My Interpretation of Dominant Postmodernism - A Reaction Against Enlightenment

                                                                          Charles Taylor

 As I said, my first introduction to three figures associated with postmodern philosophy – Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida – was in a course in social theory called Conservative Thought (or something like that) (Ted Schatzki was the professor, a good one). Since they all seemed left of Marx, that puzzled me. I did understand the reasons for their inclusion during the seminar.  Conservative was defined in opposition to Enlightenment.

   A professor (and friend), Georg Bluhm, once characterized the Enlightenment thus: Each individual – regardless of ascriptive factors like caste, class, race, gender, etc. – defines their own life purposes. A paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson’s “inalienable” right to the “pursuit of happiness.” This in turn presupposes the more fundamental belief: “all men are created equal” – not in terms of talents (I am not the equal of Einstein in math and physics) but rights: in particular, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

     He discussed this in the context of a discussion of India and its political culture (this was in the early 80’s). The caste system in India, deeply rooted in Hinduism, was his antithesis to the Enlightenment, and he discussed Nehru’s failed attempt to introduce aspects of Enlightenment into India and the cultural resistance to him. Traditionally Hinduism divides society into hierarchical groups called varnas, which are further divided into sub-castes or jatis. The four primary varnas are Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders and agriculturists), and Shudras (laborers and service providers). Additionally, there are those outside the varna system, often referred to as Dalits or "untouchables," who historically have performed tasks considered impure. Economically, the caste system functions by assigning specific roles and occupations to each caste. This system historically ensured a division of labor where each caste had its traditional occupations. For example, Brahmins would perform religious rituals and teaching; Kshatriyas would engage in warfare and governance; Vaishyas would handle trade and agriculture; and Shudras would serve the other three castes through various forms of manual labor. If your father was a smith, which typically falls under a specific jati within the Shudra varna, it would traditionally be your duty to continue in the same occupation. This continuity is seen as dharma, or duty. Dharma encompasses the moral and ethical duties corresponding to one's caste and life stage. Therefore, taking up your father's occupation as a smith would be considered fulfilling your dharma.

   This is a very different human image than what the Enlightenment bequeathed to “modernity.” This is obviously not an example of the individual defining their own life purposes without regard to ascriptive factors!

  Another source I learned much from was the philosopher Charles Taylor, who visited my seminar and in additional gave a talk about his at the time new book Hegel and the Modern World, which I read along with this Hegel. (Taylor, and I following him, were attracted to Hegel because he attempted in thought reconcile the Enlightenment with tradition and the romantic-conservative reaction against the Enlightenment. I felt intuitively at the time that all these conflicting worldviews had some validity.) As he put it: “The essential difference [between the Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment cultures] can perhaps be put this way: the modern subject is self-defining, where on previous views the subject is defined in relation to a cosmic order.”  The “data” of our subjectivity is underdetermined. We can at times “be ‘in touch’ with ourselves, with our central concerns, we can be clear about who we are and what our purposes are; while at other times we are confused, unclear, or distraught, torn this way and that, obsessed with the inessential, or just giddily forgetful.” I want to quote Taylor at length here:

 

Many concepts and images can be used to describe these opposed conditions: harmony vs. conflict, depth vs. superficiality, self-possession vs. -loss, self-centring vs. dispersal. And of course none is neutral, in the sense that each proposes an interpretation of what is at stake which can be contested. For different notions of the subject suggest very different interpretations.

     If we pick ‘self-presence’ as against ‘distraction’ or ‘dispersal’ as provisional terms to designate the oppositions here, then we can say that the view of the subject that came down from the dominant tradition of the ancients, was that man came most fully to himself when he was in touch with a cosmic order, and in touch with it in the way most suitable to it as an order of ideas, that is, by reason. This is plainly the heritage of Plato; order in the human soul is inseparable from rational vision of the order of being. For Aristotle contemplation of this order is the highest activity of man. The same basic notion is present in the neo-Platonist vision which through Augustine becomes foundational for much medieval thought.

