https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=oyzSrtr6oJE
Well, I’m speaking today with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who’s a professor of philosophy at, in the Department of Philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois. And Professor Hicks has written a book that I found, he’s written several books, but he’s written one in particular that I want to talk to him about today called, Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, which was published a fair while ago now in 2004, but I think has become even more pertinent and relevant today. And I have talked a lot to my viewers about your book. And so let’s talk about postmodernism and its relationship with neo-Marxism. And so maybe you could tell our viewers here a little bit more about yourself and how you got interested in this. Hmm. Well, I finished graduate school in philosophy in the early 90s, originally from Canada, born in Toronto. At that point, Pittsburgh and Indiana had the two strongest philosophy of science and logic programs. And that’s what I was interested in at the time. So upon a professor recommendation, I ended up at Indiana and it worked out very nicely for me. So most of my graduate work was actually in epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, some cognitive science issues as well. So a lot of the epistemological and philosophical linguistic issues that come up in postmodernism, the groundwork, so to speak, was laid for that. When I finished grad school, I started teaching full time. I came to Rockford University. I was teaching in an honors program. And the way that program worked, it was essentially a great books program. So it was like getting a second education wonderfully. But the way it was done was each course was taught by two professors to our honor students. And so the professors would be from different departments, so it was paired with literature professors, history professors, and so on. And this is now the middle of the 90s. I started to hear about thinkers I had not read. I kind of heard about them, but now I was reading them more closely and finding that in history and literature and sociology and antepro, names like Derry Dog, Hukoh, and the others were, if not omnipresent, were huge names. So I realized I had a gap in my education to fill. So I started reading deeply in them. My education in some ways was broad in the history of philosophy, but narrow at the graduate school level. And I focused mostly on annual American philosophy. So my understanding of the continental traditions was quite limited. But by the time I got to the end of the 90s, I realized there was something significant going on coming out of continental philosophy. And that’s where the book came out. When you say significant, what do you mean by that? Do you mean intellectually? Do you mean socially, politically? There’s lots of different variants of significant. At that point, intellectually, this is still the 1990s. So postmodernism was not yet outside of, say, art, a cultural force, but it was strongly an intellectual force. In that, at that point, young PhDs coming out of sociology, literary criticism, some sub-disciplines in the law, if you’re getting PhDs in the law, historiography, and so on, and certainly in departments in philosophy, still dominated by continental traditional philosophy, that almost all of them are primarily being schooled in what we now call postmodern thinkers. So the leading gurus are people like Gary D’Aa, Lyotard, from whom we get the label postmodern condition, Foucault, and the others. So maybe you could walk us through what you learned, because people are unfamiliar. I mean, you were advanced in your education, including in philosophy, and still recognized your ignorance, say, with regards to postmodern thinking. And so that’s obviously a condition that’s shared by a very large number of people. And postmodernism is one of those words like existentialism that covers an awful lot of territory. And so maybe we could zero in on exactly what that means and who these thinkers were, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, and what you learned about them. Okay, yeah, fair enough. Well, all of the thinkers you just named, they think broadly, they think strategically, and they do have a very strong historical perspective on their disciplines. And at the same time, they are trying to assess where they think we are culturally, politically, socially. And all of them are making a very dramatic claim that to some extent, or in some way, modernism has either ended or it has reached its nadir, or all of the pathologies and negative traits within the modern world are reaching a culmination in their generation. And so it’s time for us to both recognize that modernism has come to an end, that we need some sort of new intellectual framework, a postmodern framework. Okay, and the modernism that they’re criticizing, how would you carry that? That’s enlightenment values, that’s scientific rationalism, how would you characterize it exactly? Yeah, all of those would be elements of it. So and of course, there are some discipline-specific differences. So literature people and philosophy people and historians will use modernism slightly differently. But the idea, core is that if you look at the pre-modern world, essentially the world of the Middle Ages, say, that that was itself broken up by a series of revolutions, the Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, early scientific revolutions, and all of this is going on in historically short chunks of time, 1500s and 1600s. And so if you look at both the intellectual world and the social world, comparing, say, the 1400s with the 1700s, culturally and intellectually, you’re in a different universe at that point. So the features then of the modern world, and now I’m going to use my philosophical labels here, are that we are now naturalistic in our thinking. We’re no longer primarily supernaturalistic in our thinking. So we might still be open to the idea that there’s a god or some sort of supernatural dimension like the way deists are. But first and foremost, we’re taking the natural world as a more or less self-contained, self-governing world that operates according to cause and effect, and we’re going to study it in its terms. We’re not seeing the natural world as a derivative of a higher world or that everything that happens in the natural world is part of God’s plan, and we read omens and so forth into everything. So metaphysically then, there’s been a revolution and we’re naturalistic. Epistemologically, in terms of knowledge, there also has been a revolution. How do we know the important truths? How do we acquire the beliefs that we’re fundamentally going to commit our lives to? By the time we become moderns, we take experience seriously, personal experience. We do that more rigorously and we’re developing scientific method, the way of organizing the data. We’re taking logic and all of the sophisticated tools of rationality and developing those increasingly. So our position then is either you know something because you can experience it and verify it for yourself, or we’ve done the really hard work of scientific method and as a result of what comes out of that, that’s what we can call knowledge or best approximation to that. That is also revolutionary. Let me just say one more thing because the prior intellectual framework was much more intellectually authoritarian in its framework. So you would accept in the Catholic tradition the authority of the church, and who are you to question the authority of the church, and who are you to mouth empirical rational arguments against the authority of the church. Or you take the authority of scripture, or you accept on faith that you’ve had a mystical revelation of some sort. So in all of those cases, you have non-rational epistemologies that are dominating intellectual discourse. That is all by and large swept away in the modern world. So prior to the emergence of the modern world, let’s say, people are dominated essentially by their willingness to adhere to a shared tradition, and that shared tradition is somewhat tyrannically enforced. But there’s no real alternative in terms of epistemology, let’s say. And then as the modern world emerges, people discover the technologies of science and the value of rigorously applied method and the comparison of shared experiences, and that makes us technologically powerful and in a new way and philosophically different from what we were before. Yes, the shared tradition phrase that you added there, that’s an important one. So I would say in the early modern world, there’s not necessarily a skepticism about a shared tradition. So it would be an acceptance of shared traditions. The idea is that you would not uncritically accept your tradition, but you will accept the tradition, but only after you’ve thought it through and made your own independent change. So you’re elevated to the status of someone who’s capable of taking a stance with regards to the tradition and assessing its presuppositions and so forth. Absolutely. So there’s an elevation of the individual and the critical intellect along with the elaboration of the scientific method. Okay, so then we might note, perhaps, that that’s a tremendously effective transformation, although maybe it leads in a somewhat nihilistic direction metaphysically. We can leave that to the side, but it’s a very, very successful revolution because by the time at least the beginning of the 20th century comes along, there’s this staggering and of course before that, the Industrial Revolution, there’s this staggering transformation of technology