This is the best non-fiction book I’ve read in a decade. I highly recommend it. The over-all value of the book lies in tracing the origins of what I find to be a common tactic when debating a leftist. You present them with arguments, facts, and logic, and, at the end, they will say something like:
“Well this is all just your white male prejudice,”; “that’s only logic, come down to reality,”; “those are just your definitions, and all definitions are ultimately arbitrary”; or, even, “I don’t feel that you’re right, and why is your logic better than my feelings?”
Hicks has provided an explanation, lying in the history of philosophy, for why so many people seem to consider such responses to a logical argument to be persuasive. That explanation lies, mostly, in the ideas of dead, white, male philosophers who lived two-hundred years ago. Those notions have slowly “trickled down” to the masses, and infect the majority of people’s minds today -especially any college student with a “gender studies” or “black studies” degree.
The author expressly states his theme in his table of contents:
“Thesis: The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.” (Table of Contents, Pg. i.)
Did I find this, in fact, to be his theme based on my reading of the book? Overall, I’d say, yes. I’ll start with Hicks’ definition of “postmodernism”:
“Postmodernism rejects the entire Enlightenment project. It holds that the modernist premises of the Enlightenment were untenable from the beginning…” (Pg 14)
“Postmodernism reject the Enlightenment project in the most fundamental way possible -by attacking its essential philosophical themes. Postmodernism rejects the reason and the individualism that the entire Enlightenment would depend upon.” (Pg. 14)
His definition of “postmodern” is basically a “negative definition”. He defines it as an attack on the Enlightenment. What does he think the Enlightenment stood for?
“In philosophy, modernism’s essentials are located in the formative figures of Francis Bacon…Rene Descartes…, for their influence upon epistemology, and more comprehensively in John Locke…for his influence upon all aspects of philosophy.” (Pg. 7)
“Bacon, Descartes ,and Locke are modern because of their philosophical naturalism, their profound confidence in reason, and especially in the case of Locke, their individualism. Modern thinkers stress that perception and reason are the human means of knowing nature -in contrast to the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s character -in contrast to the pre-modern emphasis upon dependence and original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual…“ (Pg. 7)
To sum up, Hicks sees three “types” of philosophical attitudes in the Western World:
The “Pre-modern”, as exemplified by the Christian Medieval, and, probably, the Ancient Greek worlds;
the “modern” attitude, which started around the time of Francis Bacon; and
the “postmodern”, whose origins he goes on to explain later in the book.
What was the “failure of epistemology” he says “made postmodernism possible”? He doesn’t spend too much time explaining what “epistemology” is. He clearly is familiar with, and sympathetic to, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. I assume he generally agrees with what she said in “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”. I also think he is assuming people reading his book will already have some general understanding of the subject of philosophy and its basic questions. But, early on, he defines what he views as the “Enlightenment epistemology”, which is:
“If one emphasizes that reason is the faculty of understanding nature, then that epistemology systematically applied yields science. Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundations of all the major branches of science. In mathematics, Isaac Newton….developed the calculus….Linnaeus…a comprehensive biological taxonomy…Lavoisier…the foundations of chemistry.” (Pg. 9)
Hicks says there were:
“…philosophical weaknesses…” that had “….emerged clearly by the middle of the eighteenth century, in the skepticism of David Hume’s empiricism and the dead-end reached by traditional rationalism.” (Pg. 24)
But, he says that the real “counter-Enlightenment” started from 1780 to 1815 with a split between Anglo-American culture on the one hand and German culture on the other. (Pg. 24) In Germany:
“Immanuel Kant is the most significant thinker of the Counter-Enlightenment.” (Pg. 27)
Kant’s priority was to defend religion from the Enlightenment:
“I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (See Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.)
How did Kant “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”, according to Hicks?
