Stephen Hicks: Postmodernism: Reprise

Dr. Stephen R.C. Hicks is professor of philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA. Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship and Senior Scholar at the Atlas Society. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Guelph in Canada and his PhD in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He's published four books translated into 16 different languages. In 2004, and expanded in 2011, he published "Explaining Post-Modernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault." In 2010, he published "Nietzsche and the Nazis," in 1994, with the second edition in 1998. He published "The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis," co-edited with David Kelly. And he published “What Year Was Entrepreneurial Living Published?” 16.2016. In 2016, he published "Entrepreneurial Living," co-edited with Jennifer Herold.

He's also published in academic journals such as "Business Ethics Quarterly," "Teaching Philosophy," and "Review of Metaphysics," as well as other publications such as "The Wall Street Journal," "Cato Unbound," and "The Baltimore Sun." In 2010, he won his university's Excellence in Teaching Award. He has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., a Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, Senior Fellow at the Objectivist Center in New York, and Visiting Professor at the University of Kashmir the Great in Poland.

"Dr. Hicks' work on post-modernism, explaining post-modernism, skepticism, and socialism from Rousseau to Foucault—that’s the 2011 book—and in particular has been quite controversial. So, I thought we would start with that."

"Good. Thanks for having me. You published 'Explaining Post-Modernism' in 2011 in the revised version. How has it been selling, first of all? What sort of reaction are you garnering?"

"Yeah, sales have been steady, which is gratifying for an academic book. In the last, I would say, three to four years, sales have picked up again, just because post-modernism has spilled out from being a primarily intellectual movement to a more broadly cultural movement. As a result of that, I’d say the reactions have been strongly polarized, particularly among philosophers. The reactions tend to be positive; as we talk with intellectuals outside of the area of philosophy, the reactions start to become more mixed to outright hostile. Also, interestingly, among the broadly-thinking public, there's been a lot of response to it, so that's been gratifying again. Of course, the reactions are polarized because post-modernism is a very strong, right, vigorous movement. That makes some very audacious, in my view, destructive claims. And then, as we're seeing when they spill out into the cultural arena, people realize the stakes are high."

"And we have the usual kinds of social media debates that we have."

"I'm going to do something terrible here; I'm going to start again. I’m sorry, my recorder, my audio record, it wasn’t functioning. Okay, so well that way I’ll get the intro right anyways with 2016, so that’ll be some small benefit to doing it. So, no problem, that's our warm-up."

"So in 2016, there we go, 'Entrepreneurial Living' was co-edited with Jennifer Laurel. All right, so we'll start that again. Steven Darcy Hicks is professor of philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA. Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship and Senior Scholar at the Atlas Society. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Guelph in Canada and his PhD in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He's published four books translated into 16 different languages. In 2004 and expanded in 2011, he published 'Explaining Post-Modernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.' In 2010, 'Nietzsche and the Nazis' in 1994 with the second edition in 1998. He published 'The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis,' co-edited with David Kelly, and in 2016 'Entrepreneurial Living,' co-edited with Jennifer Harrell. He's published in academic journals such as 'Business Ethics Quarterly,' 'Teaching Philosophy,' and 'Review of Metaphysics,' as well as other publications such as 'The Wall Street Journal,' 'Cato Unbound,' and 'The Baltimore Sun.' In 2010, he won his university's Excellence in Teaching Award."

"Dr. Hicks has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., a Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, Senior Fellow at the Objectivist Center in New York, and Visiting Professor at the University of Casimir the Great in Poland. So welcome today and thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me."

"Yeah, well, thanks for having me back. Yeah, I thought we might start by talking about 'Explaining Post-Modernism' again, your 2011 book 'Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault,' because I know that it's been perhaps more controversial of late than it was when you originally published it."

"Absolutely! Oh, the sales and the academic and the public reaction."

"Right. Well, sales have been strong. The book was originally published in 2004. It sold steadily for the first decade or so, which is quite gratifying for an academic book. Then starting about three years ago, in part because post-modernism started to spill out of the stricter academic intellectual world into the broader cultural world, sales picked up again, and there’s been a two-front set of discussions: one at the intellectual level and one of the more public thinking public level as well."

"Yet gratifyingly, lots of translations; I think there will be three more translations added this year: Arabic, Hebrew, and Estonian are in the works, so all together I'm pleased with that."

"The reactions are quite polarized, in part because reactions to post-modernism itself are polarized. It’s an extreme movement as good deep thinking should be. Even if I disagree fundamentally with post-modernism, it is a well-articulated negative outlook on most of life's philosophical questions. And so we should expect that any movement that pushes buttons fundamentally like that should get some extreme reactions. The same thing holds for me. When I push back against, in my book, some of these strong, to my mind, ultimately nihilistic claims that post-modernism ends up making, I also get the negative pushback. The pushback kind of comes in two forms."

"I've found that from the professional reviews, there have been, to my knowledge, by professional philosophers in the philosophy journals, and they are generally strong to very strongly positive. The normal scholarly quibbles arise when I get pushback for, sorry, reviews from academics outside the philosophy. They tend to be more polarized, so I’m strong in favor, but then particularly people in history, in sociology, in rhetoric studies, and literature, places where there are stronger contingents of postmodern thinkers, I tend to get strongly negative responses. And those responses are also mirrored in the general thinking public when they respond and write back and write reviews."

"Maybe to bring people up to date for you to give us a brief overview of your view of post-modernism, like a definition. It's one of those tricky terms, like existentialism or phenomenology, that are bandied about by people educating people on a fairly regular basis, but right where the definition itself is slippery and difficult to pin down."

"So, right, talk a little bit about how you view post-modernism and also what argument you made with regards to the history of its development."

"Right. Well, it makes sense that it’s slippery in part because post-modernism philosophically avoids categorizations, avoids broad sweeping statements, although they do make some. So anytime you try to make a precise broad sweeping claim about what this post-modernism amounts to, you will get pushback on that. But there is a broadly unifying set of themes to post-modernism. If you start by breaking the term down, it's post-modernism. So first you have to say, what is modernism such that post-modernism is reacting against it or saying that we need to go beyond?"