and technological and conceptual power and then a stunning increase in the standard of living. And that starts in about 1890 to move exponentially in the 1890s or at least to get to the really steep part of the exponential curve. Okay, so that seems to be going well. So what is it that the postmodernists are objecting to precisely? Well, by the time, just on those two issues, the metaphysical naturalism and then the elevation of the critical empiricism and a belief that we can, through science and even not necessarily but social scientists and so on come to understand powerful general principles about humanity and social systems. Those two revolutions both are then subjected to counterattacks. And again, what happens in this case is there was a revolution, probably by the time we get to 1800, the height of the Enlightenment, where the beginnings of more powerful skeptical traditions that come to be developed. So thinkers are starting to say things like, well, if scientific method at root is based on the evidence of the senses, we observe the natural world, that’s our first point of contact. And then on the basis of that, we form abstractions and we put those abstractions into propositions and then we take those propositions and put them in networks that we call theories and so on. So we start to critically examine each of the elements of scientific method and over time, weaknesses in the existing accounts of how all of those rational operations work come to be cheesed out and philosophy then starts to go down a more skeptical path. So if, for example, you take perception as fundamental, it’s the individual subject’s first point of contact with the natural world, then you have to immediately deal with issues of perceptual illusions or the possibility that people will have hallucinations or that the way you report your perceptual experience is at odds with how I report my perceptual experience. So we have all of this. Is that also part, tell me if I’ve got this right. So with the dawning of the empirical age, let’s say, there’s this idea that you can derive valid information from sense data, especially if you contrast that sense data rigorously with that of others. So that’s sort of the foundation for the scientific method in some sense. But then I think this is with Immanuel Kant, there’s an objection to that, which is that, well, you can’t make the presupposition that that sense data enters your cognitive apparatus, your apparatus of understanding without a priori structuring. And it seems to me that that’s where the postmodernists really go after the modernists. It’s that given that you have to have a very complex perceptual structure that modern people might say was instantiated as a consequence of biological evolution, you can’t make the case that what you’re receiving from the external world is something like pure information. It’s always subject to some very difficult to delimit degree to interpretation. And then you also have to take into account the fact of that priori structure and what it might mean for your concepts of objective reality. And that’s Kant, I think, if I’ve got that right. Right. Well, the postmodernists will use both of those strategies, the anti-empiricist strategy and the anti-rationalist strategy. And what’s important about Kant is that Kant is integrating both of those anti-strategies. So in the generations before Kant, the skeptical arguments about perception directed against the empiricists. The empiricists want to say everything is based on observational data. But then if you don’t have good answers about hallucinations and relativity and illusions right and so forth, then it seems like your structure, your intellectual structure, whatever it comes to be, if it’s all based on probabilistic or possibly faulty perceptual data, then the whole thing is a tottering mess. And by the time we get to Kant, the empiricist tradition is largely unable to respond to those kinds of objections. And so Kant is recognizing and saying, all right, we’ve been trying now for a couple of centuries. We haven’t been able to do so successfully. We’re not going to be able to do so. Now, you also nicely emphasize that one of the other responses have been on the rationalist side, which is to say, well, no, you don’t start with pure empirical data instead that we do have perhaps some innate a priori structures built into the human mind, how they got there. Maybe they’re put there by God, maybe they’re put there naturalistically, right, or whatever. But what enables us to have legitimate knowledge is that our empirical data comes in and it is filtered and structured by these preexisting cognitive structures as well. Now, the problem with that side of the line, and this is also well worked out by the time we get to the content, is to say, well, if you’re starting with inbuilt cognitive structures and everything that comes in, so to speak, goes through the structuring machine and you’re aware of the outputs, that’s what’s presented to your mind, well, how do you know that those inbuilt structures have anything to do with the way reality actually is out there? It seems like then what you are stuck with is the end result of a subjective processing and there is no way for you, so to speak, to jump outside of your head, to compare the end result with the way the world actually is, independently of how your mind has structured the awareness. So, once again, you’re stuck rather in a rather subjective place. And again, the importance of Kant here is that he’s also looking at this more rationalist tradition and he’s saying, well, look, again, we’ve been trying now for a couple of centuries to work these things out from Descartes, who’s been those alignments and the others, and rationalism also has reached a dead end, so we’re not going to be able to do so. So Kant is, in effect, standing at the end of these two traditions and saying, you know, the skeptics have it right on both sides. Okay, so I don’t know now whether to talk a little bit about the American pragmatic approach to that or whether to, maybe we should go ahead and continue our discussion of postmodernists because they’re developing these claims. Absolutely, and some of the postmodernists do describe themselves as neo-pragmatists, like Richard Rorty, for example. So yes, that’s exactly a direction that’s worth going. Okay, okay. So my understanding of that, if I was going to defend the modernist tradition, let’s say, I would say that we have instantiated within us an a priori perceptual structure that’s a consequence of millions, billions of years for that matter of biological evolution. And it has emerged in tandem with continual correction of its presuppositions by the selection process. But it’s still subject to error because we have a very limited viewpoint as specific individuals and we can, not only are we limited, but we also make, you might say, moral errors, and I’ll get back to that, that cloud our judgment. And so in an attempt to expand our purview and rectify those errors, we do two things. We test our hypothesis practically against the world, which is to say, we say, here’s a theory of reality, we act it out. If the theory of reality is sufficiently correct, when we act it out, we get what we want. And then that’s sufficient proof for the validity of the theory. It’s not absolute proof, but it’s sufficient proof. And then the other thing we do, and I think this has been paid attention to much less, except by thinkers such as Piaget, is that we further constrain our presuppositions about reality with the necessity of constructing theories that are also acceptable to people around us. So they have to be integratable within the currently existing social contract, and they have to be functionally appropriate in the external world. And that’s a nice set of constraints. It seems to me that that, at least in some part, goes a long ways to answering the objections to the limits of the scientific method that have been discussed, that were discussed, and that you just discussed, that have been discussed historically, and that you just summarized. OK. All right. I’m sympathetic to much of what you went through. In fact, a five-point response to the kinds of arguments that have been played out. You’re actually putting me in the position, then, of defending the postmodern tradition about how it would undercut each of those components. So if you take, for example, evolutionary epistemology, and you give a nice sketch of one standard evolutionary epistemological rep front, and we could say, OK, maybe we have these infield a priori structures, but we can rely upon them, because here we are standing at the long end of hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution, and they would not have survived, or enabled us to survive, had they not served some sort of reliable cognitive role in accurately representing the way the world works. Now, what the postmodern, this is actually too early for the postmoderns, although the postmoderns will agree with this, is to say that all of that kind of begs the question in a very deep way against the kind of skeptical objections that we’re raising, because in order to make that paragraph-long description of what evolutionary epistemology is, what I have to do is take, for granted, basic assumptions, certain truth about the world. That, for example, there is an external world, that we are biological creatures, that we have inbuilt structures, that those structures are evolutionarily responsive and conditioned by changing forces and so forth. And if you take those assumptions to be true, then as a consequence or as a conclusion, you can infer that therefore the