Postmodernism: History and Diagnosis....

Well, I’m speaking today with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who is a professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois. Professor Hicks has written a book—he’s written several books—but he’s written one in particular that I wanted 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.

I have talked a lot to my viewers about your book, and so let’s talk about Postmodernism and its relationship with Neo-Marxism. So maybe you could tell the viewers here a little more about yourself and how you got interested in this.

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. And so upon a professor’s 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 and started teaching full-time, came to Rockford University. I was teaching in an honors program, and the way that program worked was—it was essentially a Great Books program—and so it was like getting a second education, wonderfully.

But the way it was done was that each course was taught by two professors to our honor students. So the professors would be from different departments, so I was paired with literature professors, history professors, and so on. And this was now the middle of the 90s. I started to hear about thinkers I had not read. I’d kind-of heard about them, but now I was reading them more closely and finding that in history and literature and sociology and anthropology, names like Derrida and Foucault and the others, 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 had focused mostly on Anglo-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 [published 2004] came out of.

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 was still in 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 Ph.D.s coming out of sociology, literary criticism, some sub-disciplines in the law (if you’re getting a Ph.D. in the law), historiography and so on, and certainly in departments in philosophy still dominated by Continental traditional philosophy: almost all of them are primarily being schooled in what we now call postmodern thinkers, so the leading gurus are people like Derrida, Lyotard, from whom we get the label post-modern 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, so that’s obviously a condition that is shared by a large number of people. Postmodernism is one of those words like Existentialism that covers...