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.”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 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 an awful lot of territory, and

so maybe we could zero in on exactly what that means, and who these thinkers were: Derrida,

Foucault, and Lyotard, and what you learned about them.

Fair enough. Well, all of the thinkers you just named—they think broadly, they think

strategically, and they do have a very strong historical perspective on their disciplines,

and at the same time they are trying to assess where they think we are culturally, politically,

socially—and all of them are making a very dramatic claim: that to some extent or in

some way Modernism has either ended or it has reached its nadir, or all of the … kind

of the pathologies and negative traits within the modern world are reaching a culmination

in their generation, and so it’s time for us to both recognize that Modernism has come

to an end, and that we need some sort of new intellectual framework, a post-modern-like

framework. And the Modernism that they’re criticizing,

how would you characterize that? That’s Enlightenment values? Scientific rationalism?

How would you characterize it, exactly? All of those would be elements of it. But

then of course there are some discipline-specific differences: so literature people and philosophy

people and historians will use Modernism slightly differently. But the idea at core is that

if you look at the pre-modern world—essentially the world of the Middle Ages, say—that that

was itself broken up by a series of revolutions: the Renaissance, Reformation, Counter Reformation,

early scientific revolutions—and all of this is going on in historically short chunks

of time: 1500s and 1600s.

And so if you look at both the intellectual world and the social world, comparing, say,

the 1400s with the 1700s, culturally and intellectually you’re in a different universe at that point.

So the features then of the modern world—now I’m going to use my philosophical labels

here—are that we are now naturalistic in our thinking. We are no longer primarily supernaturalistic

in our thinking. So we might still be open to the idea that there’s a God or some sort

of supernatural dimension, the way Deists are, but first and foremost we’re taking

the natural world as a more or less self-contained, self-governing world that operates according

to cause and effect, and we’re going to study it in its terms.

We’re not seeing the natural world as derivative of a “higher” world or that everything

that happens in the natural world is part of “God’s plan” where we read omens

and so forth into everything.

So metaphysically then there’s been a revolution: We’re naturalistic.

Epistemologically—in terms of knowledge—there also has been a revolution. How do we know

the important truths? How do we acquire the beliefs that we’re fundamentally going to

commit our lives to? Well, by the time we become Moderns we take experience seriously,

personal experience. We do that more rigorously and we’re developing scientific method (the

way of organizing the data), we’re taking logic and all the sophisticated tools of rationality

and developing those increasingly ...

And so our opposition then is: Either you know something because you can experience

it and verify it for yourself, or we've done the really hard work of scientific method

and as a result of what comes out of that, that’s what we can call knowledge or our

best approximation to that.

And that’s also revolutionary because the prior intellectual framework was much more

intellectually authoritarian in its framework. You would accept in the Catholic tradition

the authority of the Church. And who are you to question the authority of the Church? And

who are you to mouth empirical-rational arguments against the authority of the Church?

Or, you take the authority of Scripture, or you accept on faith that you've had a mystical

revelation of some sort.

So, in all of those cases you have non-rational epistemologies that are dominating intellectual

discourse. That is all by and large swept away in the modern world.

Okay, so prior to the emergence of the modern world, we’ll say, people are dominated essentially

by their willingness to adhere to a shared tradition and that shared tradition is somewhat

tyrannically enforced. But there’s no real alternative in terms of epistemology [epistemology:

the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity and scope: the investigation

of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion] let’s say. And then as the modern

world emerges, people discover the technologies of science and the value of rigorously applied

method and the comparison of shared experiences and that makes us technologically powerful

in a new way and philosophically different from what we were before. ]

Yes, the shared tradition phrase that you added there, that’s an important one. So

I’d say in the early modern world there’s not necessarily a skepticism about shared

traditions—so there would be an acceptance of shared traditions—but the idea is that

you would not uncritically accept your tradition. You may accept your tradition, but only after

you've thought it through and made your own independent judgment.

Okay, okay, so you’re elevated to the status of someone who’s capable of taking a stance

with regards to the tradition, and assessing its presuppositions and so forth.

Absolutely. So there’s an elevation of the individual

and the critical intellect along with the elaboration of the scientific method. Okay,

so then we might note, perhaps, that that’s a tremendously effective transformation, although

maybe it leads in a somewhat nihilistic direction metaphysically—we can leave that to the

side. But it’s a very, very successful revolution, because by the time, at least the beginning

of the 20th century comes along, there’s this staggering (and of course before that,

the Industrial Revolution), there’s this staggering transformation of technology and

technological and conceptual power, and then a stunning increase in the standard of living.

And that starts at about 1890, to really move exponentially in the 1890s, or at least to

get to the really steep part of the exponential curve. Okay, so that seems to be going well.

