Postmodernism, cont. - Philosophical Root

                                                                            Kant

To me, Thomas Jefferson is a perfect example of the Enlightenment. He famously wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Now “men” either means human beings (Menschen) or the thought is stupid. This idea is a refutation of the medieval teachings of the Church, taken from St. Thomas. On the one hand, Aquinas's philosophy is grounded in the concept of natural law, which posits that certain rights and moral principles are inherent in human nature and can be discovered through reason. According to natural law, all humans possess inherent dignity and worth because they are made in the image of God. On the other hand, St. Thomas Aquinas articulated a view of social and gender relations that embodies a duality of equal dignity and different social valuations. He upheld the inherent dignity of all human beings, recognizing their equal worth as rational beings created in the image of God. However, he also maintained that natural law prescribed distinct roles for each sex and for different social classes. Men were naturally suited for leadership and public authority due to their perceived greater rationality, while women were inclined toward domestic responsibilities and nurturing roles. Similarly, Aquinas believed that society required a hierarchical structure in which some individuals, naturally endowed with leadership qualities, would guide and govern, while others, suited for various types of labor, would follow and support. This hierarchical complementarity, encompassing both gender and social roles, was seen as reflecting a divinely ordained order that contributed to the common good. While men and leaders were regarded as heads of households and society, women and workers were viewed as essential partners and supporters, their roles justified by theological interpretations of scripture and practical necessities. In this official philosophy of the Declaration, Jefferson stressed human moral and political equality; in his private life, he practiced hierarchy – he was a slave owner.

    The basis for political equality was reason – a minimal competence that we all share. We can know enough about ourselves and reality to understand our own interests and the common good to govern ourselves. The previous class society was premised on a denial of competence: women, children, the laboring classes, and of course Jefferson’s slaves were thought to lack full rationality, full competence. They needed patriarchal guidance. They were incapable of self-government. People – like the sovereign monarch – did not have to know everything to be able to govern themselves. But they had to be able to make competent judgments based on evidence and reasoning. The government is to the sovereign people was the cabinet was to the sovereign monarch: presenting to the sovereign arguments and evidence as to the requirements of justice and reality. The denial of competence was thus also a denial of a capacity of judging what reality and justice requires. Both arguments appealed to human nature.

   Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on nature and natural hierarchy lent themselves to an ideological justification of the power of an elite over the great majority of working people and women. Enlightenment thinkers got around nature by reducing it to what can be quantified and described without respect to meaning and value. The universe for the 18^th Enlightenment was a closed system operating by mechanical laws indifferent to human aspirations. With this ontological shift came a simplifying of reason, reducing it from a richer Aristotelian understanding to a much more restrictive empiricist-rationalist conception in philosophy and of course to the scientific methods – which did wonders for natural science to be sure. (More specially, it cut out Aristotle’s concern with essence and teleology, which understood in a certain way brings a hermeneutic aspect to reason and a meaning-aspect to reality.) A collection of raw materials without intrinsic value. Nature so understood didn’t justify any hierarchy. On this reduction, the justification of unequal classes and restriction of women’s political involvement was taken away – it was emancipatory.

   But it came at a heavy price. Adopting the Galilean picture of the world cut off our inner lives – the realm of meaning; the realm of art, religion, morality, political action, and philosophy; the realm of freedom, reason, spontaneity, and love – from reality; imprisoned us in our subjectivity. If nature (reality) is a closed system, then everything in it is predetermined. If everything is predetermined, then our experience of (limited) freedom and meaning is an illusion. The belief in emancipation, an illusion.

   [I believe the way to go would have been to keep the classical understanding of a meaningful nature but criticize and purge the ideological interpretations of it.]

  Kant attempted to reconcile our freedom (and thus meaning) with determinism by making the physical, sensual world a kind of Matrix – designed by whatever programmer designed our brains. Our brains construct reality; our minds to not conform to it. The physical world is a closed system because our minds (subconsciously) generate it as such. Reason is thus powerless to know anything about reality as such, about goodness, about beauty. Our knowledge is the knowledge of our own construction, like mapping our minds instead of the world. The world we know is our own representation of reality, and we cannot get out of our minds/brains and compare our representations with reality itself. Our deterministic science accurately describes the representation – the algorithms of the Matrix. But even though we cannot know anything about reality, we are free to imagine or to have faith that our subjective lives correspond to something real, even if not the phenomenal world. Science can’t prove that wrong, since it is limited to appearances, to the world as a human representation.

   The roots of Postmodernism today – the extreme forms of it in art and philosophy – are to be found here.

  For Kant, we are imprisoned in a subjective Matrix, the creation of our own conscious experience. But within that subjectivity, we experience the world at the level of sense perception universally the same. It is like we are in windowless spaceships orbiting a planet but at least have all the same instruments. Thus the sky appears blue to all of us. We all see the white coffee cup on my desk. The data of science are the same for all of us. And science works. Like being inside a computer-programmed virtual world that has been programmed with the laws of physics, which we can amazingly discover from our location inside the program.

    But even on Kant’s terms, what gives anyone the warrant to assume that his instrument panel is the same as others. Perhaps the sky is blue for me but green for you as it was for the painter Eduard Munch, who asserted that what his critics can't understand was that for him the sky was green. Perhaps for you it is green, too, but the abstract sign ‘blue’ refers to that color and it refers to the color blue for me. Since I can’t get inside your spaceship mind and experience the world as you do, and vice-versa, we can never know.

   From there it is a short step to the idea that different kinds of people do have different instrument panels based on different natural or political histories. Whorf-Sapir believed different cultures had different instrument panels. Marx believed that the exploited working class had a different instrument panel from their capitalist exploiters. Nietzsche thought that the resentment weak had a different mode of experience from the value-creating noble – that the drive for power or the maximal possible elevation of the ego determines how we experience the world. And from there it is a short step to Foucault, who believes that this power drive permeates all of experience and expresses itself at the very core of our language – in discourses – that make, for example, the subjectivity of marginalized groups very different from those who are not marginalized (I guess the billionaires).

   All of this begins with the idea of Kant: reality, the reality that we perceive even, is a human construction all the way down. Few share Kant’s belief that the construction is universal – as science is universal. Many postmodern folk also see science as one power discourse among others. But the assumption that we live in a Matrix of our own making is dogma.