"Modernism is used variously in different fields of modernism in art, in literature. I'm using a philosophical and historical understanding of post-modernism, and that's how it's mostly used now. That is to say, we look at the modern world, so that essentially is the last four to five hundred years of history at least in the Western tradition. So, what's going on in the world five hundred years ago is a revolutionary transformation of Western society. We have Columbus crossing the ocean, and so we're entering into a new era of globalization. The Renaissance is in full swing and its impact late 1400s early 1500s is now being felt all over Europe. There is the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, so religious life in the West is being dramatically transformed. You see the beginnings of science with thinkers like Copernicus and Vesalius in anatomy, and thus scientific method is being developed and all the things that we now recognize as the scientific disciplines are being founded."

"So that's the modern world, starting four or five hundred years ago. Philosophically, we start looking at the analyses that are being offered by thinkers like Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and others, and we see that they are putting thought on a different foundation from that that had gone on earlier. What happened with the modernists, maybe if we try to sum it up, is that there seems to be this emerging consensus that the world was rationally intelligible, and that human beings could explore both physically and mentally and also come to predict and control the transformations of the material world. I mean, it seems to me that that's the fundamental element of, let's say, the scientific and, therefore, also the modernist perspective, but also I think that what went along with that was the idea that progress, genuine progress in knowledge was possible, and along with that the benefits of progress both conceptually and technologically. I mean, it seems to me to be, it seems to me to be fair to point out that that movement for substantive fruit—I mean, yes, argue about the misery that the modernist movement caused along the way, say with regards to the advancement of military technology and so forth—but it seems indisputable to me that the average human being is far better off now than he or she was, well, certainly 200 years ago and absolutely 500 years ago."

"Right? So this revolution in thought with the subsequent developments in science and technology. We certainly can judge philosophies by their fruits, and so we can then say, yeah, absolutely, we're living longer, we're living healthier, we're living less pain-free lives. We're able to enjoy more art, more leisure, and so forth. So all of the things that—and again, this is a value judgment—if you think those are all good things, then we're doing a whole lot better as a result of that philosophy."

"No, the other side though, I want to emphasize here is that you emphasize that the world is rationally intelligible that along with modernism came the claim that it was rationally intelligible to each individual, rather than there being an elect number of people who have special cognitive insights into the mysteries of the universe, or that there are certain authoritative institutions that are controlled by elites and only they are the ones who have cognitive and therefore social authority to make various pronouncements. Part and parcel of the rise of modernism is a broadly universalizing of that each individual is born with the rational capacity and that with proper training, education, literacy, and so forth, they can come to understand the world for themselves. They can be self-responsible, they can take charge of their lives, and as a result of that, we should have an extension of rights that used to be prerogatives only of the few—an expansion of freedom. You can do whatever you want with your life, broadly speaking, and so what we then see is that it’s not only a religious elite or a political elite that is empowered, but rather every human being."

"And then we can see systematically over the course of the next century it gets extended to not only males who own property but to all males, and then to women, and then to people of other ethnicities and other races as we push back against all of this. So we have this notion of universal rights and universal self-responsibility, universal freedom that I think also is part and parcel of the modern movement."

"Well, the thing about science that makes it so peculiar, I think, is that science is actually a technology that enables people who are bright but not that bright, let’s say, to genuinely produce advances in knowledge because of the method, right? Meaning if you’re a careful scientist—look, when we studied what predicted academic achievement, for example, both in graduate school and among faculty members, creativity didn’t even enter the equation. That’s interesting. Noted conscientiousness. But I think it's partly because with the scientific method you can actually break down your knowledge seeking into a set of implementable technological steps, and that enables it to be implemented on an incredibly broad scale."

"And even if a lot of it is error-ridden, which is obviously the case and to a scandalous degree, to some, what lately it still means that as hundreds of thousands of us and increasingly now millions of us grind away slowly at this careful technology of knowledge acquisition, that overall, we do seem to be able to predict and control the world better."

"Then that started to become questioned, you know. One of the things that seem to characterize post-modernism, one definition that I've read is skepticism of meta-narratives, right? That's sorry, that's from Jean-François Lyotard, and he is the one credited with labeling post-modernism philosophically, right? So, and defining it as a skepticism toward meta-narratives, what that means—there's a couple of things built into that. One is, of course, the skepticism in philosophy for the last century and a half or so has entered an increasingly skeptical mode, so that pushes back against the very broad claims that the early modernists are making, that the power of reason is great, it is highly competent, and that essentially we can figure out all of the important truths of the world."

"We can come up with a big story that explains everything—a big narrative—ultimately not necessarily that any one individual will contain all of that knowledge in his or her mind, but certainly communally, there will have a huge amount of knowledge. We will slowly, as you're putting it together, piece together a big picture worried about the way the world works and then in principle there’s nothing about the universe that we can’t figure out; they’re just things that we haven’t been able to figure out yet. So the skepticism that Lyotard and the others are talking about is a skepticism about that grand set of claims, right—a meta-narrative, a narrative that encompasses everything. Instead, we’re left with smaller narratives, and then as the movement develops, we should be skeptical even about the truth status or the knowledge status of those smaller narratives. So what becomes important in the post-modern tradition is a skepticism about our ability to know the world, and in milder form, as much as the modern thinkers thought we could, and in stronger post-modern form, that maybe there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as knowledge. Instead, all we have is opinions and beliefs that are subjectively held but don’t have any objective influence."

"So, for example, they seem to be convinced in some strange way of something that disturbed me when I first really discovered dictionaries when I was a kid. You know, I’d look up a word in the dictionary, and of course, it would just refer to another word in the dictionary, and that would refer to another word in the dictionary. And yes, in some sense, any definition outside of the dictionary—and the French intellectuals that were so influential in the post-modern world seemed to think of meaning in exactly that way. They exactly understood that linguistic meaning is necessarily embedded in a larger linguistic context so that each word is dependent on each phrase and each phrase is dependent on each sentence. And so there’s a contextual dependency absolutely on linguistic framing, but they seem to me to—and this is one of the major problems, I think, of post-modernism in the university—is that they seem to deny or ignore the existence of any world whatsoever outside of linguistic construction."

