Postmodernism part 2

So logic, language and all of that is just a subjective tool that we have devised. And if we want to avoid contradiction, we can. But if we don't want to avoid contradiction, then who's to tell us that we are wrong? Nobody can say anything like that. So they will use an epistemological strategy then just to dismiss contradiction. Now, some of them also, though, will say, yes, it is a contradiction. Here I'm thinking of Jacques Derrida, and he will say, well, look, we have to use language.

That's true. We can't escape from language. We are language users. And the way language and logic have been developed in the western system has only allowed us to use words and reason in a certain way. So we are kind of stuck with that. And rather than trying to step outside of that framework to seek some alternative truth or better understanding of reality, all we can do is work within it. And we're trying to subvert that system. So we will just use language to advance our ends.

And if we have to use contradictory strategies, then so be it, because we're not left with anything else. And then if you are a smart guy and you point out that what I said three paragraphs ago contradicts what I'm saying in this paragraph, well, I'll say, okay, well, good, you got me. But who really cares? And then just divert the conversation in some other direction.

So start from the concept of resentment. One crude way of putting it then, is to say that there are people who are achievers in their life, they have accomplished something, or they are confident in their abilities to achieve their goals, and so they go on and just get on with life and enjoying life and being proud of what they do accomplish and having a good sense of self esteem about their ability to do so. But we do know that there are lots of people who don't feel up to the task.

And it's not that someone else is telling them that they are not up to the task, it's that they, in their own self awareness, they feel afraid of reality, they feel not competent in their abilities. The kind of person who always says it's not worth trying, nothing is going to come from it. Why does reality, or why does this always happen to me? So the person has a kind of self reputation of being a loser, and that, of course, is humbling and in one's own self estimation.

But then, in the presence of someone who is not a loser, someone who's accomplished something, the emotional reaction the loser type has is this resentment feeling, because the person who has actually accomplished something stands as a kind of indictment of the fact that they are a loser. So I might tell myself, if I put myself in this position, that life is unfair. I never had a chance, and that's why I'm a middle aged schmuck who's never accomplished anything, but it's not my fault.

And I'm telling myself this story now, I don't ever quite really believe it, but it is a story I tell myself. And then along comes someone, say, who graduated from the same high school class, or who was in my peer group in some respect, who's gone on to do something special and emotionally, my reaction will be to resent that person. I hate that guy, and I wish him damage and so forth. So all of the classic resentment feelings.

But what's going on there is that that person is showing that the story I tell about myself isn't really true, that it is a rationalization, but I hate the person for being a living example, that my rationalization doesn't actually work. And so rather, though, than I taking responsibility for my own failings in life, that's a very hard thing to do. I outwardly project them onto the other person, and I hate that person, and I want to damage that person. I want that person to go away.

I want that person to be undermined so that I can go on with my self rationalization for my loser status. So what Nietzsche is doing is trying to diagnose what he calls the slave morality, in contrast to what he calls the master morality.

And this is a bit reductionistic, but he argues that human beings fall into two kind of life types, two psychological types, those who feel they can master themselves, master reality, master their social circumstances, and do something significant, and those who feel that they cannot do that, so they are enslaved by their circumstances, enslaved by whatever, and they have effectively given up and given up on life, given up on themselves.

So he uses the concept of reissanto mon, or this really bitter, curdled resentment, as a deep condition to diagnose a certain type. And with all of that, by way of background, it is one of the concepts that I deploy in the latter part of the explaining postmodernism book, just because a century after Nietzsche, in my estimation, many of the postmodern subgroups are motivated by a kind of nietzschean, Rey Santa mon.

The more bitter form of envy comes out in a destructive form where someone, say, has a really nice car, and I don't really think that I ever will have a nice car. And I feel bad about that. And it comes out in the form that I want to say, damage the other guy's car so I might scratch it or intentionally ding it in some way as a way of saying f you to you having a nice car, while I don't have a nice car. And there's nothing valorizing about or decent about envy in that particular form.

Resentment sometimes can have a justice component to it. So maybe I'm just making up an example on the spot here, but maybe I'm up for promotion. But I have some competition for this promotion, and I kind of think that I deserve the promotion. But I know that my competitor is perhaps not quite as deserving as I am of the promotion. But nonetheless, say he gets the promotion. And I'm upset about this fact that he now has something that I wanted.

But in that case, there's a little bit of an injustice because I think he was a little less indesering. So sometimes resentment is meant for that particular kind of emotion as well. So one has to be careful and start parsing out the subcategories. But they definitely are in the same area. And yes, to come back to your point about Marxism, it is one of the interpretations of Marxism.