intellectual products that come out of our cognitive processing are reliable in some way. But where did you get those four premises from? How do you know that there is an external world? How do you know that we are biological creatures? How do you know that evolution is true with all of the historical knowledge that’s necessary to reach the conclusion that evolution is true? All of that presupposes that we have legitimate cognitive methods to come to understand the world. But now we’re having legitimate cognitive processes to understand the world, that’s exactly what we are arguing about in the first place. And you can’t just assume that for then the sake of coming up with some premises that are then in turn going to validate those cognitive processes. So something like that, they will say, there’s a big circle, a circular reasoning problem that evolutionary epistemology finds itself trapped in. Now, I think there are some responses to that, and this is just the first back and forth right on that particular debate, but that is the kind of response that would be there. So the third and fourth, I’m keeping track accurately, is to say that we also have constraints with respect to ourselves, that if we have a certain set of hypotheses or certain set of theories and we’re testing them out, we will accept those that give us what we want, or what I want, so to speak. And I’m also necessarily in a social situation, so what I need to do is check my results against the results of others, peer review, experiment replication, and so forth. The ability to live in the same household? Yes, absolutely, more prosoically, sharing our frameworks with each other and so on. So if, so to speak, and this is the more pragmatist orientation, if we then say we have a theory or a set of principles or guidelines or whatever, and they do enable me successfully to navigate the world or to get what I want, or they do enable me to navigate my social world to get us what we want, then they’re reliable, true, or some sort of success label epistemologically that we’re going to give. Okay, so let me ask you a question about that. This is a place where I got augured in very badly with Sam Harris when we were discussing metaphysical presumptions. So, you know, and I’m confused about this, I would say, to some degree, conceptually, because I’m a scientist and certainly operate most of the time under the presupposition of an independent objective world. But then I also have some difficulty with the idea that objective truth, that it’s objective truth within which all other truths are nested. And that’s something that Sam and the people that he represents in some sense are very dead set on insisting. Now, it seems to me, though, that the crux of the matter is something like the method of proof. And this strikes me as very important because my theory is correct enough if when I implement it, I get what I want is not the same as they claim my theory is true because it’s in accordance with some independently existing objective world. I mean, both of those things could exist at the same time, but I think the more appropriate claim to make with regards to human knowledge is something like its biological functionality, which is that your knowledge is of sufficient accuracy, which is about the best you can hope for because of your fundamental ignorance. If when you implement it, it reliably produces the results that are commensurate, say, with your continued existence. Now, it seems to me that that’s a reasonable claim from a Darwinian perspective. And it also seems to me that it’s very much in keeping with the claims of the American pragmatists. And I mean, it’s not like they were radical postmodernists because they weren’t, but they were trying to solve this problem to some degree of our fundamental ignorance and our inability to be certain about the nature of the reality that surrounds us. Yes. Okay, let’s set aside Sam Harris’s version of this and focus on the pragmatist tradition here. So, no, you’re absolutely right. William James, John Dewey, and the others, late 19th century, early 20th century, they are coming a century after the Contian Revolution, after Hegelianism, and so forth. And so they are very much trying to solve this problem. One way, and this is kind of a very American sort of thing, is to say, look, maybe the problem with philosophy is that we have been too intellectualizing cognition, that we’re not just disembodied brains or disembodied minds that are trying to kind of contemplate abstract truths in some other realm. Maybe what we need to do is understand the mind and cognition as a naturalistic process. And that the purpose of knowledge is not to come up with these pure and beautiful truths that are going to be kind of museum pieces that we will admire, but rather the purpose of knowledge is functional. The purpose of knowledge is to guide action. And so they will then harken back to the earlier Baconian tradition, that knowledge is not an end in itself, as Bacon put it, Francis Bacon, knowledge is power. And by its fruits, so to speak, you know its worth. And so what we then should do is to see that the test of truth is not whether it meets purely intellectual standards of logic and mathematics, but rather when we put it to practice and when we act upon it, we actually get good results, or we get the results we want, or I get the results I want. And it can come in more individualistic form or more socialized. Right, because then we can get on with things too. That’s right. It’s finer ignorance in some sense. So there’s two things that are being packaged here. One is to say that knowledge is functional. That part I think is important. I think it’s a very nice correction that the pragmatists are, it’s not original with them, but they are re-emphasizing it in the 19th century. Knowledge needs to be pushed to the test and its ability to enable us to be pragmatic, like so to speak, in the real world is its test. Yeah, and then there’s a code to that as well. And I think this is relevant to Thomas Kuhn’s discussion of scientific revolutions, because Kuhn is often read as pausing a sequence of, in some sense, discontinuous revolutions. But if you, and that the conceptual structure that characterized one epoch, let’s say, like the medieval epoch, was so totally different in its presuppositions from the conceptions that characterized the next epoch that you can’t even mediate between them in some sense. And now the reason I’m bringing this up is because Kuhn is at least read as hypothesizing that there’s not any necessary progress when you make leaps from one conceptual system to another. But if you take this pragmatic approach, the one that we’ve been outlining, it seems to me that you can say, well, it’s something like this. Your conceptions of the world are more tool-like than objective truth-like, and tools can have a greater or lesser range of convenience. And so if you come up with a really good tool, which would also be something that would look objectively true, generally speaking, then that’s something that you can use in almost every situation, and it will never fail you. And I would think of something like Newtonian physics in that regard, or even more, particularly quantum mechanics, because it’s never failed us. And so it seems to me the pragmatic approach, in some sense, allows you to have your cake and eat it too. You can posit a hierarchy of truths, moving towards an absolute truth even, but also retain your belief in your own ignorance and not have to beat the drum too hard about the, like, well, eternal accuracy of your objective presuppositions. Okay. Again, I’m sympathetic, I think, with about 80% of that, but let me put my skeptical hat back on and say how the postmoderns or the critics of pragmatism, or the first-generation pragmatism, will respond to that. So if we then say, all of these cognitive results, I’m going to rephrase that. Okay. So if we’re going to assess all of our cognitive results or cognitive hypotheses in terms of their workability, right, or they’re getting what I want or what we want, well, then the big question we have to turn to is to say, well, how do we judge whether something works? Yes. How do I say that it’s good because I get what I want or we get what we want? Well, what is a want, right? Where do these wants come from and why should we accept wants and desires and achieving certain goals as our bottom line, so to speak? Right. Okay. So you can, that’s right. So you can start to question the framework, the validity of the framework within which you’re constructing the answer. That’s right. And at this point, we’re leaving epistemology neutrally, so to speak, and moving into normative issues. And so the whole status of normative goals ends and then the means that are going to enable us to reach rather those ends comes into play. So if I want to say, the most important thing is that I, I’ll put it very boldly here, I get what I want, right? And I’m going to assess intellectual structures and beliefs and hypotheses in terms of do they give me what I want? Well, that already sounds like a fairly normatively subjectivistic standpoint, right? To start, why should you take your wants as having some sort of high status that everything has to be evaluated in terms of? And then philosophically, then we say, well, where do wants come from? Of course, there’s a long anthropological and psychological set of literature here. What’s the relationship of our wants? Are they based in biological drives? Are they instinctual? Are they acquired? Are they intellectual? Do they have any relationship to our rational capacities? When I’m acting, should I act on my