system amorphous and criticism extremely difficult: It can always be countered that one has failed to precisely grasp this or that term, passage or argument.
In common parlance he might be described as slippery.
But if much of prose produced by the German tradition was obscurantist nonsense, it may well be that the single greatest mistake modern man made was to assume it was harmless nonsense of no consequence in the real world – even as that world was collapsing into one inexplicable horror of collectivism after another. We knew vaguely that these had to do with something called “ideology,” but beyond that did not care to investigate, perhaps because we feared becoming lost in its labyrinthine coils of rationalization.
Here we go again! Your rant on Kant does not makes sense to me. You seem to be reaching into a hat and pulling out whatever you can, or cannot! The obscurity of Kant’s writing is legendary, but not quite as bad in German as in English. Each language has its character. Saying “Cherchez la femme” in French can be translated as “check out the chick” in English, but English is not a romantic language. English is a form of German (Anglo-Saxon) mitigated by Latin. German has three sexes and four cases, so even when convoluted, it can be clear…though perhaps not straightforward. Readers kindly note, I am NOT interested in Wittgenstein garbage about linguistic/semantic difficulties.
Your arguments, as always, veer from things German, to Nazis, to Holocaust, to self-righteous conformity with the New York publishing hub. However, the Ayn Rand analysis of roughly Descartes to Hume to Kant, of gathering “unreason” [my term] is related to political developments, mainly collectivism. There is no doubt the previous thinker influenced those that follow him, but in terms of the political impact of his ideas, no thinker, save Marx/Engels, can be blamed for how crooked politicians use or profit from his ideology. In the GREEK WAY, Edith Hamilton points out that the round-shouldered old lady Kant is the modern philosopher, whereas we think of Socrates, a man of action, a “street fighter” as the epitome of ancient philosophers. Likewise, with witches. We have the modern (quasi medieval) hag over a pot casting spells, not the irresistibly beautiful Calypso (who enchanted Odysseus for nine years) or Circe (who turned men into pigs).
The tragedy of the Holocaust, or of the slaughterhouse in the Soviet Union, the massacres of Chinese by the Japs and by Mao, the genocides in Rwanda or Burundi via machete, these horrible events are not precipitated by good or bad philosophy but immoral powers that be or that were. As Aristotle wrote, “Virtue is not in the mind, but in the will.”
The present Zionist government of America, run by the Federal Reserve and its printing presses, is slaughtering the future by grabbing anything they can obtain NOW. Through its finance, money lending, blackmail, smear campaigns, selling children’s body parts…this miserable chunk of the Levant has cost Americans trillions of dollars, and what do we get for it? But ask the Objectivists, like Leonard Peikoff, and the scream goes up, “Israel must be saved!” Why? This is not an anti-Semitic argument but one for national (and personal) self-interest. Christopher Hitchens (partly Jewish) plainly stated, “Israel is the worst thing that ever happened to the Jews.” Yet, this “promised land” is ceaselessly ingrained into the American psyche by the media, television, Hollywood — all run by the New York pornographers, a good many of whom are swamp Yankees who have sold themselves so cheaply as to have become indentured.
Mr. Hicks’ excellent lecture shows the intricate “evolution” of ideas and the critical moments of — in this case — philosophical history. Kant was a fulcrum, but at his time, and in his Prusso-German culture, he was trying to solve every known philosophical problem (he taunts the reader at the end of [my guess] The Critique of Pure Reason “that if any philosophical problem has not been solved here…” send me a postcard &c &c.
Every philosopher presents a new facet of thought. The better the philosopher, the more accurate his “reflections”. This “prism” can also transmit light. We all need the “common sense” of Aristotle. Interestingly, Ayn Rand once wrote that “common sense is nothing more than Aristotle’s teachings filtered down to the common man…” [my recall] Reason is all-important, and I feel Kant was trying to “adjust” it. I don’t think any philosopher quasi metaphysician denies reason, but much reason lacks passion, and cannot propel itself upward, and all reason requires premises, as in “Check your premises” AR.
Check your premises! Do you have ANY?