There's always a back and forth when we talk about philosophies, about whether kind of psychology comes first and philosophy comes along and rationalizes the person's psychological predispositions or their beliefs that they've acquired in a pre philosophical way, or whether one first thinks about things and argues oneself into certain conclusions and formulates a philosophy. And then once you believe certain things, that shapes your psychology in a certain direction.

And I think both routes are possible for us as human beings. First we can have an idea and be committed to the idea. And then rationalize a philosophy that justifies that idea. And then we can also come independently to ideas and that can change our psychological outlook.

So in the case of Marxism, the question then would be, should we just take it straight as a series of claims about the way the world works, and that those claims about the way the world work lead to a certain psychology, including certain animosities and hatreds toward people who have a lot of money? Or if Marxism really starts with some pre philosophical resentment or envy or hatred for people who have life better than you do.

And what you're doing is trying to find a philosophy that just rationalizes that animosity that you had in a pre philosophical mode. And I think this is where one has to get to know any individual Marxist very well before one knows for sure which came first. But I think there are Marxists who fall into both.

But there's a move that is made by Emmanuel Kant. We have to back up one generation earlier, where Kant argues that modern philosophy had reached some dead ends, that it was committed to reason, and that's what made it break with the earlier premodern philosophies that emphasized revelation and mysticism and faith in authority. The modern said individuals need to be rational and think for themselves.

But the moderns had divided into two major schools, those who were more empiricist, that thought we should start with the senses and build our way up to more abstract, logical formulations, more general principles, and the rationalists who thought that we should start with some self evident, rational, logical principles and then apply them more deductively. And so there's a long story about modern philosophy as it develops in the 16 hundreds on into the 17 hundreds.

And by the time we get to the end of the 18 hundreds, Kant, who's a genius, by the way, is standing looking at what has occurred. And he argues that both of those schools had reached a skeptical dead ends. The empiricist school and the rationalist school had reached a dead end. And so the project that had said, we can use our reason to come up with objective, general truths about reality, and we can be very optimistic epistemologically. That has to be abandoned.

And so what Kant does on my reading is argue that we need to retreat to a kind of subjectivism, that the subject has some inbuilt forms of sensibility and categories of the understanding, as Kant calls them. And what we do is we construct reality rather than discover the nature of reality, that we create what he calls a phenomenal world and then investigate it, rather than finding and investigating an independently existing reality.

So there's a subjective term in kantian philosophy, but what Kant argues, is that all of us subjects are the same, that we have the same psychological apparatus, so to speak, or we have the same subconscious or preconscious structuring forms. And so we all then universally are in the same subjective reality. So there's a universal subjectivism.

Now, with all of that by way of background, one of the things that Hegel does is argue that there's no way for Kant to know that all subjects have the same structuring subjective faculties. And Hegel then introduces a relativism, to say that different subjects at different time periods will be structuring subjectively reality differently. So he's abandoning universalism for a kind of relativism.

And so instead of saying that the whole world is universally structured for all time, but that rather there are different epochs, that human beings are part of the evolving or the evolution of the universe. And as such, what's true in one generation is not necessarily going to be true in the next generation. And what's true in one culture, depending on its stage of evolution, is not going to be true in a different culture, which might be at a different evolutionary stage.

So Kant is abandoning objectivity for a kind of subjectivity, but he's maintaining the hope of a universal set of beliefs. Hegel is a relativizing, and then Marx adopts that relativizing and changes things in some direction, in a slightly different direction. And the story carries on until a century later, we get to the postmoderns.

And if one drills down he's part of the 20th century type of Marxism that says Marx didn't get everything exactly right, so there have to be some modifications. And so he ends up being some sort of neo, neo Marxist of the 20th century. At the same time, I'm mentioning the name Heidegger, because Marcusa is working with Martin Heidegger, who is another very important german philosopher of the early 20th century.

And Heidegger's philosophical approach is not marxist ontologically or epistemologically. We'll talk about the politics in a few minutes. And so Marcusa, as a graduate student, is also working heideggerian, what we call phenomenology, which is a school of german philosophy in the early part of the 20th century, where one is not assuming that in one's philosophy, what one is doing is trying objectively or scientifically to analyze the world as it is.

But rather, one is assuming that one is a part of the world and that one can't go into one's description of the world by assuming a strong distinction between subjects and objects and so forth. But rather, one is rather trying just to describe the flow of experience without making assumptions about distinctions between subjective and objective, factual and imaginary, and so on. And there's a lot of technical developments that are going on there.