desires and my wants, right? And so forth. So there’s that whole tradition and we have to have a sophisticated theory, right? About how all of that is going to work if we’re going to say, we’ll solve all of these cognitive epistemological issues in terms of wants or the satisfaction of desires or the achievement of goals the way pragmatists want us to do. And again, it’s fairly easy to imagine what the skeptical arguments are going to be, right? If it’s a matter of what I want, well, isn’t science supposed to be about coming up with general truths or maybe even universal truths? And if we’re immediately just going to devolve it to whatever individuals want, well, then we’re going to be in a fairly scattered place. Okay. So that also opens up a good point for a segue into the potential link between neo-Marxism, let’s say, and postmodernism, because maybe you could say, once you’ve opened the door to an admission that you can criticize the idea of want as a social construct, let’s say, which is one of the things that you intimated, not the only thing, obviously, then you open the door to also making the claim that that social construct that governs the wants, that governs the truth can be governed by power relationships, something like that. And then by unfair power relationships. Exactly. So you can spin off down that aisle, which and that’s the other thing I really want to talk to you about is because on the one hand, the postmodernists are following this intellectual tradition of the critique of Western thinking, which is exactly in some sense what philosophy should be doing. But in another way, they seem simultaneously to be introducing almost by sleight of hand, a kind of social critique that has its origin more in political revolution and class based theory. And they do that. They do that under the guise of pure philosophy in some sense. But with the intent and motivation of something like justifying the social revolution or continuing the Marxist, the Marxist analysis of power differential. It can go both ways. Yes. Right. It is possible to follow the road that we’ve just been going down to say, well, you know, if it’s a matter about, you know, what works for you, then that immediately starts to sound too relativistic and subjectivistic. We don’t have an explanation or an answer rather to all the weirdos who want to do strange things, because that’s what they want to do. So we might introduce as a corrective, a socializing of the process. Right. So we might then say, no, it’s not so much what you want as an individual, but rather what we want. And we need to achieve some sort of a consensus here. So that’s a slightly cartoon version here. But the difference between William James, who is more individualistic, and John Dewey in the next generation who collectivizes things a little bit more. So then we have a corrective on all of the individual weirdos who knows what their desires and goals are going to be. Right. But then we, of course, we just confront the same problem there as soon as we start doing anthropology, because then if we say, well, if we relativize it to the social group, and we start looking at different social groups, obviously different social groups have dramatically different wants and needs and desires, and they’ve evolved very different traditions. And if it’s a matter of saying what’s true is what works for the group, there is then no, so to speak, uber group, or highest group of all groups that has status over all of the others. And if you do, and this is the second point that you said, exactly right, then you say, well, no, no, this group’s norms and its goals are better than that group’s goals or norms. Right. Okay. Then you’re into what the critics are going to call imperialism of the inappropriate form. Right. So that leaves us with our current political situation in some sense, which is because that’s been taken, that idea has been taken to what, that’s a logical conclusion, and that logical conclusion has now been instantiated to a large degree as an intellectual and political activist movement, I would say. Right. Sure. Absolutely. So it can start as an intellectual movement, that we’re trying to do some hardcore epistemology, right, and we go through the empiricists and the rationalists and the Kantian revolution and the pragmatists, right, and now we’re into second generation pragmatism, where we relativize it to various kinds of groups, and then we’re just stuck in a kind of group relativism. And then the operational principle socially then is going to be that each group, so to speak, should stick to itself and not think that it can impose its ideas and its norms on any other group, right. All groups, so to speak, are equal. Yeah, well, at least they have an equal claim to their formulation of the truth. Yeah. Like the problem with the postmodern conjunction with neo-Marxism, to me, seems to be the acceptance of idea that there’s an intrinsic moral claim by the dispossessed to the obtaining of status, and that actually constitutes a higher moral calling in and of itself. So they’re swallowing a moral claim that in making it universal in some sense, at the same time, they criticize the idea of, say, general narratives or universal moral claims. Okay, now that’s also right. That’s the other way to say that rather than starting with epistemology, right, and ending up and getting to a kind of cultural relativism, right, you can start, of course, committed to a certain normative framework, right, or a certain ideological framework, as Marxism is, where you’re very critical, right, of one of those traditions, and then the cultural relativism can be, right, a part of that that you use to criticize the tradition, right, internally, right, so to speak. Now then, we’re explicitly into not kind of metaethics and asking, where do we get our ethical principles off the ground, or where do they come from in the first place, but kind of a robust normative ethics where people have committed commitments rather to fairly strong ethical principles and ethical ideals. This is where the debate between, say, Nietzsche and Marx becomes relevant. This is a late 19th century debate. So suppose we say, as both the Marxists do and the Nietzscheans, right, will do, is to say, there is no truth in any objective sense. Instead, all we have is subjectivity and relativity, right, of various sorts, and we have different individuals and different groups, and they are in antagonistic conflict relations, right, with each other. And that means there’s not really going to be any rational and civil resolution of these discussions with each other. Instead, it all comes down to power. Yeah, and that’s the strange sleight of hand claim there, too, because why it has to come down to power is, again, that seems to introduce the idea of necessary need. Okay, yeah, all right, that’s another thing. Let’s set that aside just for a moment. But then we say, okay, so we have power, right, and one thing that we can say is, while we don’t think any one individual or any one group has a better objective claim to truth or better ideals, it is nonetheless the case that some individuals and groups have more power than others. And so then we have to make our allegiance clear, right, in this unequal power struggle. Are we on the side of those who have more power or are we on the side of those who have less power? And that’s where we get then a Nietzschean and Marxian fork in the road. All right, so the Nietzscheans following Nietzsche will say, look, it’s all about power. You know, we can drive on some crude evolutionary thinking here. It’s only the exercise of power, right, by the stronger, the fitter, the healthier, and so forth that are willing to impose their power on the weaker and use them for their own ends that we, as individuals and groups, are going to make any sort of progress toward the next best thing, whatever that is. So in the power struggle, you know, there is no objective morality and objective truth. We just throw our lot in with the stronger, with the richer, with the more powerful, and they say whatever it is that they do in order to advance themselves, that’s the normative best that we can do. And of course, there’s a long kind of aristocratic tradition, right, in normative thinking that one can draw on to support that. And then Marxist, rather, of course, if it’s on the other side of that equation, right, where their sympathies, right, initially are going to be saying, you know, in any power struggle, our kind of a priori commitments, right, should always be to the weaker, right, to those on the losing end, part of history, those who suffer, right, and so forth. And it’s always the bad, rich, and powerful people who are oppressing and harming them. And so we throw our lot in with the weaker, and we’re willing to use power, whatever amount of power we have on behalf of the weaker. And then we’re just into what I think of as, you know, the major false alternative that really has driven much of 20th century intellectual life. Are you a Nietzschean or are you a Marxist? Right, right. Well, okay, so now we can get to the crux of the matter here to some degree, because to even engage in that argument means to accept the a priori position, which you’ve made quite rationally compelling, let’s say, that it’s power, it’s power, because there’s no other way of differentiating between the claims of different groups, it’s power that’s the determining issue. But that’s something I really have a problem with. And I think it’s of crucial importance, because first of all, I think there’s a big difference between power, there’s a difference between power and authority and competence. Those