“The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality -or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality…or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti- reason camps…the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.” (Pg. 28)
“Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality -real, noumenal reality- is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products….Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself.” (Pg. 29)
In this way, reason was, according to Kant, limited to the “phenomenal realm”, while the “noumenal realm”, the realm of religion, was off limits to reason. (Pg. 29)
Since Kant posited his epistemic system to save religion, how did it come to be used by a bunch of largely, “irreligious”, if not atheistic, post-modern intellectuals? The rest of Chapter Two of Hick’s book lays out the “evolution” of Kant’s way of thinking by subsequent German philosophers, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. He sums these subsequent, pre-twentieth-century philosophers at the end of Chapter 2 in this way:
“The legacy of the irrationalists for the twentieth century included four key themes:
1. An agreement with Kant that reason is impotent to know reality;
2. an agreement with Hegel that reality is deeply conflictual and/or absurd;
3. a conclusion that reason is therefore trumped by claims based on feeling, instinct, or leaps of faith; and
4. that the non-rational and the irrational yield deep truths about reality.” (Pg. 57)
In the Twentieth Century, Hicks sees this tradition as having been continued by most major philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, who “…agreed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer that by exploring his feelings -especially his dark and anguished feelings of dread and guilt- he could approach Being.” (Pg. 59)
According to Hicks:
“Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications:
1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of realty;
2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;
3. Reason’s elements -words and concepts- are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;
4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;
5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;
6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy -whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian- based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to overcome.” (Pg. 65-66)
Note that little has been said about the political views of post-modern intellectuals yet. Hicks observes that, in fact, most post-modern intellectuals are on the political left. (Pg. 84) Starting at Chapter 4, he addresses the connection between the epistemology and metaphysics advanced by German philosophers since Kant, and its political implications. The reason for the modern socialist’s rejection of reason lies in the failure of socialism in theory and in practice:
“As modernists, the [early] socialists argued that socialism could be proved by evidence and rational analysis, and that once the evidence was in, socialism’s moral and economic superiority to capitalism would be clear to anyone with an open mind.” (Pg. 86)
Free market economists, such as Ludwig von Mises, Milton Freedman, and Friedrich Hayek, have largely won the debate when it comes to the theoretical case for capitalism over socialism. (Pg. 87) The moral/political debate is more “up for grabs”, but, even here:
“…the leading thesis is that some form of [classical] liberalism in the broadest sense is essential to protecting civil rights and civil society…” (Pg. 87)
By the 21st Century the:
“…empirical evidence has been much harder on socialism. Economically, in practice the capitalist nations are increasingly productive and prosperous…every socialist experiment has ended in dismal economic failure…Morally and politically…every liberal capitalist country has a solid record of being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives. Socialist practice has time and time again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history prior to the twentieth century.” (Pg. 87-88)
The success of the capitalist world and the failure of the socialist nations created a “crisis of faith” for those on the left. As Hicks notes:
“This is a moment of truth for anyone who has experienced the agony of a deeply cherished hypothesis run aground on the rocks of reality. What do you do? Do you abandon your theory and go with the facts -or do you try to find a way to maintain your belief in your theory?” (Pg. 89)
Hicks believes the modern left’s abandonment of reality and reason in favor of “post-modern thinking” is their effort to “have their cake and eat it too”:
“Here then, is my second hypothesis about post-modernism: Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.” (Pg. 89)
Hicks notes that just as religious thinkers faced a “crisis of faith” during the Enlightenment, in which it was widely recognized that there was no way to prove the existence of god on “naturalistic” and rational grounds, so to, by the 1950’s and 1960’s, there was no way for socialists to use naturalistic and rational grounds to justify socialism. It had failed in theory and in practice, and, with revelations about the brutality of the Soviet Union, it had very little moral standing left. (Pg. 89-90) If they wanted to hold onto socialism, they had to reject reason and reality:
“Postmodernism is born of the marriage of Left politics and skeptical epistemology….Confronted by harsh evidence and ruthless logic, the far left had a reply: That is only logic and evidence; logic and evidence are subjective, you cannot really prove anything; feelings are deeper than logic; and our feelings say socialism.” (Pg. 90)
The rest of Chapter Four describes the evolution of modern anti-individualist thought, starting with Rousseau and moving on to Hegel and Marx.
Chapter 6 discusses Marxism in historical context. Hicks notes that classical Marxism believes socialism would arise in the more advanced capitalist countries, like England and the United States, first. In actual practice, it arose in semi-feudalistic countries like Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. As such, Twentieth Century Marxists, like Lenin, had to modify their thinking to rationalize the need for a violent and brutal aristocracy to bring about socialism. (Pg. 138 to 141)
By the 1950’s and 1960’s the failure of socialism to arise “spontaneously”, as predicted by Marx, resulted in several different strategies to be tried by socialists. Some subtly changed their ethical standards from “need to equality”, which could include the inequalities experienced by small businesses versus big businesses (pg. 151), or the inequality supposedly present between the races. (Pg. 152)
Other mid-twentieth-century Marxists said wealth was bad anyway, giving rise to the environmentalist movement. (Pg. 153).