So what Marcusa is doing in his phd work is trying to do heideggerian phenomenology, but at the same time, integrate some. Then, in terms of deep philosophy, a quasimarxist, quasi heideggerian. Now, where this comes to become more important is that we have to integrate the politics as well.

And here, a striking fact is that Heidegger was a Nazi that is a follower of national socialist philosophy and a card carrying member of the nazi party and kind of a gung ho advocate of that approach to politics. So what we have then, in the case of Marcus, whom your question is about, or who your question is about, is that someone who is working with a card carrying Nazi, at the same time, is quite strongly attracted to Marxism.

And so what we find in Heidegger also is a way trying to integrate some elements of what we would think of as national socialism and some elements of Marxism. And then the slide is to say that one way of trying to do this is to stop talking about the world workers as a unified class and to start focusing on ethnic groups in the way fascists and national socialists will.

So what they will argue is that Marx said, when we do our politics, we need to divide groups into oppressor and oppressed and see them as in conflict with each other. But the oppressors are the rich, property owning class, and the oppressed are the poorer working class. And so it's an economic oppressor, oppressed relationship.

What we find in National Socialist philosophy is that there also are oppressors and oppressed, but it's not economic classes that matter so much as ethnic and racial classes that matter. So you'll find the Nazis talking about the Aryans versus the Jews. And, of course, they will also mention the Germans versus the English and various other ethnic and racial groupings and so on. So what, Marcus?

And now we start talking about the Frankfurt school and other related thinkers, like Max Horkheimer and Theodore Ordorno, who also were very strongly attracted to Marxism but also trying to work. Marxism is they will then take the same oppressor oppressed relationship and the same anti capitalism and the same anti Enlightenment philosophies.

But say, sometimes it's a matter of economic clash, sometimes it's a matter of religious clash, sometimes it's a matter of racial class, sometimes it's a matter of gender class, sometimes it's a matter of ethnic clash. And what we need to do is have a multidimensional, oppressor oppressed relationship. And out of this then comes what we call Frankfurt school theorizing, which takes some of Marxism.

We haven't talked about Freud, but some of Freudianism, some of Heidegger, some of Nietzsche, and puts it all together in a package in the middle part of the 20th century or so. So where all of this then comes is to fruition, is in the 1960s. And this is when Herbert Marcus becomes a big deal, primarily in America. Interestingly, all of these Frankfurt school thinkers, they are german thinkers.

And with the rise of Nazism, when things got bad in Germany and central Europe, some of them are also jewish. They decide, of course, that they're going to get out of Germany. And even though they are marxist sympathizers, they don't go to the Soviet Union. Most of them come to America. And so they get kind of nice university positions at american university. And so their stars rise largely in America.

And what's happening in America, this is now, after the war, is that the old left is sort of dying out. And there's the new left, and it is the Frankfurt school and Herbert Marcus who become some of the shining intellectual stars for the new left. Now, the concept then, all of this is by way of background, of getting to repressive tolerance, which you had put in your question.

And the idea of repressive tolerance is the claim that what we have in liberal, capitalist America and much of Western Europe is a society that pretends to be liberal and tolerant. Right? We say that people have free speech, that people can publish whatever they want, that we're going to have art of these arguments about all sorts of stuff. And so it sounds very liberal, it sounds very tolerant and so on.

But what we need to do is apply a kind of marxist analysis to see that that really is just a surface or a cover analysis of the way society is, that really we live in a capitalist society, and so it has to be oppressive. But what the capitalists have done is become very clever at hiding their oppression, hiding the way they really are, intolerant, at the same time being very good at this rhetoric of liberal tolerance and so forth.

So they will allow dissenting voices to speak and allow some of them to get published at the same time, knowing that if they get too uppity or they get too much power or too much influence, they can find various sneaky ways to just cut them down to size and continue to control society.

So they want to argue that what we liberals think of free speech and academic freedom and freedom of the press and freedom of the religion is that that really is just a fake cover story for an oppression that is largely hidden, but that the critical theorists, the Frankfurt school trained, the neomarxist trained theorists, are the ones who are able to see beneath the surface, to see the real oppression that's really going on there.

The argument then is that this is then Herbert Marcus's famous formulation, where he wants to then say, look, the liberal capitalists aren't really tolerant. They're only pretending to be tolerant. So there's no reason why we should be tolerant. In turn, we should, to the extent that we have power as professors or whatever cultural institutions we control, that we should just play the same game. And so, of course, we will be tolerant and promoting of viewpoints that we think advance our agenda.

And when we have the power to do so, we will be intolerant to voices that are coming from the capitalist side of the equation. So that is then going to be a liberating intolerance. And you might then say, well, that's just a double standard. And we will say, well, double standards depend on believing that we should have these universal standards. But we learned from Hegel a long time ago that there are no universal standards, just what works.