     On this view the notion of a subject coming to self-presence and clarity in the absence of any cosmic order, or in ignorance of and unrelated to the cosmic order, is utterly senseless: to rise out of dream, confusion, illusion is just to see the order of things. We might say that on this view, there is no notion of the self in the modern sense, that is, of an identity which I can define for myself without reference to what surrounds me and the world in which I am set. Rather, I am essentially vision of...either order or illusion.

           . . .

Plainly the obverse relation holds as well, and to dispense with the notion of meaningful order was to re-define the self. The situation is now reversed: full self-possession requires that we free ourselves from the projections of meanings onto things, that we be able to draw back from the world, and concentrate purely on our own processes of observation and thought about things. The old model now looks like a dream of self-dispersal; self-presence is now to be aware of what we are and what we are doing in abstraction from the world we observe and judge. The self-defining subject of modern epistemology is thus naturally the atomic subjectivity of the psychology and politics which grow out of the same movement. The very notion of the subject takes on a new meaning in the modern context, as a number of contemporary writers have pointed out. (Taylor, from Hegel, 6-7)

    A radically new cosmology, indeed ontology emerged:

Understanding the world in categories of meaning, as existing to embody or express an order of Ideas or archetypes, as manifesting the rhythm of divine life, or the foundational acts of the gods, or the will of God; seeing the world as a text, or the universe as a book (a notion which Galileo still makes use of) this kind of interpretive vision of things which in one form or another played such an important role in many pre-modern societies may appear to us the paradigm of anthropomorphic projection onto the world, suitable to an age in which man was not fully adult.

  What was the basis in reality for this elevation of the individual over community and tradition (and authority); of the dissolution of a meaningful, moral order of reality in favor of "autonomy"? Dr. Bluhm put it like this: the individual man or woman (though that took a while) is competent. At least unless some oppressive authority prevents us from developing our competence. Competence implies the skills, knowledge, education not only to make a living and raise a family but to “know yourself” and your core interests well enough to determine your own life purposes. It implied “reason” or “rationality.” Reason is a fairly empty term meaning: that part of our intellect that allows us to “know an at least partly knowable universe” (as Dr. Bluhm put it). But also to know ourselves and our social situation. My reason is why I am uniquely qualified to define my interests and life purposes – better than a priest, teacher, or parent, for example. It is rational to submit to the authority of my piano teacher if I want to learn how to play the piano. But only I – not my priest or father – can determine whether playing the piano should be part of my life purpose. The same reasoning applies to choosing how to make a living, choosing whom I want to marry or whether I want to go to church, and so on. Doing what my father did also seems like a rejection of my own autonomy, a form of “bad faith” to myself, as Sartre would later put it.  

   This is now so ingrained in our regime it is hard to think of just how destabilizing and revolutionary it was when it erupted into history.

  Note how sinful is such an attitude for the dominant Christian culture of Europe. For Christian thought autonomy was the defining characteristic of Satan. Our nature – our will, our reason – has been corrupted by sin. Christ, through the Church, makes grace possible, but only if the individual embraces the authority of the Church. The Eucharist is the center not only of religion but community. Only as part of the Christian community can we thrive according to our nature. Only by sublimating individual desires to define ourselves can we live in community with others, and practice the virtues of justice, self-restraint, courage, and practical commonsense wisdom. Only in the community of the Church can we live the theological virtues of hope, faith, and love, on which everything else depends. Economically, the point is to find our vocation. While not as rigid as the Hindu caste system, tradition did rightly under this regime guide people in their choices. If my father was a farmer, it was natural for me to become a farmer. I learn from him (and the community of farmers) what they learned from their father (and community) and so on. The cumulative local knowledge of the land and farming is passed on. The skills need to make a living and sustain a family and community were passed on.

  Sounds good in theory. In practice, the majority of people who worked were oppressed (more or less greatly, depending on the region) by feudal elites, who left them only a subsistence. (I cannot see the great palaces of Europe without thinking of the millions of farmers and craftsmen (and their families) who were deprived of the fruits of their labor by their oppressors – all justified by the Church. Most traditional societies were characterized by mass poverty and, outside of the skills and knowledge needed to remain productive, of literacy and education.  Within these oppressed communities, other forms of oppression were no doubt common: of men against women, of adults against children.