"And that’s something that strikes me as extraordinarily curious—that that’s a real denial of nature in my estimation, but also something tremendously dangerous because, well, assuming that you think that physics and biology and chemistry actually have any sort of genuine reality? It denies the existence of a substrate of existence that the purely linguistic relates to. I mean, I always think of words as being—they're not so much descriptions; they're tools that you use to operate on the world with, and the consequences of those operations are actually manifest in the world of sensation and perception and emotion and motivation and embodiment rather than purely on a linguistic level."

"And so I also don't really understand how it could be that our intellectuals could come to the conclusion that—this seems like a primarily French idea—that our ideas are primarily constructed linguistically. I mean, how do I resist under those circumstances?"

"Yeah, now that strong form of linguistic skepticism that you’re articulating is most pronounced in Jacques Derrida, and he does bill himself as a post-structuralist, and that's a linguistic version of post-modernism. But the challenge here is that our view is that consciousness is a relational phenomenon; it's responsive to an external world, and that should be the fundamental realist commitment that we make."

"The problem that the post-structuralists are coming up with by the time we get to Derrida, I should say—the idea that there isn’t any sort of ontological substrate matching on to—not all of the post-modernists will buy into that as strongly as Derrida does. They might say, well, there’s something out there, but we can’t know what the relationship is between our concepts and our words and an external reality. So the point though is that the words that we use are abstractions, and they do come along fairly far or high up in our cognitive development. If you want to argue that consciousness is a response to reality or that consciousness is a relational phenomenon, as I do, to maintain that objective relational commitment there, all you then have to do is take up all of the skeptical arguments that want to put consciousness out of relationship or to say that there’s no way to bridge this gap between the subject and the object."

"Once you start going down that road, if you want to say for example, that perception is fraught with allusions or hallucinations or that we can’t tell the difference between a vertical perception when our sensory organs are in contact with reality and a hallucination, well then you have a gap between our conscious apparatus and reality. If you then want to go on and argue, as empiricists do, that our concepts and the words that we assign to the concepts are based on empirical observations or perceptual observations, but you now believe that those perceptual observations are subjective and out of relation with objective reality, then you’re going to say these abstract concepts and words are also out of relation with reality. And then what gives them their meaning if you can’t establish a connection between the words and reality? Then you’re into the dictionary, you’re saying well, what gives the words their meaning is their sideways or network connections to other words, and then a generation or two later you’re into Derrida’s university where he says that language is all of reality."

"That's also where the postmodernists' claim about the primacy of power seems to sneak in. It's like, well, if the words are only related to one another, they’re verbal relationships, well, they don’t seem to have any motive force. And as soon as you enter a lens of linguistic consideration that has no motive force, then there’s nothing to do. And so this seems to me to account for God being criticized very often for, let’s say, conflating post-modernism and Marxism. But it seems to me that the Marxists or that the post-modernists have had the default to what are essentially Marxist preconceptions to add any motive to their thinking, and what they've done is to say that, well, words are related to one another, and that’s how they derive their fundamental meaning, and they’re not really connected to the world in any real way except insofar as they privileged one group or another or one point or another in terms of power and status."

"Which exactly sort of goes back to your dictionary analysis that the next step then would be to say, if words are in these linguistic relationships to other words and we can find out what they are in dictionaries, well, who writes the dictionaries? And then at that point you’re not asking an epistemological question anymore; you are asking a social and psychological question. So who are the authors of the dictionary? What authorizes rather than with the power to decide what words mean? At that point, we step directly out of no kind of narrow epistemological arguments into social and psychological arguments about linguistic communities."

"So one another, and there’s this gap between the words and empirical reality, which by the way, I don’t think anybody disputes. I mean, that’s why we need five senses. That’s why we need to communicate with each other; that’s why we need the scientific method, right? Is because it’s difficult to establish a useful one-to-one relationship between words and reality. But if words serve power, then it seems to me that what the post-modernists have done is taken biological motivation, let’s call it the motivation for power at least, and snuck it through the back door and reconnected the world of linguistic abstraction to the world of reality by saying, 'Well, look, the only connection is one of power.' And then they leave why it is that people want power. Like the idea that people want power, first of all, it’s a complicated idea because you have to define power, and you have to define what—that are not trivial issues by any stretch of the imagination. And so you sleak it in the back door as sort of self-evident, and then that seems to undermine the general post-modernist claim. It’s like if it's—if the words are only embedded in a network of meaning that’s related to other words, then it isn’t a fair move on to logically or epistemologically to reinsert power striving, like a Nietzschean power striving or even in Adlerian power striving, as the fundamental and what you call it sort of sui generis motivation that characterizes human beings. So I also don’t understand how they get away with that except that it seems to be like a mask for the continuation of a Marxist move on new guys."

"Well, I have no problem with seeing power as a positive. Coming back to just in a moment to all of the suspicions that you’re announcing about inappropriate understandings of the relationship of power, I do think we should be able to say our cognitive capacities are a power that we have, and they are a tool. And the whole point of using that tool is to increase our power in the world to achieve our goals. What the post-moderns are doing is undercutting the two things that make that understanding of power legitimate."

"One is to say that when I am making a cognitive claim, I am successfully saying something about the world so that we can use the words knowledge and truth. So if I want to act on the basis of my beliefs that those beliefs do map onto the world as it really is, but if you are skeptical about any sort of a knowledge claim or any sort of a truth claim, then you’re just going to say, 'No, no, your claims merely are subjective beliefs that are peculiar to you or peculiar to your group,' and they don’t have any special cognitive status whatsoever. And in that case, if you want to act on or use those beliefs to empower you, well, then you are in an out of reality connection."

