Episode #118 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I hope you love the show today.

So, even though the insights of structuralism were massively influential on the progression of human thought, it’s really only around for a couple years before it starts to face some pretty heavy critiques from people. And these critiques generally fall into one of two broad categories. One category are critiques of the actual works of structuralism itself. But the other category of critiques is something actually much more fundamental. It’s a critique that’s much more internal to structuralism. Structuralism in a sense starts to consume itself. The beginning of this line of thinking is probably something many of you listening to this have already thought about just as we’ve been talking about this.

The idea is, so, if our subjectivity and the ideas we have about the way the world is is not actually the way the world is but is instead a mythology that has been given to us by an almost infinitely narrow set of cultural parameters that dictate what it is possible for us to think -- wait a second. Didn’t the ideas of structuralism emerge out of that very same narrow climate? What does that say about structuralism? A little further down that line of thinking, what would happen if the fields of economics, anthropology, sociology, history, and most importantly philosophy, what would happen if people that were internal to those fields were to use the insights of structuralism to examine their respective fields and uncover the structures underneath them? What happens when you use structuralism to analyze structuralism?

These questions and many of the questions that are to follow and the problems that you arrive at when you actually do the legwork implied there, this all led a group of thinkers to become increasingly dissatisfied with structuralism. This group eventually became known as the post-structuralists. But to history, a core group of them would eventually become known as postmodernist philosophers.

Now, I want to speak very generally for a second about what is meant when someone references postmodernist thought or postmodernist philosophers because there are a couple different answers to that question. See, in one sense, there’s no neat and tidy way to nail down the definition of postmodernism. I’ve heard it said before that, if you’re listening to somebody speak, the more they throw around the word “postmodernism” when they’re referencing some specific, codified set of ideas, the less likely it is they actually know what they’re talking about. And the reason why that’s the case is because, even within groups of postmodern thinkers, there are often huge variances in terms of what they believe and clearly way more disagreements than agreements the more nuanced your understanding of it gets.

But, nonetheless, it’s incredibly useful to at least understand the beginning, the context that the critique of postmodernism emerged out of. And I think when you combine that context with an analysis of several of the key thinkers that have done work in this area over the years, you can at the very least understand how postmodernism fits into the state of the Western world over the last 50 years or so. And I think the best place to start if you wanted to do something like that is just to look at the actual word itself: postmodern. What is meant when someone says that something is postmodern? Well, of course the prefix “post” means after or implies that we’re beyond something. So the real question is, what does it mean to say that we are beyond modern?

Well, regardless of the way the word “modern” is used in a colloquial setting or just in casual conversations among people, within philosophical discourse, the word “modernity” has been used for centuries by this point to specifically reference the goals, projects, and attitudes of the Enlightenment: reason instead of faith, induction instead of deduction, science as the dominant method of arriving at truth and objectivity, proportioning your belief to the evidence, and so on. To a postmodernist thinker, none of these things are necessarily bad in themselves. The thing that they want to get “post,” the thing they want to get beyond, are a collection of epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological assumptions that were unknowingly smuggled in by 17th century thinkers all those years ago. And we’ll talk about specific examples of these in a second. But the big point here is, to a postmodernist, these assumptions have caused humanity to be incredibly misguided for hundreds of years. To a postmodernist, the attitude of the Enlightenment is a mistaken phase in the progression of human thought that’s causing enormous damage the longer we don’t get past it.

Probably the best way to describe the way a postmodernist would see a fan of the Enlightenment is to compare it to the way a fan of the Enlightenment might view someone that was a proponent of the dominant way of thinking that came before them in the middle ages, say, from the perspective of religious fundamentalism of some sort. Now, before I give this example, I totally realize this is an oversimplification both of the attitudes of the Enlightenment and of the perspective of a religious fundamentalist. But the point of this example is to illustrate that oftentimes there is epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological baggage that gets smuggled in with our foundational beliefs. And it’s easy to not realize that you’re smuggling it in.

So, just for the sake of the example, hypothetically, a fan of the Enlightenment might look at several of the foundational beliefs of a religious fundamentalist and, from the perspective of the Enlightenment, many of those beliefs may seem to be outdated, naïve. And, if you were to continue to believe them after being made aware of the lack of evidence for them, some of those beliefs may start to seem downright delusional to a fan of the Enlightenment. And these beliefs would be so foundational that they would no doubt inadvertently make assumptions that tread into the territory of epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, and all the other branches of any particular worldview.