are all not the same thing, because you might be willing to cede greater status to me in some domains, if there are things I can do that you value that you can’t do. And that’s not power, exactly. Power seems to be more that I’m willing to use force to impose my interpretation of the world to get my wants fulfilled on you. And it seems to me that where the Marxists make a huge mistake, not that the Nietzscheans aren’t making mistakes as well, but where the Marxists make a huge mistake is that they fail to properly differentiate between hierarchies of interpretation that are predicated on tyrannical power and hierarchies of interpretation that are predicated on authority, competence, and mutual consent. Because those, and the other issue that they fail to contend with, and I believe this is a form of willful blindness, is that it isn’t obviously the case that every society is set up equally to only fulfill the desires of the people who are in principle situated at the pinnacles of the hierarchies. I actually don’t think that that’s fundamentally characteristic of the Western tradition, because it has a very strong emphasis, weirdly enough, and this is how I think it extracts itself out of the socialized, the conundrum that accepting a socialized version of truth presents to you. The West does two things. It says, we have a social contract that constrains our views of the world and our actions in it, but that social contract is also simultaneously subordinate to the idea of the sovereignty of each individual. And so the social contract then is bound to serve the needs of each individual, not any privileged set of individuals, although sometimes it works out that way, and I don’t believe that the postmodernists have contended with that properly, with their criticism of logocentrism, for example, which was something that characterized Derrida. Because I think that that, because it doesn’t, it never has seemed to me that what you had with Stalinist Russia and the Marxist view of the world, and what you had on the side of the West, was merely a matter of a difference of opinion between two equally valid socialized modes of interpreting the world. You know, there’s something wrong about, there’s something more to the view of the West than what’s in battle, what’s embodied in the conflict between, say, capitalism and socialism. Because it could have just been a matter of argumentation and opinion, but I think that that’s faulty. And I thought this way in part because of Piaget. You know, because Piaget was interested in what the intrinsic constraints were on the social contract. And he said, and he was trying to address this issue of the insufficiency of want as a tool to justify your claims to truth. And that’s when he introduced the idea of the equilibrated state. So if you’re sophisticated, you have to put forward your want and then meet it in a way that will meet it today and tomorrow and next month and next year and in a decade. So you have to iterate yourself across time. And you have to take all of the iterations of yourself across time with some degree of seriousness. And then you also have to do the same thing as you extend yourself out into the social community. So it has to be what’s good for me now and repetitively into the future in a manner that’s simultaneously good for you now and simultaneously into the future. And that starts to become, and he thought about that as the playable game, something like that, the voluntarily playable game. And there’s something deep about that, because it includes the idea of iteration, you know, iterated interpretations into the equation, which strikes me as like of crucial importance. Okay, yes. Again, I think, Mike, count about six very interesting sub topics built into that. And the latter part, a very nice statement, I think, of enlightenment humanism, where we’re going to take power seriously, but we’re going to constrain power in a way that respects the individual and simultaneously enables individuals to form mutually beneficial social networks across time, and so on. And I’m very sympathetic, right, to that overall construction. And that comes out of then the first part, which is a taxonomy, right, that you’re offering about the nature of power. And that taxonomy does differ significantly from both the Marxist right hand and the Nietzschean one. Now, what I would say is, you know, I think it’s better to take power more neutrally. So there’s a continuity with what the physicists do. My understanding there is a power is just the ability to get work done. So it’s, you know, we can put that in tool and functionality, right, language, right. Power is what gets you from A to B. Right, right. Which is also that I love that description, because it fits very nicely in with the narrative conceptualization of being because narratives seem to be descriptions of something like how to get from point A to point B. Right. But it also doesn’t say anything about B, right, and the status of B, how we choose where we should be going, right, what our ends are, right, or what our goals are going. So in that sense, power is normatively neutral. It’s a means to an end. And that means when we start to try to evaluate, right, the uses of power, we’re going to be evaluating power in terms of the ends toward which it is put. Right. If I can end with that preposition there. So now, then we say, okay, well, power comes in all kinds of forms, right. We’re quite happy to say there’s intellectual power, that’s the ability to use our minds to address and solve certain problems. There’s muscular power, the ability to move physical objects. There’s social power, you know, people respect you and are willing to spend time with you and divert resources to you, actually, voluntarily and so forth. There’s military power, political power, and so we can have a whole set of subspecies of power. And what they all have in common is in each of those domains, there are goals and having the power enables you to achieve your goals in those domains. Great. And we shouldn’t fall prey to the illusion that there’s necessarily any, like, what would you call it, unifying matrix that makes all those different forms of power importantly similar, except for the terminology. You know, I mean, and this is another thing that bothers me about the both the Nietzschean and the Marxist view is that there’s this proclivity to collapse these multiple modes of power into power itself. And that’s not reasonable, because it’s reasonable to note that many of the forms of power that you just described contend against one another rather than mutually fortifying one another. It’s like the balance of power in a polity like the American polity. Yeah, I think that’s a deep point that you’re making. I think both the Marxists and the Nietzschean do end up collapsing power into a unitary type. Right. And that’s a mistake. But it’s a mistake only if you deny, as both the Marxists and the Nietzscheans do, that there is a deep individuality about the world. So if you think by contrast, about the kind of individual human rights, respecting enlightenment vision, you’re articulating and that I agree with as well. Normatively, that wants to devolve social power to the individual, leave individuals with a great deal of self-responsibility and control over their own domain, so to speak. And the idea then is that if we’re going to form social relationships or any sort of social interaction, it has to be kind of mutually respecting that I have to respect your control over your domain and you respect my control over my domain. But we agree to share domains, so to speak, voluntarily right to a certain point. It also means, and this is a place where I think the postmodernists are really open to, you might say, conceptual assault, is that in order to have that freedom devolve upon the individual in that manner, it also means that the individual has to take responsibility for acting as a locus of power in the world, actual responsibility, and cannot conceive of themselves or act in a manner that only makes them an avatar of a social movement. And I think that part of the perverted anti-individualism of the radical left is precisely predicated on that refusal to take responsibility. And I think that’s also reflected in the fact that by temperament, they’re low in trait conscientiousness. So it’s deep, it’s not merely an opinion, it’s an expression of something that’s even deeper than opinion. Okay, that locus of responsibility, locus of power, locus of control, you’re right that the far left in Marxist and neo-Marxist form does deny that, but you also find that in far right. Yes, you find that among ideologues in general. Right, and so this is a bit of cartoon, right, to intellectual history, right, but then if you try to trace it to the Marxists on the left and the Nietzscheans on the right, both of them do deny that individuals are loci rather of responsibility. Both of them in their views of human nature have strongly deterministic views. What we call an individual, right, according to both of them, right, is just a vehicle through which outside forces are flowing, right, so to speak. Right, well you can also see that in some sense as a perverse consequence of the scientific revolution, because you still see this among modern scientists. It’s like, okay, what are the causal forces that regulate human behavior? Okay, there’s two primary sources, nature slash biology and culture. Right, so it’s the crude nature versus nurture debate, right, being played out through them, yes. Right, so in my opinion, and I’ve derived this conclusion from studying mythology mostly, is that there’s a missing third element