A third group of Marxists turned to violence in an effort to move the proletarian revolution along in the First World. (Pg. 165-170) As Hicks notes, several international terrorist groups with ties to Marxist thought, including the Weathermen in the US, and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East, arose in the early 1960’s.
What does Hicks consider to be the motives of the 21st Century postmodern left? He notes that postmodernist thinking contains a whole host of contradictions:
“On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.” (Pg. 184)
“On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.” (Pg. 184)
“Values are subjective -but sexism and racism are really evil.” (Pg. 184)
“Tolerance is good and dominance is bad -but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.” (Pg. 184)
There is a “…contradiction between the relativism and the absolutist politics…” of postmodernism. (Pg. 185)
Hicks sees three possible explanations for this seeming contradiction:
1. Postmodernists are “relativists” primarily and their absolutist leftwing politics are “secondary”. He rules out this possibility because, otherwise, there would be more “conservative” postmodernists, but they are all uniformly left-wing. (Pg. 185-186)
2. The use of postmodernism is a “Machiavellian” strategy to undermine their political enemies. (Pg. 186) When they loose an argument, they will respond with: “Of course you, a white, male, heterosexual, would say that. But we cannot know anything about ‘things in themselves’, so reason is limited.”
3. Postmodernism is ultimately a nihilistic world-view, so the contradiction doesn’t matter to a postmodernist:
“The final option is not to resolve the tension. Contradiction is a psychological form of destruction, but contradictions sometimes do not matter psychologically to those who live them, because for them ultimately nothing matters. Nihilism is close to the surface in the postmodern intellectual movement in a historically unprecedented way.” (Pg. 191-192)
The biggest flaw of the book I see may lie in the author’s treatment and evaluation of Marxism, which I think he gives more credit than it deserves. At several points, he seems to suggest that Marxism is more “pro-reason” than I think it ever was, even in its original “classical” format, as propounded by Karl Marx himself. Hicks makes an assertion about Marxist socialism that probably isn’t correct at page 86:
“As modernists, the socialists argued that socialism could be proved by evidence and rational analysis, and that once the evidence was in, socialism’s moral and economic superiority to capitalism would be clear…” (Pg. 86, emphasis added.)
He implies that he is including Marxists in the above description of “socialists”, and not just the non-Marxist socialists of the 19th Century, since he goes on to discuss the claims of “Classical Marxist socialism” on the same page. Also, later, he says:
“Beginning in the 1920’s and 1930’s there had been some early suggestions that Marxism was too rationalistic, too logical and deterministic…And early Frankfurt School theorizing had suggested that Marxism was too wedded to reason…” (Pg. 156 to 157, emphasis added.)
Hicks seems to say that Marxism, as originally conceived, is “pro-reason”, when I think it never was. Non-Marxists socialists, the so-called “utopian socialists”, would have been pro-reason, like Hicks said on page 86. The ideas of Marx probably won out over the “utopian socialists” precisely because Marx embraced the Hegelian dialectic, and didn’t depend on classical Aristotelian logic. Marxism is too “arbitrary”, or disconnected from reality, to really be disproved or proved. Any time someone tries to disprove it, a Marxist could just say that person was a “tool of the capitalist exploiters”, and, “of course”, the critic would say that:
“Aware of the fact that communism cannot be defended by reason, the Marxists proceeded to turn the fallacy of ad hominem into a formal philosophic doctrine, claiming that logic varies with men’s economic class, and that objections to communist doctrine may be dismissed as expressions of ‘bourgeois logic.’ “ (Leonard Peikoff, “Nazi Politics,” The Objectivist, Feb. 1971, 12, found at: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html)
Overall, I consider this to be a minor flaw of the book, which deftly traces the “philosophic genealogy” of today’s “postmodern” left. It really helped me to understand the mind of the average leftist, and how she will dismiss reason and say, I’m engaging in a logic: “…created by dead white men”. Now I see another reason why the average leftist, like some mindless automaton, will point out how I’m a white, male, “bourgeois”, heterosexual -its easier to say this than do any hard thinking about the merits of their political ideology.
(All page number references below are to the 2018, expanded hardcover edition of “Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault”, by Stephen R.C. Hicks, ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7)
