This is my favorite RU-vid featuring Dr. Hicks. An excellent conversation, Jordan. You asked great questions that enabled me to better access Dr. Hicks's ideas on Post-Modernism.
Hicks hits it out of the park with Nietzsche's idea of RESENTMENT as the source of POMO. I would add that like the music industry the failed musicians end up being PR and A&R guys for record companies. So too with the academy... the university profs hate western capitalist society because they are ineffectual and don't come up to the standard (the old axiom: those who do, do and those who can't teach and those who can't teach, teach phys. ed.) and they become the ones who pull it all down. Their idea is to become clever and convoluted, which means by today's standard they are "artists." No talent to create -- except gibberish -- but "artists" none-the-less. The more gibberish and tortured language -- the more profound. And then they will demand their 15 minutes of fame, be the next Elvis Presley. And so the comedy goes.
Dr. Hicks is brilliant and has been very influential in terms of filling in my worldview regarding the use of PoMo as a mere tactic to reinsert leftism as a pure power grab mentality. I studied PoMo at university and was given a very balanced account, became a Foucauldian for a time until the inherent contradictions became overwhelming. Now I am an anarcho-libertarian writing my own book on philosophical ethics.
Peter - have you studied Ayn Rand and found her wrong in some way? Or do you have a passing understanding offered by her critics? Because if you have studied Ayn Rand in depth - Yes, OF COURSE Ayn Rand.
Yeah. They can be arrogant and smug, which is annoying. I will encourage you to learn why Stephen Hicks (as sober and thoughtful as he is) has devoted so much of his life's work to understanding and promulgating her work. Why is it that hundreds of thousands of people buy and share a 50-year-old novel every year? and offer the highest praises they can articulate about it? and want to talk about the philosophical issues it raises? What kind of book does that? One that is beneath your study? Confronting Ayn Rand's ideas is not comfortable. And, if you take it seriously, it is extraordinarily intellectually profitable.
If there's anything Ayn Rand could not stand it was the "Slave Morality." Up with it she would not put. Me, I'm not so ambitious, but, I respect the ambitious a lot more than I respect those who wallow in the stupid ignorance of the pathetic "Slave Morality." "Master Morality" can be annoying, but "Slave Morality" is just plain evil.
I finally heard the whole thing and it is very interesting. The problem for me is that the post moderns want to jettison reason and try to do it on reasonable ground: which means you haven't really jettisoned reason. Try as they might it is a lesson in futility -- like squaring the circle or making 2+2=5. Now the other problem is that they are influenced by Nietzsche who had a profound respect for the arts. These post moderns are trying to be "creative" -- like artists -- in their attempts to jettison reason. Artists had become like Gods after the "God is dead" statement of Nietzsche. The whole Romantic project and panoply focused on the creative individual in the 1800s. Creativity is something we share with God. So the post moderns in line with this tradition take the cheap way out by becoming sophists and creative word twisters. This is when the whole focus and convulsion of language started. In particular, it started with Heidegger (a great admirer of Nietzsche and the poet Holderlin) and he purposely wanted to destroy the philosophic lexicon for being inadequate and wanted twist language into some creative deformity -- his writing is purposely impenetrable. A number of the post modernists studied under Heidegger, most notably Derrida, and this was the thumbs up to do the same, to imitate the "artists." (Incidentally, language is now the new God that has superseded man, language comes before us -- we are born into it.) Anyway, the post moderns are too self conscious to be real artists -- its reactionary and calculated -- it's all pretty much an artificial constructs in an attempt to appear novel and NEW with no real inspiration. That is why they share the cult of ugliness with many of today's artists : it's the eye toward shock value as the genuine response. To ask them to do something reasonable and beautiful is next to impossible. But reason is still alive in the sciences and at the critical time when this all this irrationality of the post moderns started to come together (60s and 70s) man was going to the moon. At this time when western culture was starting to be consider "privileged" by the post moderns -- all cultures are suppose to be equal -- western man knew enough truth about reality to go to the moon. If you get sick are you going to an African witch doctor or a doctor in the west? All cultures are not equal in regards to the truth about reality. There is a big difference between putting a bone through your nose and going to the moon.
Would this strenuous attempt to explain a human construct like postmodernism help someone to cook a better dish for his/her lunch? Probably not. Would the time invested to follow this theory of postmodernism package, term used by Hicks himself would help to think out of the box into which our mind navigate hopelessly? Perhaps if one is an optimist, how many can afford this luxury to be optimistic in a world hopelessly drowning into an ocean full of garbage and toxic pollution. Let’s be creative, shall we?
There's been a flip in Post-Modernism where it was once understood what part of any given Narrative was subjective and what was objective Eg. - "Aristotle Lived, he thought, he died ... everything else in between is subjective Narrative"... Derrida. OK fair enough. Today Post-Modernists seem to be saying "Everything is subjective narrative, even the existence of Aristotle."
There's a method to the madness. It is consistent to make all things subjective; even existence. What certainty is there that we actually exist? It seems that Being ultimately is a Paradox.
Moises Nadal Yep ... So we are back to Rene Descartes then really right? The Post-Modernists are, unwittingly, running their way through the whole enlightenment and fooling themselves into thinking they are treading on radically new soil when in actual fact it is they're own naivete concerning History, Politics and Philosophy they are dealing with. They have confused and conflated their own personal disillusionment with the 'ignorance' of society as a whole and painted it as a larger, more 'Universal' problem. This is something I've always believed to be true of all the Paris intellectuals post revolution. Or, Even since J. J. Rousseau and the concept of 'The Greater Will' early 18th century. Have you Read Isiah Berlin at all? His 'History of Romanticism' and 'Two Concepts of Liberty' Points this out rather well. This is when you get the 'You are acting against your own best interest and only I, one of the Elite intelligentsia, can possibly know what is good for you.' attitude. Good old fashioned snobbery my friend.
I'm flexible enough to play their game their way if they insist. If all is subjective, then, I subjectively hate their guts and want them gone. I subjectively choose to reject their bullshit and embrace something else. If they don't like it they can subjectively lump it. If they want to fight about it I'm ready to subjectively rumble.
I will elaborate. This guy doesn’t back up his claims, Objectivists seem to need an ‘ark villain’ in order to justify the existence of a simplistic and essentially flawed philosophy. For Rand it was Kant