And what's true is, depending on what class membership one has and what stage in the historical evolution of society one is. So we're not at all bothered by double standards.

And the idea is that we're taking a controversial topic and we're supposed to be open minded about it and listen to both sides and be willing to change our own minds and to have our positions subjected to debate and so forth, with the idea being that the better arguments will and should prevail over time, and we'll get to the truth or we'll get closer to the truth. But by the time we get to postmodernism, we don't believe in truth anymore as a goal.

We think everything just is power and achieve social power for our subjective value framework. We also don't believe in reason in that old fashioned sense. We don't believe in evidence and logic, and we don't believe that people presented with evidence and logic are going to change their mind. We think that is an outmoded epistemology. And so the entire ethos of what we are trying to do, it's just a power struggle, means that the debate structure is just completely outmoded.

And so we don't debate. Instead, when we use language, we are using language rhetorically as a power tool to try to influence people, to put them on the defensive in some cases, and less sure of their values, less sure of their beliefs, and to advance our own values and our own beliefs in a social context.

And in that context, instead of seeing language as a tool of cognition that we will use, and that we will, in a social context, use formal structures like debates, instead, we have to see language as a different kind of tool. It's a weapon. It's in an adversarial context, and you use language as a weapon. And that means that using insults when they work, using ad hominem arguments and other things that we used to call logical fallacies, if those work, go ahead and do so.

Name calling, like calling someone a fascist, is very effective because it puts people on the defensive. Nobody wants to be called in a fascist and immediately means the person is trying to find five reasons why they're not a fascist and they're groping for that, and while they're groping and so on, you can go on to make other points and so forth. So name calling is then just a useful rhetorical weapon, and you just use it explicitly.

And if you think the idea here is, oh, well, we need to have clear and precise definitions of the words that we are using. If that's your modus operandi psychologically, then from their perspective, you're just one of these old fashioned, rational, liberal individualists who doesn't get it. And so we're just going to be rhetorically able to out weaponize you.

But since it's a volitional capacity, it becomes a very deep responsibility for each of us as individuals to choose to think and to think consistently throughout our lives. Then, when we are in a social context, because many of the things we do in lives, we pursue our values in a social context with family members, with friends, going to school, doing our business organizations. And so there's a lot of kind of shared discovery, a lot of discussion, a lot of conversation that goes on there.

And so for those social relations to work, well, one of the preconditions then, is that it's going to be a lot of discussion and sometimes a lot of debate. We work out what we are going to do socially, but that each of the participants in the family, in the friendship, in the business, in the classroom, and so on, still needs to be a free agent to do his or her own thinking. So part of the social ethos is to encourage that freedom of speech in that social context.

So if I say, am the father of children and I'm preparing them for adult life, then part of what I want to do is encourage my children to think for themselves and to speak their minds and not just take me, as always, to lay down the law, authority, dad, and whatever I say, is the absolute truth. And so some challenging and criticism when appropriate.

And the same thing if I am a teacher establishing the rules for the class, that each of my students needs to learn more sophisticatedly how to think for himself, how to think for herself. And so my responsibility is to establish that as a social condition in the classroom, and then more broadly, in a political context. If we're going to have some sort of liberal democratic republic, we want our citizens to be thinking about all kinds of political issues and having discussions and debates.

And so my job as a politician is to establish those free speech conditions. And then things become more particularized in specialist institutions like universities, where we want professors to be researchers, in part, to be discovering new knowledge, and to be taking up all of the controversial issues and having arguments and debates amongst themselves and so forth. And so free speech in an academic context becomes important.

And then we set up special protections like academic freedoms and giving people tenure and so forth. So all of that is free speech. Working it out in the liberal, individualist, pro reason, philosophical framework.

They don't believe we're individuals, that we are rational, that we are volitionally self responsible, that we're trying to set up win win social institutions of various sorts within which free speech is a core cherished value. And since they reject all of those elements, they end up rejecting free speech as a value, consistently. And so they will push for speech codes when they can get away with it.

If they are the ones who have power, they will push for double standards in the application of speech. Who gets to say what? If it's the favored group, yes. If it's the disfavored group, then no. They will enact kind of rhetorical sleight of hands. They will enact explicit censorships. They will deplatform. They will cancel.

They will use all of the forceful, violent, rhetorical and physical methods at their disposal to achieve their end because they reject the liberal, individualist, rationalist, freedom oriented philosophy all the way down and all the way.