Just to give a few examples, the idea that there is an all-powerful guy up in the sky that knows you by your first name, oh, and he’s also the ultimate source of any truth claim that can be made. Now, that’s certainly a belief that carries with it a lot of metaphysical and epistemological baggage. How about that what it is to be you is to be an incorporeal spirit that is inhabiting this body and that upon death you will float out of this body and go off to some other realm and never have to die? Well, that’s a belief that carries with it very clear ontological baggage among other things. The idea that demons and spirits exist and that they sometimes inhabit inanimate objects or possess a goat or something or turn light switches on and off to scare people -- that carries with it baggage as well.

Now, to a fan of the Enlightenment, it wouldn’t matter whether these beliefs made the fundamentalist feel better. It wouldn’t matter if holding these beliefs allowed the fundamentalist to feel like they had ultimate access to a single, centralized theory of what it is to exist. To a fan of the Enlightenment, there’d be no logical reason to continue believing these things. Now, this is not me hammering on fundamentalism here. This is an important point to make because it’s incredibly similar to the way a postmodernist would view a fan of the Enlightenment if they persisted with several foundational assumptions that thinkers made in the 1700s that you can still see in people’s worldviews to this day, the same way you can still find religious fundamentalists if you look for them.

In fact, a few postmodernist thinkers have speculated that many of the assumptions Enlightenment-era thinkers made are really just extensions of assumptions made in religious societies that their societies structurally emerged from: for example, the over-exaggeration of our level of free will and autonomy to be able to preserve the idea that there is a black-and-white, simple way of saying whether someone is morally good or not. Religious fundamentalism needs that. Some postmodernists would say that the Enlightenment thinkers carried on its legacy, and this manifested in many different ways over the years, as Kantian subjectivity, Hegelian subjectivity. It pervades practically all the works of the existentialists. It allows thinkers to arrive at grand narratives about what it is to exist as a human being. It allows nice, convenient, catch-all maxims to be created: man is condemned to be free and things like that. The outlook is, there are an infinite number of decisions you could possibly make, an infinite number of ideas you might arrive at if you reason clearly and distinctly enough. The only thing limiting you is your own intellect and creativity.

Well, this classic Enlightenment-era take on human subjectivity to a postmodernist would seem outdated, naïve, and to continue to believe it based on what we know now would be delusional. That -- as we’ve talked about on earlier episodes -- to a postmodernist, what you really see when you take a deep look at human subjectivity under a microscope is that what you are is a single instantiation of an almost infinitely narrow set of cultural and historical parameters that dictate not only everything you do think but the narrow limits to what you can think. And, while it’s no doubt convenient to be able to arrive at these grand narratives and no doubt exciting for philosophers over the years to try to come up with some sort of unified theory -- you know, the ultimate take on what it is to exist -- not too different from the fundamentalists they claim to despise -- that convenience, to a postmodernist, is no reason to persist in a delusional belief.

Now, you may be saying, “Well, who cares? I mean, it’s not like this take on subjectivity was crucial to the projects of the Enlightenment. I mean, can’t you be a fan of everything else the Enlightenment had to offer and just concede this one point?” Well, let’s talk about another point of disagreement between postmodernist and Enlightenment thinkers. One classic idea that stems from the Enlightenment is that there is an objective reality that we all exist in. We have access to this reality through our senses. Yes, our senses are flawed, but let’s be realistic here. They ultimately are the only tools we have to be able to arrive at knowledge about things. Now, the scientific method is an incredible way to use these senses to get knowledge about this reality. And, while it’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to happen overnight, scientists are going to have to check their egos, biases, and prejudices at the door, and, yeah, they’re not always going to be good at doing that, but nonetheless, if we persist diligently enough, if we conduct enough experiments, we will arrive at a progressively more accurate and detailed picture of what this reality is that we exist in.

To a postmodernist, this belief would be outdated, naïve, and based on what we know presently would be delusional to keep believing. To a postmodernist, it’s crucial for us to realize, knowledge is always knowledge from a particular perspective. What you have is not some sort of disinterested lens that’s the exact same as every other human being around you, and we’re all using these identical lenses to examine this objective reality and way that things are. No, to some postmodernists, what you have is an extremely narrow, culturally and historically determined method of perceiving. And that’s all you can reasonably claim to have, a set of cultural biases that you use to make sense of things that cannot be separated from your experience. There’s no such thing as a scientist checking their ego and biases at the door. They may check the ones they’re self-aware of. But what about the ones they don’t even know they have? What about the biases and theories that make perception even possible, the ones that dictate what resolution the scientist is chopping up the world in, the ones that run all the way down to the very process of organizing reality in a coherent way? To be perceiving anything at all is to be perceiving from a particular, narrow, biased perspective that allows you to make sense of the world.