   The Enlightenment was revolutionary. Its logic applies across the board of traditional or preindustrial cultures undermining everything from the role of women to the authority of traditions and religions – and of course, the desirability of the community itself insofar as its requirements posed limits on men’s inalienable right to determine his own life purposes in equality.  From the perspective of the Enlightenment, all “pre-modern” or “pre-industrial” cultures – from Samurai-ruled Japan to the Islamic cultures of the Ottoman Empire to the Hindu culture of India as well as Catholic Europe – become “backward.” Such cultures chained the individual to irrational, power-hungry authorities – often through torture and horrific forms of execution. They prevented human flourishing by repressing our innate potential for autonomy. Conformism through repression of the individual; superstition-based authority through the repression of reason: that is the name of the pre-Enlightenment game.

    The Enlightenment was not just a new anthropology and a universal conception of reason (I haven’t dealt with that here). It was an umbrella for diverse expressions of it. There was the scientific Enlightenment and capitalist industrialism with the acceleration of technological change. Again I will quote Taylor, who explains this better than I could:

...the modern shift to a self-defining subject was bound up with a sense of control over the world – at first intellectual and then technological. That is, the modern certainty that the world was not to be seen as a text or an embodiment of meaning was not founded on a sense of its baffling impenetrability. On the contrary, it grew with the mapping of the regularities in things, by transparent mathematical reasoning, and with the consequent increase of manipulative control. That is what ultimately established the picture of the world as the locus of neutral, contingent correlations.

...

 My suggestion is that one of the powerful attractions of this austere vision, long before it ‘paid off’ in technology, lies in the fact that a disenchanted world is correlative to a self-defining subject, and that the winning through to a self-defining identity was accompanied by a sense of exhilaration and power, that the subject need no longer define his perfection or vice, his equilibrium or disharmony, in relation to an external order. With the forging of this modern subjectivity there comes a new notion of freedom, and a newly central role attributed to freedom, which seems to have proved itself definitive and irreversible....

    In any case, . . . we can discern the development in these countries of a modern notion of the subject, which I have characterized as self-defining, and correlative to this a vision of things as devoid of intrinsic meaning, of the world as the locus of contingent correlations to be traced by observation, conforming to no a priori pattern. I have spoken above of this vision of the world as ‘disenchanted’ using Weber’s term, or as ‘desacralized’ in speaking of the religious development. Perhaps I can introduce the term of art ‘objectified’ here to cover this denial to the world of inherent meaning, that is, the denial that it is to be seen as embodied meaning. The point of using this term is to mark the fact that for the modern view categories of meaning and purpose apply exclusively to the thought and actions of subjects, and cannot find a purchase in the world they think about and act on. To think of things in these terms is to project subjective categories, to set aside these categories is thus to objectify’. This marks a new, modern notion of objectivity correlative to the new subjectivity.

    The new notion of objectivity rejected the recourse to final causes, it was mechanistic in the sense of relying on efficient causation only. Connected with this it was atomistic, in that it accounted for change in complex things not by gestalt or holistic properties, but rather by efficient causal relations among constituents. It tended towards homogeneity in that seemingly qualitatively distinct things were to be explained as alternative constructions out of the same basic constituents or basic principles. One of the most spectacular results of the new physics was to collapse the Aristotelian distinction between the supra- and sub-lunar to account for moving planets and falling apples in the same formula. Thus this science was mechanistic, atomistic, homogenizing, and of course saw the shape of things as contingent. (Hegel, 8-9)

 

 

Pause: I think the traditional view is absolutely right but it was perverted by injustice in every known society to me into an ideology justifying oppression. Putin's power system is not much different from that of Henry VIII, kleptocracy being perhaps the most common form of regime in European history. 

  Thus, the autonomous or self-defining self presupposes a segregation of meaning from nature. To be able to manipulate nature technologically, the whole industrial and scientific revolutions, confirms the reality of the autonomous self and kills the idea of nature as Creation, as a meaningful order of reality to be understood and followed. The industrial and scientific conquest of nature proves and celebrates the "disenchantment" (Max Weber) of Being. 