"Now the other thing though is we want to say that power should be a tool that we use for good, for advancing genuine values in the world. But another part of the post-modern skepticism is to say that we cannot ground any values objectively; instead, values are merely subjective preferences, either individually or group-oriented. So in that case, if you have your value framework, then we’re into the problem of relativism, that I have my value framework, neither of us is able to adduce any facts that give an objective grounding to those values or to argue that those values should be universally embraced. Then we’re just left with, you have a certain amount of power to advance your interest, I have a certain amount of power to advance my interests, and it’s a naked power struggle in the suspicious way that you’re worried about."

"And that is we come back to this issue of how Marxist or not the postmoderns are, but you’re right that at least the great-grandfather move was made by the Marxists in one generation and the Nietzschean next generation to strip power down to that amoral ontological status that you are worried about."

"But what’s the motivation for it? It’s like if there isn’t reality that’s outside the linguistic, then why is it? Why is it that—?"

"Well, I think there’s two—yeah, I think there are two kinds of motivations. One of the things we know is that there are people who just like power; they want to control other people. They have their agendas. No, we can talk about the sociological and the psychological foundation of that, but that is an ongoing fact about society: some people just want power, and they will then rationalize their use of power over other people by a variety of means."

"Okay, that’s one that is an extra-linguistic reality? Yes, thing that’s so surprising! It’s like I’m not using that. Let me see the case. You think, right? If you think of the way some lawyers argue in a courtroom, they will use all sorts of reach out or rhetorical power plays, they will make fallacious arguments if they can get away with it; they will browbeat witnesses and make up facts and so forth. Now, they are not really skeptical; they believe that there’s an external world and so forth; they just believe that life is a power struggle and any tactic is fair in order to achieve their ends."

"All right, so they’re not postmodernist lawyers, they’re just old-fashioned power-seeking lawyers and so forth. Now, that is one motivation. It comes up in religious circles; it comes up in political circles, it comes up in the schoolyard, and so on. But the other one, in the one that I think that we are worried about though, is that those who get to that view about the amoral ontological substrate being power are those people who are smart and who do some thinking about philosophy, thinking about politics, and so forth, and they argue themselves into that position because they find the power of those skeptical arguments to be convincing rationally to them."

"So even though this is not a paradoxical formulation, even though they are rational individuals, they are following the logic of certain skeptical arguments to its conclusion. And the legitimate conclusion of those arguments is that amoral power rules the universe."

"Okay, so let’s examine that for a moment. I mean, this is another thing that strikes me as specious, to say the least. I mean, first of all, I’m very skeptical of people who try to reduce all complex phenomena to a single explanatory mechanism. No, I mean, if you look at—because I do look at things biologically. It’s obvious that human beings have a multitude of primordial motivational systems and that we share them and that we share them with animals."

"There’s pain, and there’s fear, and there’s incentive, reward, and there’s rage, and there’s play, and there’s hunger, and there’s lust, and that’s a handful. There are more than that, and these are very—and you know, those motivations get integrated across time into hyper motivations, let’s say, that would be something akin to an integrated narrative-one that is manifested interpersonally, but also played out socially and higher-order values emerge from that."

"You take a claim like the post-modernists make that, well, first of all they accept the idea that there’s almost nothing but hierarchy and that people’s fundamental motivations is to climb up the hierarchy even though they’re very—my experience has been, for example, whenever I talk about hierarchy, the postmodernist types go after me hammer and tongs because I’m making the claim that hierarchy is a natural phenomenon, not necessarily a beneficial one, but an inevitable one in some sense with its pros and cons. But they accept that uncritically when they presume that power is the fundamental drive. And then the other problem is, and this is an even more serious one as far as I’m concerned, is that the evidence that the most effective way for human beings to occupy positions of authority, let’s say, and competence in human dominance hierarchies isn’t through the naked expression of power. That’s actually unbelievably unstable."

"You know, even Frans de Waal, when he was studying chimpanzees, you know the female chimpanzees are more empathetic than the male chimpanzees. But of all the chimpanzees, the alpha males are the most impacted. They’re the ones that engage in the most reciprocal interactions with the members of the troop. And there’s evidence occurring from all sorts of areas, including developmental psychology, the developmental psychology of Piaget, for example, that suggests that something like cooperative game playing aimed towards a particular important end is a much more stable means for establishing hierarchical relationships between people than power."

"It’s like power only rules in tyrannies, and I guess maybe that’s part of the reason that the post-modernists also insist that the Western hierarchy is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy, because that justifies their claim that power is the primary motivator and mover of the world, but I just don’t see how that’s a tenable position now."

"Well, I think ontologically it’s fair to say that most postmoderns buy into the notion that power is fundamentally—there’s not anything that can be reduced to that. But my reading of them is that that is not the entire philosophical story because power just is a tool, a means to an end, and that still leaves open the question of what ends one is going to use that power. And here and I think the postmoderns are rightly diverse in their views. There is a strong streak of them—then this is something that goes back to Marxism in general or broadly socialism in general—that will say, 'Yes, we all want power but we recognize that power is unequally distributed in the world.' And that connects to your points about hierarchy."

"But what is your value reaction to that unequal distribution of power in the world? Now, there are the Nietzscheans who will react to say, well, the unequal distribution of power is fine, and our sympathies are with those who have more power because we want them to advance the human species by some evolutionary mechanism, but that is a subjective value preference that they are adding to previous facts that power is fundamental, power is unequally distributed."

"Now we’re adding my sympathies go to those who have more power. The socialist or more narrowly Marxist response to those is to say, power is fundamental, power is unequally distributed, but our empathy is with those who are on the losing side of history, so to speak, or various social forces."

"And so what that then means for them is that they will accept that power is operating in a hierarchical context, but that they want to use whatever power they have to more equally redistribute the power in an egalitarian fashion. The only needs to talk about it is going to be, though, that third component about what your value reaction is to what you take to be the metaphysical substrate."

"There’s another form of real-world smuggling that goes along with that, which is both ontological and ethical, and the ontological smuggling would be: while there are definitely power structures and that people compete for power, so that’s claim number one, which seems to be extra linguistic, and claim number two is that the proper moral stance of a human being is empathy. So there’s a claim that something like empathy exists and that it should be reserved for people who are on the lower end of the hierarchical distribution."