Couple that with the fact that, to some postmodernists, what we mean when we say something is true really just means that it’s passed a particular culture’s methods for verifying what a true statement is. And, when you consider how much that has changed throughout human history, a postmodernist would be very skeptical of any claim that the things we say we know about the universe are anything that even remotely resembles this objectivity that people talk about. Now, that said, it’s important to acknowledge, if you were someone in the Enlightenment era who aspired to use science as a means to arrive at some grand narrative about the nature of reality as it exists objectively, in other words, if following up on what religion ambitiously claimed to do before you -- postmodernists, might say naively claimed to do -- if at the forefront of your mind you were trying to replicate that enormous goal through science, it may be convenient for you to believe, “Hey, from my incredibly narrow and biased perspective I seem to have harnessed objective reality, the ultimate unified theory for the way reality is!” No matter how convenient it would be for that to be true, reality is nowhere near as convenient, to a postmodernist.

Take another point of disagreement: the traditional way the Western world has thought about the concept of the self and identity. Once again, say you’re a psychologist in the Enlightenment, and you’re in the business of using science to hopefully uncover a theory about personality types and what it is to be a self. And you conducted that analysis from a narrow cultural perspective given to you by a society that structurally emerged from a long tradition in the West of looking at the self as a static, fixed, stable thing that can be studied. If that was your situation, it may seem totally reasonable to set up some sort of grand narrative, some centralized theory of where the self and identity lies. Maybe you’ll use binary oppositions to classify people into different categories. Are you curious versus cautious? Are you introverted versus extroverted, organized versus careless, friendly versus challenging? And maybe you’ll give them a list of statements, and you’ll ask them how strongly they identify with them. And, based on their answers, you can give them a score on their level of conscientiousness and agreeableness and extroversion. At the end of this whole process, it is reasonable to assume that you can reliably nail down who it is that they are. And this person can look at this assessment of themselves. They can believe that identity is a stable thing; the self that you identify as, who you are is a fixed thing. And look no further than these scores you’ve been given by a grand narrative designed to tell you what it is to be you.

To a postmodernist, this hallmark of Western thought, this stable, fixed self that you can grab onto with both hands and brandish around and put in the About Me section of your Facebook page, that level of stability just doesn’t exist when it comes to identity. And to believe that it does is an outdated, naïve way of looking at it. When you really take a deep look at the self and the things you identify as moment to moment, what you see is this constantly changing, fleeting collection of thoughts and feelings and actions that vary in massive ways based on the context you’re in or the people you’re around or the options at your disposal. And, I mean, honestly, even to try to put it in these terms is oversimplifying the way a postmodernist sees it.

Like every one of these points of disagreement we’ve talked about here today, it’s impossible to give a complete picture when we’re speaking this generally about ideas. But you can at least understand the fundamental disagreement that’s going on here that we’ll cover in more detail in a future episode. To a postmodernist, self-identity cannot be as simple as this picture the Enlightenment paints about it. And to try to speak about self-identity solely in terms of it being this fixed thing that’s determined by looking at how people relate to binary oppositions is a mistake, especially when considering those binary oppositions were created arbitrarily by people that were trying to come up with some grand, ultimate theory for what it is to be a self. Once again, to a postmodernist, self-identity would certainly be less confusing if it were that simple, would be convenient if that’s the way it was, but it clearly is not.

Now, this talk about convenience is just getting repetitive at this point, and there’s a reason for that. So, I want to point out a similarity so far between all these examples of disagreements we’ve talked about. What is common among all of them? To a postmodernist, one of the key mistakes of the thinkers of the Enlightenment was their belief in this classical idea of there being an ultimate truth that can be arrived at. Just to clarify that for a second, not belief in the existence of truth, but the belief that it’s a reasonable proposition that we can arrive at truth given the situation we’re born into as human beings. To a postmodernist, all we can honestly say we have access to are cultural discourses, various attempts by human beings to interpret and make sense of reality from an extremely narrow, biased perspective. And to think you’re arriving at something like the classical way we used to describe capital-T Truth is to be participating in a game that is delusional, as delusional as the religious fundamentalists of the past. I mean, a postmodernist might say, what a coincidence that so many Enlightenment rationalists talk about Truth with a capital T the same way their ancestors talked about God with a capital G. The people looking for both hold each of them with an equal level of delusional reverence.

This search for the ultimate truth of the universe is a game that we’ve been playing. Now, the consequences of participating in that sort of game and believing in your ability to access objective truth, the consequences that you invariably try to arrive at grand narratives and centralized theories that make sweeping claims about the way that things are and attempt to turn your narrow perspective into what reality is for everyone, philosophers have been doing this from the very beginning. “This is what it is to be a human being.” “This theory is what it is to exist.” “This method of analysis will tell us what it is to be a self.” This has all been a mistake. And this is what postmodernists want to get “post” or beyond. They want to get beyond this hallmark of modernity, this mistaken phase in human thought where we thought it was possible to arrive at grand narratives that give us access to capital-T Truth about things.