   If nature is not meaningful, if our reality is not part of a larger world of meanings, then we define what is real and good at least as far as the meaning of things go. The industrial capitalist is free to deforest the upper peninsula of Michigan or the ancients forests of Appalachia or the West coast because they are nothing but raw materials that become valuable only when translated into human use values. The very human awe some people may feel in the presence of such forests are subjective-psychological projections onto the blank and meaningless screen of nature. From the perspective inside a cosmos like the Catholic-Christian, meaning and value are objective, woven into the fabric of Creation, present eternally as Ideas in the mind of God. Reason and reality require the recognition of the Ideas, the patterns, and conforming your intellect, heart, and life to them. Outside the perspective of a meaningful cosmos – Creation in Christian-Catholic terms – we are little centers of self-consciousness, absolute within ourselves, self-contained autonomous units of will defining ourselves and the world outside of us. Science, modern technology, and industrial capitalism – actually one regime – presuppose the latter view.  

. . .

   Dr. Bluhm was a passionate adherent of the Enlightenment: an understandable response to the irrationality and horrors of the Nazi period that he experienced first hand. He and many of his generation are probably right in believing that the hostile, conservative reaction of many German intellectuals to the Enlightenment. (There are reasons for this having to do with the fact that Germany was not a country for the longest time, but smaller regions, territories, duchies, etc. Religion was for these reasons also a stronger cultural force in the German territories than in the centralized countries especially France but also of England. No time to go into all of that here.)

  Under Dr. Bluhm I studies the various ‘revolutions of modernity’: the “successful” revolution in Japan under the Meiji emperor; the rather unsuccessful attempt to ‘modernize’ India by Nehru; the rather unsuccessful attempt to modernize Turkey under Ataturk. Why did Japan succeed whereas Turkey and India had only very partial success? That was the question. The answer was partly culture: some cultures – Islamic and Hindu cultures in particular – are more resistant to Enlightenment than others. I was amazed at the culture war Ataturk made against the Islamic clergy, even forcing them to cut off their beards. (The Samurai in Japan also had to cut their long hair.) I should not say Enlightenment. These regimes wanted the pay-off of Enlightenment – science, modern technology, and capitalism – more than the self-defining subject. The reason is simple: power. Western countries with their regime of Science-technology-capitalism were more powerful. And imperialistic. The West was the blueprint. You either modelled your country on that blueprint for the sake of the payoff in power or your country was threatened with colonization.

   Indeed, as modern autocrats still bemoan, Enlightenment – liberalism as well as Marxism are products of the Enlightenment – is revolutionary. Its individualism undermines religion, community, tradition, and authority. This undermining is the necessary precondition to conquer nature – eventually also human nature. It is in all its forms a universal blueprint for transforming traditional societies into modern (Western) societies based on individualism, individual rights, self-determination – and the regime of science, technology, and capitalism, forces that radically undermined the very goals of the Enlightenment that unleashed them. [All that is left of autonomy is the autonomy of the consumer – defining lifestyle is analogous to consumerism in every way and usually includes purchased products.]

    Conservatism in its original form was based on the rejection of Enlightenment: the rejection of universal reason, anti-community individualism, anti-tradition-and-authority rationality. The sacred – nature and human nature as part of a larger moral cosmos – had to be recovered. Local culture had to be protected from what was experienced as an imperialist movement of anti-culture. And this is the form of thought that links conservativism with postmodernism. I shall want to qualify this and see postmodernism as Enlightenment in different form. Later.

   [Marxism and liberal capitalism, as a side note, the big enemies of the Cold War, were both Enlightenment products. Marx wrote of India and all traditional societies – I can’t find the quote – that in European capitalism, in the smokestacks of Manchester, they were looking at the future of their own countries. (Marx gets heavily criticized for his “Eurocentrism” by postmodern critics.)]

Charles Taylor, Hegel, 1975. 

Also important as criticisms of modernity:

       Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, 1970.

       E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, 1977. 

       Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology,          1992.