"That’s right. And post-moderns like Foucault make that very clear. Richard Rorty even more clearly makes that claim. Jacques Derrida is a very interesting case because most of his work is not overtly social, ethical, or political, but at various points, particularly toward the end of his life, he says, you know, my entire sympathies are with the oppressed, and he talks about reinvigorating a certain kind of—or in the spirit of Marxism—something or other, but from his perspective, he recognizes that he has no philosophical resort to justify that value claim. He doesn't want to say that it's just a personal subjective preference that he has, so he does appeal to a kind of Kantian regulative idea or what we’re in more old-fashioned terms, whether it’s a kind of Platonic form, that we need to appeal to if we’re going to justify in some way, so it’s kind of interesting that recognizing exactly the problem that you’re pointing out."

"Where do we get that empathy claim from and justify that? The postmoderns recognize the predicament, and some of them are trying to point to extra-linguistic sources for it. Well that opens that opens a big can of worms if your initial claim is that there’s no such thing as an extra-linguistic source."

"Exactly. Yes, because you let one extra-linguistic source in, especially something as complicated as the interplay between, say, power, hierarchy, and empathy. I mean, yes, those are major motivational forces, and then if you’re willing to admit to the existence of those major motivational forces, well, it’s hard to exclude pain. It’s hard to exclude anxiety. It’s hard to exclude—or something even more basic is hunger. It’s hard to exclude the proclivity for cooperation and play. It’s like all of biology, it seems to me, sneaks back into the post-modern project as soon as those initial—"

"Well, absolutely, but that’s what we’re finding a lot of our debates are right now about psychology and biology. Is that certain number of psychologists and biologists are pushing back and saying, 'Oh, there is a reality here,' or we’re getting great resistance from the post-modern second and third generation to having to do so."

"Okay, so now you said the philosophers that have reviewed your book have been basically positive, so why are you receiving positive feedback from—what is it about philosophy and about philosophers or about your work eliciting a positive response from them?"

"Yeah, well, my book is primarily an intellectual history. To some extent, I am polemical and pushing back against post-modernism, so people don’t understand that I’m taking a stance as well, but the primary purpose of the book is to do a solid intellectual history. Where does this confusing, sprawling, but nonetheless very vigorous and powerful movement come from? It doesn’t come out of thin air, but rather there are a lot of deep thinking that’s behind it."

"So, what I’m doing is I’m tracing what I see as the important intellectual movements of the last two centuries. So I’m starting with Conté, Rousseau, I’m talking about Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the others. So all of those figures are difficult, complex, and important in their own right, and there are scholarly debates about, say, how skeptical or not Conté is, whether there’s an element of liberalism or not in each, Heidegger’s connection to the Nazis and so forth. So there is a range of scholarly movement and most of these major intellectuals have two or three major schools of interpretation attached to them. But what—and so the pushback that I am getting on Conté or Heidegger or whatever will be from those who are in a different school of interpretation with respect to them. But typically among the philosophers, it’s a respectful engagement because they will recognize that there is a very good argument that can be made for interpreting the philosophers the other way and typically then what I’m doing is emphasizing the skeptical elements or the ultimately negative and nihilistic elements that get sifted out and woven together into ultimately the post-modern framework."

"And along the way, the philosophers who want to argue, 'Well, you know, this particular thinker is not that bad,' or 'You would not buy into the whole project,' those are the ones who will criticize me on various things. But I typically find, though, outside of philosophical circles, though—and this is not a criticism of these individuals since we can’t know everything— is that they will know something about Nietzsche or Heidegger or Conté, but they’re not up on the scholarly literature."

"You know, they’ve read one book or one article about that person that was written from a certain perspective. So if I make the argument for the other perspective on that thinker, it’s new to them and it seems outrageous to them. So something like that."

"So now you wrote this book back in 2004, so you were a pretty early observer of the vital importance, I suppose, of the post-modernist debate. I mean, there certainly would be none rise in political correctness in the early 90s and that it disappears by the mid-90s, but 2004 is, I’d say, five or six or maybe even eight years previous to this new burgeoning of political polarization and the debate between the politically correct types, let’s say, and those who take a more biological perspective. It’s like, what clued you into the fact that this was a fundamental importance?"

"Yeah, well, yeah, thanks. I think if there’s a testament to the power of philosophy, the power of ideas, the power of logic, that when you identify abstract principles and their adoption and you have a good sense of logic, you can make predictions about how they’re going to play out when they are applied in real life. This is one of my major career beliefs that philosophy is not disembodied abstract, head-in-the-clouds, but no matter how abstract and speculative various philosophical positions seem to be, when they are believed and acted upon, they make a real-life difference."

"So in part, that’s what I was doing. I actually wrote the first draft of the book 20 years ago this year—in 1999. I had a sabbatical, and so I had an outline of the book written in 1999, and then by the middle part of the year 2000, I had fully written the book, but it didn’t come out until 2004 because I had some challenges with getting it published."

"I think what has happened in the last five years or so is that we are now into second or third-generation post-modernism, depending on how you count things. And what has happened is the first generation of post-moderns were very successful inside academic circles at educating large numbers of students, getting a significant number of them through graduate school, and then to themselves becoming professors and public intellectuals, and things reached a critical mass, I would say starting six or seven years ago."

"So then we start to notice it significantly starting to transform the internal demand dynamics of the university, but we also now have a critical mass of activists who are now graduated. Maybe they didn’t graduate with PhDs; they got bachelor’s degrees or master’s degrees, but they’ve gone into activist organizations and they are trying to—and successfully—shifting the terms of the debate outside of the academic world, and so the broader public starts to notice things and then—that’s where we are right now with the culture war manifesting itself on two major fronts: the academic world and the broader cultural space."

"So what are your concerns about that? Like when you look out at the world, you are obviously concerned enough about post-modernist thinking to devote a substantial proportion of your academic career to it, and then to put yourself on the line to some degree as well. What is it about the post-modernist view that—well, let’s ask this question two ways. What do you think the advantages, if any, are to the post-modernist view or the inevitability of it? And what do you think the dangers and disadvantages are?"