Ouch!
Re: “these horrible events are not precipitated by good or bad philosophy but immoral powers that be or that were.”
Why is an immoral person called a criminal in one society but “our fearless and beloved leader” in another?
If the mayor of NYC orders heretics burned alive at the stake he will not get far: he will be stopped by a system governed, however imperfectly, by the rule of law i.e. an abstract idea, or more precisely: a system of abstract ideas. Ideas don’t grow on trees. People have to think of them. The most foundational, powerful and far reaching are thought by philosophers. (In the broadest sense philosophy includes religion).
As I’ve raved before, corollary to the issue of power – both in its ability to survive and thrive in its environment and in relation to other societies – are a society’s core ideas and values, which either empower or disempower it. For example a society that deems unfettered scientific inquiry and technological innovation heretical will find itself at a severe power disadvantage to a society that esteems them.
Such core concepts form the soil from which all others grow: the root premises from which sprout a society’s ethics, values, government, laws, institutions, policies, culture, science and technology (if there are to be such).
Philosophy shapes a society’s responses to the existential predicaments, threats and challenges that confront it, even if the actors are unaware of the origins of the ideas they act on. The eroding liberties, prosperity and power enjoyed by America and other Western democracies were the product of one philosophical tradition, one they are losing sight of. The exterminatory campaigns waged by 20th century totalitarian governments against huge swathes of their unarmed civilian populations were the product of a very different one.
Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952), who studied Kant in Berlin in the original German under German professors also thought he perceived an ulterior intent in Kant’s substitution of faith for knowledge. In ‘The Life of Reason’ he contended
“Kant had a private mysticism in reserve to raise upon the ruins of science and common-sense. Knowledge was to be removed to make way for faith … [Kant] wished to blast as insignificant, because ‘subjective,’ the whole structure of human intelligence, with all the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of human skill, and to attach absolute validity instead to certain echoes of his rigoristic religious education … Nature had been proved a figment of human imagination so that, once rid of all but a mock allegiance to her facts and laws, we might be free to invent any world we chose and believe it to be absolutely real and independent of nature. Strange prepossession, that while part of human life and mind was to be an avenue to reality and to put men in relation to external and eternal things, the whole of human life and mind should not be able to do so! … Conceptions rooted in the very elements of our being, in our sense, intellect, and imagination, which had shaped themselves through many generations under a constant fire of observation and disillusion, these were to be called subjective, not only in the sense in which all knowledge must obviously be so, since it is knowledge that someone possesses and has gained, but subjective in a disparaging sense, and in contrast to some better form of knowledge. But what better form of knowledge is this? If it be knowledge of things as they really are and not as they appear, we must remember that reality means what the intellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the principles of such inference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality is first instituted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded as subjective and of merely empirical validity.”
Dear Ed: Fascinating quotation from Santayana, and a new one to me. Do you have the edition/page info.?
I’ll email you the info. Basically they appear in volume 1, chapter 4 of ‘The Life of Reason.’ The book is freely available via Project Gutenberg and Google Books.
I realize a bit to my embarrassment that though downloading the pdf awhile back I copied the above quote second hand from a website because of its succinctness and it requires several more ellipsis to be faithful to the original.
One more while here: Spanish liberal philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, while deeply influenced by Kant, was moved to express opinions of post-Kantian German Idealism I share: “[That] never before has a lack of truthfulness played such a large and important role in philosophy” and, “They did whatever they felt like doing with concepts. As if by magic they changed anything into any other thing.” *
The authority of reason thus “limited” removed it as a check against secular revelation and faith-based cosmologies such as those of Hegel and Marx and ultimately paved the road for the troubling rise of religious fundamentalism in our day.
*From Wiki’s entry on German Idealism. Their reference: José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Phenomenology and Art’, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975, ISBN 0-393-08714-X, “Preface for Germans,” p. 48 ff
These are awesome. I already own EP as a book, but have been meaning to reread it.
My commute can be long, so these are perfect! Thanks Dr. Hicks.
Thanks, Aaron.