there, which is whatever the act of force, whatever it is that constitutes the act of force of individual consciousness. Right, some sort of traditional capacity that grounds self-responsibility and being an independent initiator of power instead of merely a responder to other power forces, right, or a vehicle through which those other power forces operate. Right, so yeah, the individualism, right, that is built into enlightenment humanism, you start to see it developing in Renaissance humanism, right, is to take seriously, right, the notion that individuals have some measure, some significant measure of control over their thoughts, over their actions, to shape their own characters, to shape their own destinies, and that that is fundamental, right, to one’s moral dignity as a human being, and so that is going to be that view rather of human nature built into the ethics fundamentally, and then all of social relationships have to be respectful of that individuality, and then consequently when we start to turn to political theory and we talk about very heavy duty uses of power, such as the police and the military, we want to have serious constraints on government power to make sure that we are respecting the individual sovereignty. Well, and you know, okay, so here’s something perverse too that emerges as a consequence of something you pointed out earlier in the conversation. You know, you mentioned that when modernism emerged out of medievalism that two things happened, and one was the elaboration of the conceptual frames that enabled us to deal with the external world, but the other was the elevation of the individual to the status of valid critic, predicated on the idea that there was something actually valid about individual experience as such. Now the problem there, as far as I can tell, and maybe this is part of the reason we’re in this conundrum, is that the elaboration of the objective scientific viewpoint left us with the idea that it was either nature or nurture that was the source of human motive power, but the missing element there is, well, if that’s the case, then why grant to the individual to begin with the role of independent social critic? Like on what grounds do you, it’s like a residual belief in something like the autonomy of the soul, which you can’t just sneak in and not justify without problems, like the ones that we have now. Yeah, no, that’s well put, and I think it’s fair to say that we still are in the infancy of the psychological sciences. You can speak to this better than I can, but as someone in philosophy, I think we’re still at the beginnings, and we are still in the grip of early and crude versions, or crude scientific understandings of how cause and effect operates. And so what we are starting with is very mechanical understandings, and we can understand how people then are pushed around by biological forces. We can understand to some extent how they’re pushed around by external physical and mechanical forces, but we do not yet have a sophisticated enough understanding of the human brain, the human mind, human psychology, to understand how a volitional consciousness can be a causal force, another kind of causal power in the world. Right, so that’s perfectly well put. So in this, I do a detailed analysis that some of the people who watch me are familiar with of this movie, Pinocchio, and Pinocchio has got a very classic mythological structure, and it basically introduces three elements of being. So there’s the element of being that’s associated with Geppetto, and also the evil tyrannical forces that are kind of patriarchal in nature, and that’s sort of the conceptualization of society, a benevolent element and a malevolent element, say. And then there’s the introduction of this other causal factor, and it’s personified in the form of the Blue Fairy, and the Blue Fairy is a manifestation of Mother Nature, and she animates Pinocchio. So Geppetto creates him, and then sets up a wish for his independence, and then nature appears in the guise of the Blue Fairy and grants that wish. So you have culture and nature conspiring to produce a puppet that could, in fact, disentangle itself from its strings. But the movie insists, and it does this on profound mythological grounds, that the puppet itself has a causal role to play in its own, what would you call it, its own capacity to transcend the deterministic change that it’s been, that have the deterministic processes that have given rise to it, but that also enslaved it. And you know, in all of our profound narratives, I would say, and this is part of the way that they differ from the standard scientific account, there’s always that third element. There’s always the autonomous individual who is, in some sense, you know, lifting himself up by his own bootstraps. And I don’t think it’s a problem that science is unable to account for that, but it’s a very big problem when scientists who are unable to account for that deny that it exists because they can’t explain it. That becomes extraordinarily dangerous. Right, yeah. Once you stop looking, you stop trying, then you’re left with an impoverished account. So in a way, there’s a kind of hubris built into the skepticism that says, you know, I know that this is a problem that we just can’t solve, so I’m not going to try anymore. Yeah, well, and there’s a performative contradiction as well, which is much worth pointing out, because on the one hand, the scientists might well claim, as far as I’m concerned, from an epistemological perspective, the only two causal forces are nature and culture. But then I’ll go about my actions in the normative world as an existential being acting in the world. And I will swallow wholeheartedly the proposition that each individual is responsible for his own actions, because that’s how I constantly interact with everyone in the world. And I get very irritated if they violate that principle. Yeah, right. So how you live, so to speak, with your skepticism or with your relativism in a way that doesn’t ensnarl you in tensions and contradictions, that’s a hard project itself. Right, well, it does seem to me that I think it’s reasonable to point out that it’s not possible to find a person who acts as if he or anyone else is biologically or culturally determined. We just don’t behave that way in the real world. We act as if we’re responsible for our own actions and the consequences of those actions. Right. So then we have a tension between what our intellectual theories are telling us and what our empirical data is telling us. So we don’t yet have a way to put those two together. And then what you as an individual do in response to that tension between theory and practice, that’s a whole other kind of thing to explore. Right. To get the backup to our discussion about power, it’s interesting that the way our discussion right up to that point then integrates, right, three things. We started talking about truth, and then we started talking about goals and normative ends, right, and ideals. And then we talk about power. So there we’ve got already the big three, truth, ideals, and power. Our discussion about truth took us into epistemological issues, right, in philosophy. Our discussion about ideals takes us into ethics and meta-ethics issues, again also in philosophy. Our discussion of power takes us into issues about human nature, which traditionally, a branch of philosophy, are now lots of sub-disciplines we’re doing. So we already have to have a theory of epistemology, a theory of human nature, a theory of ethics. And we in some sense try to integrate those. And postmodernism is going to be an integration of certain views that develop in philosophical traditions in all three of those areas. So maybe one way to put it is this. If you contrast it to, again, taking the enlightenment as our touchstone, since we’re both fans of the enlightenment, we say, all right, we’re fine with power. Knowledge is power, right, and we want to empower the individual, right, we want to eliminate slavery and empower people. We want to eliminate old-fashioned sexism and empower women. So power is… Yeah, we actually want to remove arbitrary and unnecessary impediments to the expression of proper power. Yes, that’s right. So there are illegitimate uses of power that are stopping and disempowering people. So it’s the double-edged sword. And as long as power is properly directed or properly located, then we are confident that by and large people individually and socially will use their power to put together useful lives, build successful economies and societies, and so forth. So there’s actually a very optimistic overall assessment about power. But power is then structured as a means to an end, and we want to empower people cognitively, teach them how to read, teach them how to think, so that they themselves can understand the truth and discover new truths. So power leads to truth. But we also then want people to be free to act on the basis of their power, because then we think that if people are respected as individual agents, they’re going to be happier, and so they will achieve good goals, and they will work out together fair agreements and deals, a kind of justice. Society will get better and better, and so forth. So power is in the service of just social relations, and power is in the service of truth. Yeah, okay. So that’s a great justification, say, for the Enlightenment viewpoint. And it seems I don’t want to stop you from pursuing that, but it also seems to me that to the degree that that’s true, a valid description of the Enlightenment aims, and to the degree that that’s actually manifested itself in reality in the current state of human