"Hmm. Well, that’s two big questions. First, why I’m worried about it, and there’s a question about what degree of worry one should have. Interestingly, in my home discipline of philosophy, post-modernism is not that strong. Part of philosophy flirted with post-modernism for a while. I think philosophy did generate all of the arguments or we saw the major arguments that post-moderns use; the force of it has built into its DNA, so to speak, a very healthy respect for argumentation and a no liking for new argument."

"So what has happened mostly in the philosophy profession is a serious development and engagement with all of these negative skeptical arguments and so on, but then a realization that a lot of them don’t work in various ways, and then people moving off in other directions, or once we start seeing the same arguments being recycled and retreading, a certain amount of boredom occurs with it. Because smart, active-minded people live like new things, and so someone comes along with a new positive argument or a new positive program, and philosophers get excited about that."

"And so post-modernism is a little bit passé in those disciplines. But I am worried about it because philosophy, demographically, is a tiny proportion of the overall academy, and the post-modern arguments have been picked up by the larger and more influential academic disciplines such as psychology, you know this one as well, English literature to some extent, in the law schools, in the field of history, sociology is very polluted, and then the big rise of all of the various special studies programs."

"You know, gender studies, race studies, ethnicity studies, and so on. You find a much higher percentage of post-modernism there. Now, I have not seen good journalistic sociology about higher academic-whether it’s 8 percent or 40 percent, or 12 percent or 25 percent. Then this issue you’re raising about punching above their weight—that does seem to be true, but how much above their weight are they punching? Is it the major problem in the classrooms, or is that a matter of... you know, as we know, most academics don’t like Mickey work."

"Yeah, but a significant number of the first-rate people are off doing their real academic work, and they’re trying to avoid committee work, but the second and third rate don’t mind committee work and they see it as a vehicle to power within the university for them. So if the postmoderns are—as we like to think—second or third-rate, that’s a little bit unfair—not all of them are—but a higher percentage of them doing the important committee work, and they have a certain amount of power, they’re an overlooked part of the university demographics from my perspective is student life, where the residents, the people who look after the residents, the hall—all in the entertainment and deciding what student clubs are authorized or not—there’s been a significant infiltration of post-modernism in that area that’s not on the academic side or only in indirect. But if you look at orientation programs, and again, we need better journalism here, but you find a significant number of them are devoting the whole entire orientation week when the first-year students are coming in to lectures on privilege and oppression and whatever the buzzwords are. That also is an important issue as well. Chronicle of Higher Education excoriating faculty’s event occasion for producing precisely the kinds of internal university activists that are pushing exactly that kind of agenda."

"Right, yeah, faculties of education, I do some work in philosophy of education, they are all over the map, but there has been a significant postmodern shift as with post-modernism being the reigning philosophy of education. Then that, of course, has impact not just in higher education because that’s training the next generation of teachers. One of my younger colleagues, a man named Andrew Colgan, recent PhD from Western University of Western Ontario, in his dissertation was documenting the significant demographic shift among the Ontario high school teachers toward basically buying into a post-modern framework, and that’s going to be a very important generational shift for Ontario."

"So what makes you like—you talked about market forces and the corrective ability and, and we spoke before we started this podcast about optimistic and positive elements in my movements. I mean, so I have two questions for you at least before we conclude, and one is you seem optimistic and positive. And so what do you see is the route out of this, and what will replace it? And like, what’s the time span?"

"Hmm. Yes, well, I think one thing that we are noticing is an increasing number of first-rate people who are now engaging the debate within higher education. So you can mention someone like Steven Pinker, who’s not just doing academic psychology now and says he’s devoting resources to defending in a public intellectual sphere the Enlightenment project. Jonathan Haidt also, excellent psychologist doing clinical work as well, but nonetheless is formative in creating that heterodox academy—bringing together academics from a wide variety of political spectrums but the positions but nonetheless all agreeing that academic freedom and free speech and so forth are important. The work that you’re doing, stepping out onto the public space stage as well. So there is a major uptick in very good academics taking post-modernism and its offshoots seriously and pushing back, and I think that augers well."

"I think there also is a financial clout, I think young students when they come in, they do take a post-modernism course, but they don’t go back for more or they plug into the student grapevine and they learn which courses to avoid, and in many cases, that post-modern activist type of professors, they are really ghetto wised in marginal departments. They might be outsized in their voice, but they’re not attracting a huge number of students, and in my view, the students that they are attracting are ones who are already predisposed to that. They’re not necessarily converting."

"It seems to be, so let’s say that the least invasive way of dealing with post-modernism, if it does have the negative attributes that we’ve been discussing, is actually something like a market solution, which is to inform young people as to its essential and to help convince them that there are viable alternatives, like viable philosophical alternatives, viable political alternatives, courses they could be taking that would enrich their lives instead of enhancing their sense of victimization."

"Exactly, that’s right. The safest route rather than political intervention or some kind of attempt to radically change the structure of the universities, which seems more dangerous than usable and I’m very gung-ho on the internet."

"The internet, of course, is just a tool that can be used for good or ill, and there’s a lot of crap, as we all know, on the internet, but it also is the case that young, open-minded, hungry students, when they are at a university and they’re not getting the education that they want, they now have access to all sorts of viewpoints, and they’re actively exploring them, and I’m sure you get hundreds of contacts. I get lots of contacts from students from all over the world who come to me through the internet, and I know that that’s a worldwide phenomenon."

"I also do think that there’s lots of very interesting entrepreneurial experimentation going on in higher education. Some of it’s driven by the cost demographics, you know, people asking the reasonable question, 'Is it really worth a quarter million dollars to get a good higher education at a traditional bricks-and-mortar university, or should I spend just a hundred thousand dollars and maybe get only a 75% quality education at an online institution or some other vehicle?' So there's lots of experimentations that are going on there, and of course, the technology is just getting better and better. So instead of the only avenue being taking the universities on head-on from the inside, that battle has to be fought, and some of us are doing it, but there will be a significant number of people who will just avoid the universities altogether, and there will be new institutions that are created, and that will be a market solution."