Because, even though this is just a game we’ve been playing, to a postmodernist, this is not a harmless game. These grand narratives create massive problems for our species when they’re actually put into practice. Because what happens when you establish these grand narratives is you create what’s most commonly referred to as points of unity or points of unification. I’ve seen them called other things, but these terms are by far the most common. But here’s the important point here. To a postmodernist, these points of unity that emerge out of these grand narratives, these are the sets of ideas that people gather around, organize groups around, attach their identity to, and ultimately become tribal and marginalize other groups on behalf of. People ultimately carry out that whole process when they have some sort of grand narrative or point of unity to reference.

This is why, to a postmodernist, the solution to so many of the problems modernity has produced lies in fragmentation. Now, this is a word we’re going to return back to many times throughout this series. An extremely common tactic suggested by postmodernists when trying to find solutions to the tribal problems these grand narratives cause is fragmentation of these points of unity, deconstruction and fragmentation of any grand narratives or unified theories, fragmentation of rigid sets of ideas, academic consensus and things like that; fragmentation of economic or political ideology, Marxism, capitalism, nationalism; I mean, even in recent years the concept of progressivism and what that even means. To some postmodernists, this fragmentation extends all the way down to the fragmentation of society itself.

Now, the fragmentation of society may carry with it a certain negative connotation for you. Why would anyone want society to be more fragmented? I mean, a unified society is a powerful society. Well, we’ll give the long answer in future episodes, but the short answer to that is, to a postmodernist, society does not need to be as unified as it has been historically to be able to function well. And, when you consider that history, when you consider how many problems these grand narratives and points of unity have caused for us in the past, we’re actually much better off when society is not as unified. Another way of putting that would be, in order for society to function well, not everyone needs to be the exact same person. I mean, if you’re a government, it certainly is convenient when everyone’s the same person because they’re much easier to control. But, to a postmodernist, we don’t all need to pray to the same god or believe in the same causes. We don’t all need to do the same things or wear the same clothes or think of who we are as people in terms of how we fit into rigid categories that have been set up in the past. Because to a postmodernist all we have access to are varying cultural discourses from narrow, biased perspectives, it actually only helps us as a species to have as many of those narrow, different perspectives contributing to our understanding of things. Fragmentation, in a sense, makes society better.

Now, of course, this is far from uncontroversial. There are a lot of critiques of this being the way to structure societies and many critiques of these ideas in general. And we’re going to talk about them. Next episode we’re going to be talking about the difference between the way Enlightenment rationalism views the concept of meaning as opposed to a postmodernist take on meaning. And we’re going to do this by starting to look at the work of Jacques Derrida. But, before we get there, I want to say one last thing about these initial critiques of structuralism that’s going to end up being very important down the line.

So, at the beginning of the episode I said there are these fundamental, internal critiques of structuralism and post-structuralism and postmodernism. But I also said there were another category of critiques that focused on the actual works of structuralism itself. Well, one of those works was the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and his theory of binary oppositions. Thinkers quickly noticed a couple things that didn’t seem to add up there. One is that it seemed oversimplified to them. When people actually use these tools of binary oppositions to make sense of things, it’s never 100 percent an either/or thing. I mean, nothing is ever that simple. Your table isn’t either clean or dirty and that’s it. Someone isn’t either sane or insane. There’s always a middle ground and practically an infinite number of points of possible delineation between whatever binary opposition you’re talking about.

So this made some philosophers think, if anyone is ever thinking about things strictly in this either/or, binary way, they’re probably oversimplifying it. And they may be using some sort of grand narrative or centralized theory to justify it. Binary oppositions are cultural tools that allow members of that culture to make sense of the world around them. And what thinkers started to notice is that, when people use these tools in practice, they always seem to privilege one side of the binary opposition over the other.

Let’s talk about an example of this: classic binary opposition that we use to make sense of things, presence versus absence. Well, picture an empty room. When you describe that room, you would describe it as, well, an empty room. In other words, you would think of that room as having an absence of presence, not a presence of absence. Now, imagine the same room with a chair in the middle of it. You think of that room as having the presence of the chair, not the absence of absence. Now, this may seem like a pointless thing to focus on, but what it seemed like to thinkers at the time is that it may be impossible to use these cultural tools without bringing privilege to one side of a binary opposition based on the context someone is in. And what follows from that is that the necessity to do that runs to the deepest levels of whatever culture is using the binary oppositions. And I’ll leave you to predict how that might create problems in the future when looking at other binary oppositions we use that aren’t about a chair sitting in an empty room.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.