affairs, that it’s perhaps unwise of us to allow our Marxist or our Nietzschean presuppositions to take too careless a swing at that foundation, given that it’s actually good. Absolutely right. That’s why the Enlightenment articulation, right, power is good if it’s in the service of truth, or power is good if it’s in the service of justice. And we’re fine. And we’re optimistic enough about human beings, cognitively and morally, that we think empowering them, giving them lots of freedoms, is going to increase the net stock of truth, and it’s going to increase the net stock of justice. So that entire Enlightenment package is precisely what the counter-Enlightenment attacks, and attacks very fundamentally, so that by the time we get two to three generations later to the generations of Marx and Nietzsche, it has been hollowed out. So on the epistemological side, right, we don’t believe, right, that there is such a thing as truth anymore. So it’s not the case that power is in the search of truth because we don’t believe that human beings are capable of getting any sort of objective truth anymore. So we’re just left with power. And also on the normative side, we don’t believe in justice anymore. We don’t believe that any sort of normative principles or ethical ideals can be objectively grounded. And so then once again, maybe we’re left with subjective desires, right, and so forth, but we’re just left again with power. So power in the service of truth, power in the service of justice, that goes away. All we are left with is power. Okay, so then we could say we could mount a psychoanalytic critique of that set of objections, because I could say, okay, here’s some reasons. Let’s assume that you’re doing something simple. And let’s assume you’re doing something simple and easy instead of complicated and difficult with your objections. And so here’s the simple and easy explanation. You want to dispense with the idea of justice and truth because that lightens your existential load, because now there’s nothing difficult and noble that you have to strive for. And you want to reduce everything to power because that justifies your use of power in the pursuit of your immediate, in pursuit of those immediate goals that you no longer even have to justify because you don’t have to make reference to any higher standards of say, justice or truth. And so I would say that’s a deep, impulsive and resentful nihilism that’s manifesting itself as a glorious intellectual critique. Now, I understand as well that there is the history of genuine intellectual critique that you’ve been laying out, which is not trivial. But those things have to be differentiated. It’s certainly not reasonable either for those who claim that all there is is power, that they’re not themselves motivated equally by that power. Sure. So in one way, what you can always say in effect philosophy is autobiographical. In many cases philosophers will put their pronouncements in third-person form or in generalized form, but if you always put it down to power, or sorry, first-person formulations, it can be profoundly self-revelatory. So if you say, for example, human beings are scum. I think that’s some sort of pessimistic assessment of the human condition. What built into that then is the idea that I, if I first-person, I am scum. What you’re really doing is a first-person confession and it’s always been an illegitimate move to exempt yourself from the general principle. Everything just is, to come back to our more likely topic here, power relations and people imposing their agendas on other people. Then what you’re saying is, well, my fundamental commitment is power and I just want to impose my agenda on other people. So I don’t think you’re right, that it can go both ways. It can of course be that you have people who for whatever reason have a predisposition to nihilistic amoral power-seeking and when they become adults and intellectual, they latch onto theories that indulge them, that enable them to rationalize their predispositions. So in many cases, a lot of postmodernism in some of its manifestations is disingenuous in that form. People don’t necessarily buy into the postmodern philosophical framework, but rather in kind of pragmatic form, postmodernism as a set of tools is useful for them to advance their own personal and social agenda for whatever those happen to be. Okay, so let’s switch a little bit, let’s switch over into that a little bit. I mean, I found our discussion, for what it’s worth, I found our discussion extremely useful on the philosophical end, but now I would like to make it a bit more personal. So now you, if you don’t mind, you’ve written this book and it’s a fairly punchy, let’s say, critique of postmodernism and its alliance with neo-Marxism and you’ve done a careful job of laying out the historical development of that, of both of those movements and their alliance. What was your motivation for doing that and what have you experienced, one, as a consequence of writing the book and two, as a consequence of a professor who’s in the midst of an academic society that’s basically running on postmodern principles? Yeah, that’s a good trio of questions there. Well, my motivation for writing the book was, motivations plural, one is an intellectual exercise. Here was a movement that was complex, many philosophical and cultural strands coming together, and I enjoy intellectual history very much, so it was a pleasure for me to read back into the histories and to tease out all of the lines of developments and how things were packaged and repackaged so that the postmodern synthesis, as it came together in the second third of the 20th century, came into being. So, as a purely intellectual historical enterprise, I found that fulfilling. Partly also, this was the late 1990s, it’s the end of the Cold War. One of the things I had done, not professionally, but just out of personal interest was read a lot of political philosophy, read a lot about the Cold War and the intellectual developments and political developments that had gone on there. So, I had a very good, I’d say, amateur working knowledge before I started researching the book about the history of Marxism, the history of Cold War geopolitics. So, one of the big questions then on everyone’s mind, of course, in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War is, what’s going to happen next? So, what is the new geopolitical alignment going to be? But then, from my academic position, the big question inside the intellectual world is, since far left politics had been so prominent, and that for generations, intellectuals inside the academic world had largely given the benefit of the doubt to far leftist experiments, even going out of their way to be fellow travelers and so forth, that by the time you get to the end of the Cold War, basically everybody, except for a few true believers, is rethinking. So, what does this mean for, not necessarily left politics more broadly, but certainly for far left politics? And so, even the far leftist of the leftists are recognizing that they’re going to have to come up with some sort of a new strategy in order to remain intellectually respectable, some sort of a new strategy in order to become culturally and politically feasible. So, I did have a kind of a cultural-political interest in what the thinking was on the far left about what they’re going to do now that the Soviet Union has collapsed and the whole world is shifting more toward a market liberalism or to some sort of third-way centralism. Yeah, and now that all the corpses have floated up on the beach, so… Right, yes. So, you have a huge amount of empirical data that you have to confront, and I think this is certainly going to be part of the postmodern package, but there was a lot of denial of the relevance of empiricism, a lot of denial of the relevance of logic and social scientific statistical methods of aggregating that data and reaching moment of conclusions on the basis of that. So, we can understand a temptation on the part of a lot of people to find psychological devices that will enable them to deny the gulag and the various other horrible things. Right, so when the facts are stacking up viciously again, when the facts as even you would have construed them are stacking up viciously in contradiction to your theory, it’s time to mount an all-out assault on what constitutes a fact. Okay, that’s one strategy and that’s again one of the sub-strategies I think that postmoderns will use. So, if you then have philosophers and social scientists and people who are up to speed in their epistemology who are telling you, well, you know, there are just different narratives that are out there and there are no such things as objective facts and logic does not necessarily point us in one direction. There are polylogics or multiple frameworks. Then if you have one framework that says, no, there are objective facts and the logic is all going against your version of political idealism, it’s going to be very tempting for you to say, well, I can just dismiss that as just one narrative way of constructing the historical facts. I can come up with a different narrative that softens or denies all together and certainly some of the bad faith postmodernists can go down that road very much. So, in part, that was my motivation for writing the book and in part I did feel that I was in a good position intellectually to do so because my PhD work had been in logic, philosophy of science and epistemology, so I was up to speed on the entire history of epistemology from the modern world on through things or the way things were in the 80s and early 1990s. So, I was reading the same people