"Hmm. Do you know that about 75% of the cumulative student debt in the United States is held by women?"

"I did not know that."

"Support a number of those women who are black, so it's so perverse. They're so perverse. Part of the explanation for that—it’s not the total explanation—is that these women were enticed or chose to enter disciplines where the probability of making enough money over a reasonable span of their life, especially given the high interest rates that are associated with student debt, is extraordinarily low."

"No, that’s another strange reaction. That’s a perverse unintended consequence."

"Oh, I was not aware of that statistic. I was aware that—this matters with my experience—about 60% of our university graduates are women, compared to only about 40% male. So, but I was not aware of the racial component of that."

"Intended consequence. It’s really what—you know, because there’s poor women laboring under these debt loads that it looks like they’re never going to be able to clear."

"Okay, so that’s optimism. It's long-term optimism, but it’s also—that’s good to hear. Can I ask you a little bit about what your private—what your life has been like, let’s say over the last couple of years as you used social media more and as your work has become much more disseminated and discussed publicly?"

"Yeah, pluses and the minuses for you, and what’s changed for you?"

"Yeah, overall plusses. The minuses definitely—whether the minuses have been—that it’s cut a lot into my writing time in some ways. Majorly, I’m a stereotypical nerd. My ideal day is to go to the library with my computer and read and write with a stack of books, and I envision my professor's life as being dominated by that, but certainly for the last couple of years, my writing and thinking time has been lessened. The other major negative just has been just the crap you have to put up with with people who are on various hobby horses who disagree with you, but who don’t have social skills or the to know how to have a fruitful discussion."

"So they send to you ad hominem emails and just resort to insults because you disagree with them, so there’s been a certain steady stream of that, but part of my learning curve has driven just to be able to ignore that or filter that out and focus on the positive responses and the critical responses that are raising good questions."

"I did want to mention, if I can plug, I have an open college podcast series, and I've got two podcasts in the work where I’m taking up the serious and, in some cases, good criticisms that have been raised of my work. So I'm working on those as well. That's just part of the ongoing fun scholarly back-and-forth that should be going on, and while I am down on post-modernism, I should say that I do think it's an important part of any person's education to at least for some time consider the most skeptical and nihilistic arguments that are out there—that post-modernism should have a seat at the table in any person's education."

"And so it really should be a three or four-way debate that’s going on there, and students need to process those arguments for themselves. The other pluses are that I do enjoy travel, so in addition to my normal academic conferencing and academic lectures, I've been giving some public intellectual lectures and interacting with the general public more thinking public, and that’s been a lot of fun. It's actually been very encouraging to realize how many smart, knowledgeable people there are out there in the world living full lives doing very interesting things, but they also have an interest in intellectual matters and you can have a very fond conversation with them about Nietzsche or Marx or the current state of higher education, so I found that the tourism part that comes with the travel and just interacting with people that I never would have interacted to be very pleasurable."

"The other big plus has been since I am a professor, I just love young students in their first, second year of university when they realize how big the intellectual world is and how exciting it can be that when they come alive intellectually. And then having a lot more students from around the world who will email me or Facebook me with very interesting questions, or they have their own podcast. And when I can, I’ll have a 45 or 50-minute conversation with them on their podcast, so I’m interacting with a lot more students from other parts of the world than I otherwise would have."

"So yeah, overall, the pluses have been great. The thing is about the public exposure and the social media exposure that’s so interesting is that the people who come to listen to you only come because they want to listen to you. It’s really part of—it’s a real pure form of the university because there’s no compulsion, as there is with say, mandatory classes and grades and so on in universities. It’s a tremendous public hunger for philosophical discourse— that’s really been completely, in some sense, undiscovered up until now and it’s—it’s not an asset."

"That's right. And that's why I think optimistically—I am or ultimately I am optimistic, because I think it is built into human nature to want to be vigorous to engage with the world, and since we’re such a smart species, to engage with the world intellectually, so young people in their teens when they are becoming more fully aware of themselves as independent of their parents and that their whole life is ahead and they’re preparing for life, they do have this hunger, and it’s beautiful to see it activated."

"Yeah, obviously all the controversy that surrounded your work hasn’t soured you in the least on the intellectual enterprise. It sounds like quite the contrary. What are you working on now? Next five years, that’s admissions?"

"What I've carved out in my schedule starting the end of this academic year, mid-May, a significant amount more of writing time, and so I’m making progress and I’m optimistic that by the end of this calendar year, I’ll be almost on this next book. What I’m doing is focusing on the positive. The post-modernism book is negative; the Nietzsche and the Nazis book is negative; going into some dark philosophical and political territory, but to put it positively, what are the positive philosophical issues and positions that need to be developed to reinvigorate the Enlightenment, to correct its deficiencies, to make people realize that the post-modern arguments are powerful but they’re powerfully based on some often easy philosophical issues or mistakes to make, very subtle."

"So my value added is as a philosopher, the way I'm going to impart package this is to say that we do have huge debates along any number of dimensions about politics and so on, but in fact, most of our debates about politics are not at all about politics. They are about underlying philosophical issues. So, for example, we're having debates right now about the proper political status of, say, transgender individuals, but we’re spending very little time actually talking about the politics of it. Instead, we are having arguments about human nature and to what extent things are fixed causally into a extent things are a matter of human volition, what things are subjective, what things are objective, and so on."

"And really, we are having philosophical arguments—hopefully philosophical arguments. It should be informed by biology, but even that is itself a philosophical debate because some people want to say we should approach this as a scientific method type of question—look at the facts, look at the experiments—and others have a more free-floating ideological commitment that is to say they’re operating on a different epistemology."

"So really what we’re doing is we’re having a debate about epistemology and human nature—not really debates about politics. The politics is just a manifestation of that, so then my hopeful professional value-added is to bring clarity and some fresh perspectives on those philosophical debates."