And we want all of these things to be integrated. So I want to observe the world, to think about it sometimes to talk about it, and then to act on the basis of that, and then evaluate the results of my action for further thinking. And so it's this ongoing, continuous, and hopefully integrated process. But in liberal philosophy, and I'm using this in the classically liberal sense, and then liberal jurisprudence, there is a distinction between speech and act that is fundamental and cherished.

And the idea is tied into the fact that we are volitional creatures. So I can say some words to you, I can use speech, and that is actually a form of action. My vocal cords are acting, my mouth is acting, and it acts upon you. Sound waves travel and impinge upon your ear, supposing this is oral communication. So my speech has become a kind of action. But you are then able to hear what I am saying and decide volitionally, are you going to pay attention to me?

Are you going to agree with me? Are you going to disagree with me? And how you are going to react? So you still are a volitional agent in control of your response to my speech. And that is different from if I say, take a stick and hit you with the stick, so I might say, I don't like you, Blair. That's blur. And so I'm expressing in speech something negative toward you. On the other hand, if I take a stick and hit you with the stick. To express my dislike of you.

Your reaction to being hit by the stick is in large part not under your volitional control. It will damage your skin, it will bruise you, it might break your bone. And so I am not treating you as a rational volitional agent. I'm treating you, in that case, just as a physical thing and trying to coerce you physically. So in liberal jurisprudence, the distinction between speech and act is very important.

So I can say, I will give me $10, and I will give you this thing in return, and you can say yes or no, or I can say, give me $10, or I will hit you with this stick. In both cases, I'm making you a deal, so to speak. But the deal is fundamentally different, because in one case it's speech, in the other it's act. But there are then transition cases, and there are cases where it's not clear that the speech is only speech and not act.

So if, for example, I don't know, I want to hire an assassin, and so I call up the assassin, and I say, I'll give you a certain amount of money if you go and kill this person. And the assassin says, okay, and goes off and kills the person, and I send the person the money, can I say in my defense, well, I didn't actually kill the person. This other guy killed the person. All I did was some speech.

And consistently, liberal jurisprudence has said, no, you are part of the causal chain, and so you can go to prison or be executed in some cases for murder. In that case, it's not just speech because of the nature of that particular circumstance. So one needs to be very careful in how one formulates the distinction between speech and act. Another important example would be, suppose I have a trained attack dog.

It's really a powerful attack dog, and you are walking by, and I take the leash off of my dog, and I say, attack to my dog, and my dog attacks you and does some physical damage. In that context, I cannot say, well, I only just said a word, attack. I didn't actually attack you. It was the dog who attacked you. In that case, you are part of the causal chain controlling the dog, and the dog did physical damage.

And so liberal jurisprudence will say that that speech act is continuous causally and hold you responsible for it. What has happened, though, is that there are some people, there's an interesting debate then, philosophically and jurisprudentially, about all kinds of new cases that come up. And I think this is one of the beauties of the common law tradition, where we are always having test cases about where exactly the line between speech and act is going to be drawn.

But what has happened then is between those who are unsympathetic to liberalism is that they want to have a much more expansive understanding of the kinds of speeches that will count as actions. And so this gets us into the whole speech or hate speech debate, as one example. They will want to, for example, argue that speech is not individual to individual, that speech is going to be group to group.

And so if you say something about a group in general, that counts as inappropriate speech, it doesn't have to be targeted toward any particular individual. So the standard liberal individualism is one avenue by which it becomes attacked. Or they will make the argument that certain emotions are not subject to our individual emotional control. So emotions are in a different category.

So certain kinds of speech, if it is too emotional, evokes responses in people that they cannot control and cannot be held responsible for. So just saying sticks and stones will break my bones, et cetera, et cetera. We can't say that anymore because certain words are like sticks and stones. They evoke emotional reactions beyond the person's capacity. And so that's another avenue of incursion into the traditional liberal speech act distinction.

So there are lots of philosophical and psychological routes through which the speech act distinction is under attack. And of course, in many cases, it's under attack by those who have a political agenda or an ideological agenda for their favored groups. Then we can get on to the usual suspects, if you want.

We need millions and millions of people who are articulate, thoughtful, passionate, each working in their own lives, in their own areas of influence to keep a healthy, liberal, individualist, free culture going. So what I would just say is, don't feel that you have to do anything more than you want to, but just in your own life, right? Work on your own life and enjoy your life and look after your own interests, for sure.

And in one sense, just being a good example of what it's like to be a rational, decent, passionate, life loving human being is already going to be influential on all sorts of people in your social circle. But also, if you have a voice, if you are a business owner or have family or you organize some events or whatever, then just in your area, be a voice of reason, be a voice of civility, and you will have more impact than you think.