So what is it that the postmodernists are objecting to precisely?

Just on those two issues: (1) the metaphysical naturalism, and then (2) the elevation of

kind of a critical empiricism and a belief that we can, through science—even not necessarily

a science, but social scientists and so on—we can come to understand powerful general principles

about humanity and social systems.

Those two revolutions both are then subjected to counter-attacks.

And again, what happens in this case is there is a revolution. Probably by the time we get

to 1800—the height of the Enlightenment—there are the beginnings of more powerful skeptical

traditions that come to be developed, so thinkers are starting to say things like: Well, if

scientific method at root is based on the evidence of the senses—we observe the natural

world: that’s our first point of contact—and then on the basis of that we form abstractions,

and then we put those abstractions into propositions, and then we take those propositions and put

them in networks that we call theories, and so on—so we start to critically examine

each of the elements of scientific method, and over time, weaknesses in the existing

accounts of how all of those “rational operations” work come to be teased out, and philosophy

then starts to go down a more skeptical path.

So if, for example, you take perception as fundamental—it’s you know, the individual

subject’s first point of contact with the natural world—then you have to immediately

deal with issues of perceptual illusions, or the possibility that people will have hallucinations,

or that the way you report your perceptual experience is at odds with how I report my

perceptual experience.

Tell me if I’ve got this right. So, with the dawning of the “Empirical Age,” let’s

say, there’s this idea that you can derive valid information from sense data—especially

if you contrast that sense data rigorously with that of others—okay? So that’s sort

of the foundation for the scientific method in some sense.

But then—I think this is with Immanuel Kant—there’s an objection to that, which is that, Well,

you can’t make the presupposition that that sense data enters your cognitive apparatus,

your apparatus of understanding, without a priori structuring, and it seems to me that

that’s where the postmodernists really go after the modernists. It’s that, given that

you have to have a very complex perceptual structure (that modern people might say was

instantiated as a consequence of biological evolution), you can’t make the case that

what you’re receiving from the external world is something like “pure information”:

it’s always subject—to some very-difficult-to-delimit degree—to “interpretation.”

And then you also have to take into account the fact of that a priori structure and what

it might mean for your concept of “objective reality.” And that’s Kant, I think, if

I’ve got that right.

Right. Well, the postmodernists will use both of those strategies: (1) the anti-empiricist

strategy, and (2) the anti-rationalist strategy. And what’s important about Kant is that

Kant is integrating both of those “anti” strategies. So in the generations before Kant,

the skeptical arguments about perception which were directed against the empiricists … the

empiricists want to say that everything is based on observational data, but then if you

don’t have good answers about hallucinations and relativity and illusions and so forth,

then it seems like your intellectual structure, whatever it seems to be, if it’s based on

probabilistic or possibly faulty perceptual data—then the whole thing is a tottering

mess. [Empiricism: the theory stating that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory

experience. Empirical research, including experiments and validated measurement tools,

guide the scientific method.]

And by the time we get to Kant, the Empiricist tradition is largely unable to respond to

those kinds of objections. And so Kant is recognizing and saying: All right, we’ve

been trying now for a couple of centuries, we haven’t been able to do so successfully—we’re

not going to be able to do so.

Now, you also nicely emphasized that one of the other responses had been on the Rationalist

side, which is to say, “Well, no you don’t start with pure empirical data—instead we

do have perhaps some innate a priori structures built into the human mind—how they got there,

maybe they’re put there by God, maybe they’re put there naturalistically or whatever—but

what enables us to have legitimate knowledge is that our empirical data comes in and it

is filtered and structured by these pre-existing cognitive structures as well.”

Now the problem with that side of the line—and this is also well worked out by the time you

get to the Kantians—is to say: Well, if you’re starting with in-built cognitive

structures, and everything that comes in, so to speak, goes through this structuring

machine and you’re aware of the outputs—because that’s what is presented to your mind—well

how do you know those in-built structures have anything to do with the way reality actually

is out there?

It seems like then what you are stuck with is the end result of a subjective processing,

and there is no way for you, so to speak, to “jump outside of your head” to compare

the end result with the way the world actually is, independently of how your mind has structured

the awareness.

So once again, you’re stuck in a rather subjective place.

And again, the importance of Kant here is then he’s also looking at this more Rationalist

tradition and he’s saying, Well look, again we’ve been trying now for a couple of centuries

to work these things out from Descartes to Spinoza, Leibniz and the others, and Rationalism

also has reached a dead end, so we’re not going to be able to do so.

So Kant is, in effect, standing at the end of these two traditions and saying, “You

know, the skeptics have it right on both sides: both the Empiricist and the Rationalist traditions

fail. There is no way for us to objectively come to know an external reality. We’re