that Rorty had. I have to say I learned an enormous amount from reading Richard Rorty, his first rate, even though I ended up disagreeing fundamentally with him about everything. Foucault’s PhD also was in philosophy. He also had a PhD in psychology. Derrida, another philosophy PhD. Lyotard, another philosophy PhD. So, not necessarily put myself on the same stature intellectually, but all of us, so to speak, are first rate educated in epistemology. So, I know where they’re coming from and where all of that is going. At the same time, my undergraduate and their master’s degree at Guelph just down the road from you in history of philosophy, so I had a long-standing passion for how arguments and movements develop over time. So, I thought I was in a good position to see how postmodernism had evolved out of various other earlier movements that had developed over time. I am enough of a political animal to be interested in political philosophy and I believe that abstract philosophical theory, when it gets put into practice, makes life and death practical differences. So, the stakes are high. So, I was motivated then to put it all together. How does the history and the philosophy and the politics all come together in postmodernism? So, I wrote the book. Now, how it has affected me personally in academic life? Well, let me see. In one way, I think I was fortunate that I had tenure by the time the book was published and my university is by and large a tolerant case. We have some issues here, but by and large my colleagues are reasonable, decent people. So, I was able to get tenure on the strength of my teaching abilities and my publication. So, it wasn’t that I was going to lose my job right over this, but of course there is blowback. I did have difficulty getting the book published right in the first place. I should finish writing the book by the year 2000. I had taken a sabbatical from 1999 to 2000 and wrote the book then, but I was not able to get the book published until 2004. The reason for that was a number of desk rejections. The editor sends a form letter back. I’ve got a few of those, but more seriously, what happened three times, possibly four times, I don’t remember exactly now, was it would get past the editor at the press and then it would be sent out to two or three reviewers. In each case, what happened was I would get split and polarized split reviews. One would come back and say, now this is a really good book. He’s done his homework. It’s a good argument. It’s a fresh argument. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but this really ought to be out there as a book. Then the other review or the other two reviews on the other side would be equally savaging. This is a terrible book. He doesn’t know his history of philosophy. He’s butchered just that or the other thing. I strongly recommend that you don’t publish this book. Then almost always in that situation, the editor just said no. It wasn’t until I guess late 2003, early 2004, Scholargy, which was in a small press working out of Arizona, took the book on. I’m happy to say that after it was published, it’s been in print consistently since then. Yeah, that’s remarkable. That’s remarkable for any book, let alone an academic book. Yeah. Then multiple translations and those continue. I’m happy about that. Let’s say the scholarly responses have been from moderate liberals, so kind of traditional, don’t want to use the word necessarily traditional, but rational, naturalistic, liberal thinkers, conservatives and libertarians. The reviews have all been strong and strongly positive, but I’ve not received any formal reviews from any of the postmodern or far left journals. I’m not sure what that means, but there is at least some level of unwillingness to engage. Well, it might be a sign of respect. Well, there is one sign of respect that comes out, and that is that every, I’d say once a year, so probably a dozen times since the book has been published, I’ve been asked by the editor of a postmodern or close fellow traveler critical theory type of journal to be a second reviewer on one of their articles. I’m in their Rolodex, so to speak, to use the old fashioned label as that when they are actually looking for someone who’s likely to give an objective but critical perspective on some article that’s been submitted to the journal, once in a while my name floats up and they’ll send it out to me, so I’ll just do the standard thing of reading it and giving my professional opinion of it. So I think they are aware of me, but there hasn’t really been any direct intellectual engagement, which is kind of sad. Yeah, so now when you set yourself up to write the book, were you thinking of writing a critique of postmodernism or were you thinking of conducting an exploration of postmodernism? Well, right now I’m working on the critique. The book ends, I don’t want to say abruptly, because it did set out the purpose that it does, but it does end with the door open, right? To say how then do we respond to this dead end of counter-enlightenment thought in postmodernism? Obviously we’re at a point culturally where the meaning of postmodernism has now, you know, it’s infected the academy and we see problems there, but it’s also left the academy, and so thoughtful people outside the academy are seeing results. And so the big question is, what do we do next? So I am actively working on the sequel to explaining postmodernism now. And I did go back and forth in the writing of it. My first purpose was to write a straight diagnosis and intellectual history of postmodernism, and that’s where I ended up leaving it, because in one sense this is a bit artificial, but I really like 200-page books. It’s kind of long enough for you to get into a subject deeply enough and to make a good, pointed, integrated argument and then stop. And so I realized if I wrote the sequel then it would be a 400-page book, and I thought it was more important to get this self-contained intellectual history of postmodernism out there, so I brought things to, I think, a logical conclusion right where I did, ended the book, and now I’m working on the next. What’s the next one called? It just has a working title. It changes every few months or so. Sometimes I think about it, the fate of the Enlightenment or something to do with neo-Enlightenment. It won’t be this, but postmodernism or after postmodernism. We’ve been struggling with terminology as well, the kind that I’ve been talking about with such things. It’s a very hard thing to do because it’s, as we’ve seen philosophically, postmodernism is multi-dimensional. It’s a metaphysical critique, it’s a normative critique, it’s a political critique, it’s an epistemological set of views, and so the alternative then also has to be integrated philosophically. There has to be an entire philosophical package, and so what label is going to capture all of that and at the same time make a connection to postmodernism? And also, I’m basically an optimistic positive guy, so I want something that has a positive… Luminates the pathway forward. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Making the world a better place. Right, right, exactly, exactly. So look, I think an hour and a half interview is approximately the equivalent of a 200-page book. So why don’t we end with that, and what I would like to propose is that we have another discussion in a couple of months about what you’re thinking about with regards to what you’re writing now. So we’ve covered the intellectual territory, we’ve covered the historical territory, and done a reasonably good job, I think, of both justifying postmodernism in this discussion and also pointing out its pitfalls and dangers. We haven’t outlined much for an alternative vision except making tangential reference to the potency of individual capacity, but that would seem to be reasonable grounds for the next discussion. That would also be worth the next time we chat, talking about the current culture war issues, one of the things I’m very interested in is younger people in particular, who are in the front lines in universities, so to speak, and they’re surrounded and bewildered and angry, and in some cases intimidated by all of this microaggressions and so forth, and in some cases the indoctrination they’re getting. But I’m actually kind of glad that we didn’t talk about the more political end of it today, because it enabled us to have a conversation that was almost entirely philosophical in nature, and I really think that’s the right level of analysis, because the battle that’s occurring in our culture is actually occurring at a philosophical level. There’s other levels as well, but that’s even more important in the political level as far as I’m concerned. Well said, I agree 100 percent, nicely put. All right, well it was a pleasure speaking with you, it was very much worthwhile. You have a remarkable capacity for tracking the content of conversations and keeping them on point, so that’s quite amazing to see, because we did branch out in a lot of different directions more or less simultaneously, and it was quite helpful in keeping the course on track that you could so rapidly organize the, you know, it was almost like you’re putting a paragraph structure in the conversation as it occurred, so that was something that was really interesting to see. So anyways, it was a pleasure meeting you, and thanks very much for talking with me, and obviously I’ve been recommending your book. Sorry, go ahead. I want to say much respect for the work you’re doing, thanks for having me on your show, and I’ll be happy to talk again. Great, good, we’ll set that up. All right, thanks Jordan. See ya, bye bye.