"One of the things that has plagued philosophers a whole number of false alternatives that have been entrenched in the discipline for generations—and in many cases, if you can notice two apparently opposed arguments but realize they share a premise. And in often cases that shared premise is implicit, then asking what the alternatives to that implicit premise would be once you make it explicit can be very illuminating. So I’m working that territory a lot."

"Hmm. Well, it’s interesting. You know that maybe one of the consequences is that out of them—let’s call it rather murky darkness of moral relativism and post-modernism and the claim that power is the fundamental motivation of human beings. I mean, these are very pessimistic philosophical statements taken almost, they’re logical extremes. Hmm. Maybe what will happen is that out of that will come something like a philosophy that’s genuinely optimistic without being naive."

"Exactly, that’s nicely put. I’m reminded of a line from the Roman poet Horace who was reflecting on some of the skeptical and nihilistic trends of his time where they were denying the natural world, denying and so forth. Then the line is, 'Though you drive nature out with a pitchfork, ever she will return.' Right? So the optimistic return is what we’re working on now."

"Right, well and there does seem to be, I would say, a tremendous hunger for that. You know, one of the things why—and I’m sure you see this in your teaching—is that it’s amazing. You know, I usually begin my lectures on a fairly pessimistic note, you know detailing out the problems of human nature and society and, to some degree, the natural world, trying to make a vicious case for the—in some sense, the atrocity of life. And it means that there’s nothing hidden in some sense when the argument begins. And then I try to make a case that despite that, you know, we have within us the capacity to transcend that, and that capacity to transcend that—the atrocity of life—is actually more powerful, and then you can derive an optimism out of the pessimism that’s even more optimistic because of the depth of the pessimism."

"You know, I can tell students, 'Look, you guys, you've got real problems to deal with. It’s no wonder that you’re suffering from the existential dilemmas that you’re suffering from; they’re real.' Hmm, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a set of viable solutions and maybe a very large set of viable solutions that can be that you can learn and that you can practice and that you can engage in—that make a genuine difference to your life and a genuine difference to the life of the people around you."

"And that this is even more real than the reality of the relativism in them and the nihilism and the pessimism. And I’ve been aligning that especially with the idea of responsibility. You know, that it’s possible to find the sustaining meaning in your life through the adoption of a substantive responsibility as you can manage. And it’s really quite remarkable how ready people are for that idea. It reduces the audience to silence to speak of that."

"Yeah, well, that’s all of that touching on the profound themes that human beings do need to engage with. My approach is typically a different, particularly with my first-year students, where my reading of them is a lot of them are coming into university feeling somewhat constrained. Sometimes they’re in university because they have to be in university or they have the sense that their lives are largely predetermined or that the things have been mapped out either by their parents or expectations of certain social forces or whatever. And getting them to see that the world is a lot more open to them, there are a lot more possibilities than that, and they have more power to shape their own destinies than they otherwise might have been taught."

"So higher education has transformative in the sense of liberating them from constraints that they felt themselves to be put in, and I found that that has been useful in tapping into the hunger that we are both talking about because that can be suppressed, but once they get a taste of it, that in fact they are free agents, that the world is a lot more open-ended than other people might have been telling them—they start to drink it up."

"Well, that was very exciting university for me. You know, I came from a small town and went to increasingly large universities, and every time I made a transition, Vince, that the world was opening up to me continued to increase. And in part, that’s what makes post-modernism unsettling because it really is a cramped intellectual vision, but it also tends to put people into smaller and smaller categories or you’re only a member of this group and you’re an example of it, and your identity has been shaped by forces beyond your control, and you can’t engage with other cultures and other individuals except on the basis of hostility—which just means people retrench. So it’s a very closing in kind of intellectual movement."

"So the optimism and the romance and the adventure in the sense that you can, in fact, take charge of your own life and make yourself and the world a better place—that’s the point that we need to emphasize. But of course, it can’t be a naive one, so we do need better intellectual tools for that."

"Well, I do think students are always love teaching undergraduates is because even those who have that brittle and thin-skinned cynicism—sort of the prematurely, hmm, intellectually hopeless, however—I thought this dynamism of youth that wants exactly that call to adventure exists, and that they will respond with unbelievable enthusiasm."

"I agree entirely, that’s right."

"Yeah. Well, any message that puts that idea across in a believable manner that takes them seriously. The other thing that struck me, too, that’s really saddening, you know, I’ve talked to hundreds of people after my lectures now, and it’s almost inconceivable the degree to which people are starving for encouragement. How little they get and how little it takes to make a massive difference in their life just to say, you know, you are a sovereign individual of divine value; you’re the cornerstone of the community, and that’s the fundamental presupposition of our society that happens to be true, and that you can put your life together with truth and courage, and things will work out better. And even more importantly than that—whether it works out or not, even more importantly than that—that is the adventure and destiny of your life, and it actually matters, and people are dying. They’re dying for that idea."

"Yep, that’s beautifully put. So thanks for saying that."

"Well, look, I’d like to know when you put up those podcasts that respond to the criticisms of your book. So if you would be kind enough to let me know that, I’ll be happy to do so. I would love to publicize them. It might be an opportunity again for us to have another conversation because I’m very interested in the criticisms, you know, because I relied on your book a fair bit in my discussion of post-modernism. It’s not an area of expertise of mine, you know, I was one of those academics who tended to ignore it, not entirely, but while I was pursuing my own studies. But your book was extremely useful. And you know, it's not necessarily the case that because I’m not as philosophically versed as I might be that I can evaluate all the criticisms, and so I would definitely like to know more about that and to know more about how you respond. So, please do let me know. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me again. I always find that extremely illuminating."

"Right, I appreciate the invitation and spending time with you as well. It’s good fun."

"Great-grand important. Oh, good luck. Good luck with your ambitions, and I wish you even more success in the public domain because I think that what you’re doing is extremely helpful."

"Well, thank you. Yeah, you too."

"Yeah, the regard is mutual, absolutely. All right, well, hopefully, we’ll have a chance to meet at some point in the not-too-distant future."

"Perfect."

"Very good to see you."

"You too. Bye for now."

"Bye-bye."