Tag Archive: Postmodernism

In my last post I discussed what I believe to be the most widespread (and, as fallacious as it is, perhaps most convincing) argument in favor of moral relativism, which is based upon the cultural relativism and social constructivism of anthropology and sociology respectively. In my experience, 90% of the impetus for adopting moral relativism lies with this argument and it is often the most difficult to overturn in peoples’ heads  (illustrating fallacies such as Affirming the Consequent for instance, usually requires the presence of a blackboard, which is difficult to keep on one’s person at all times). But having (hopefully) at last dispelled with the myth that cultural relativism has anything to do with the field of ethics, we can now move onto part II of this series of posts, which will concern the remaining reasons that people commonly adopt this view, before in part III I strive to show how it is entirely incoherent. I use the word “reason” loosely here; as I implied in my previous post, relativism itself is an ethical view that essentially sees all of ethics as a worthless enterprise. For that reason there is little point, from the relativist perspective, in engaging in much ethical reflection outside of attempting to convert heathen moral realists to relativism; the view itself asserts that it is social construction and one’s upbringing that causes one to adopt certain ethical beliefs, and scoffs at the notion that human reason can help us to rise above these purportedly all-encompassing social phenomena.

This then, leads us to the next argument commonly used in favor of moral relativism, perhaps constituting another 8% of the argumentative force of the view, which I will label the

“if you had grown up in _____, then you would be a _____”

argument. The basis behind this argument is pretty simple and, once again, at face value seems perfectly plausible. If I had grown up in England, then I would be an Englishman. If I had grown up in Ireland, then I would be an Irishman. Similarly, if I had grown up in Europe in the Middle Ages, I would probably have been a Catholic. If I had grown up in Persia in the year 1000, there’s a good chance I would have been a Muslim. And now, according to the moral relativist, if I had grown up in the American South in 1820, I would probably believe that Slavery was perfectly acceptable. If I grew up in Germany in 1930 I very well may believe that Jews are an inferior race and deserve to be put into camps and murdered. And perhaps if I had grown up in the Middle East today, I would think that beating a woman for going to work on the wrong day, or sewing her vagina shut to prevent her from engaging in sexual intercourse are entirely acceptable practices. So therefore, the only reason that I think all of these latter practices are so incredibly horrific is just because of where I grew up and was raised right?

Actually, that’s completely incorrect. This is another argument that seems to have gotten all of the relativists and postmodernists and social constructivists ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ for no good reason whatsoever, and is in my opinion an even poorer argument than those listed in my last post. Even a minimally thoughtful person should be able to see problems with this argument; as I’m a philosophy major, I’ll move from the more abstract to the more obvious. First of all, ontologically speaking, I, as a human being, have certain essential characteristics; characteristics that cannot change unless I can be considered to have become a new person after the change. The set of these characteristics includes who my parents were (and by extension, how I was raised) along with where I was  born. Thus what a relativist even means by saying that “if [I] were born in the American South prior to the Civil War [I] would have thought that slavery was morally acceptable” is unclear at best; if I were born in 1930 or in Iran I wouldn’t really be me, so the proposition that that person (whoever he would be) would have appallingly sexist views doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant. While the relativist might wish to counter by shouting “aha! You concede that where we are born and how we are raised are essential in forming our sense of morality” this would be nothing more than another relativist false dichotomy. As I explained in my last post, the moral objectivist can be perfectly content in accepting that social norms, class structures, culture, history etc. influence the way that we think about moral issues (or anything else, for that matter). It is the far more extreme viewpoint that these forces entirely determine how we feel about morality that the moral realist argues against, and is one of the hallmarks of relativist irrationalism.

Moreover, this argument is both blatantly false and self-defeating. As to the former, maybe the relativist is right, maybe if I lived in 1930 in Germany I would be a raving anti-semitic Hitler lover. Or maybe I wouldn’t be. Maybe I would be like Oscar Schindler or many other brave Germans, Austrians, Poles etc. whose compassionate hearts were far bigger than crackpot racial theories, and who had the courage and honor to do all that they could to help their fellow human beings in their time of need. While the relativist is right that sadly, those who were blatantly antisemitic or else willing to stand aside and do nothing to help those being murdered were in the majority, there were still those that dissented, and considering the entire scenario being cooked up by the relativist is a matter of conjecture it’s a damn ballsy move for the relativist to claim to “know” what I would be if I were put into that historical situation. Certainly the spirit of the relativist’s point (that views that we now consider horriffic were at many times widespread) is true, but that it serves as some specific basis of “knowledge” that the relativist can use to lend support to his position is doubtful at best.

This leads us to an aside but an important one, before we address the first of many ways in which relativism is self-undermining, which is that if relativism were true progressive social change would be impossible, both philosophically and (as far as we could predict) practically. All of those great humanitarian heroes of progressive social change that we venerate in our capitols and history books (Martin Luther King, Gandhi etc.) have something in common, which is a passionate and zealous belief that the oppression and unfairness they fought against was wrong. What a sorry state of affairs it would have been, if no one had stepped up to the plate during mankind’s darkest days because “morality is a social construction” and what our history’s oppressors were doing couldn’t be considered “really” immoral. It has been moral objectivism, passionate zeal for justice and equality, that have driven the engines of global moral evolution, and while those tiresome, whining cynics that fill today’s universities, who endlessly bitch and moan about the tiny details of our common social interactions (“how dare you vile men oppress me by thinking that wavy hair looks more attractive than straight hair!”) may not wish to admit the fact, mankind has made some improvements over the past several thousand years. Additionally, in between spouts of bitching and moaning, those cynical academics who seem enslaved to a tired dramatic dogma of melancholy postmodernism may wish to consider the fact that the fight is still going on, and all sorts of contemporary movements for equality (such as the womens’ movement, the gay rights movement etc.) are not benefiting from the idiotic proposition that “all values are relative.” If “all values are relative” then all of the marches, rallies and parades going across my college campus (and most college campuses) every year for womens’ rights, gay and lesbian rights etc. might as well pack up and go home, because apparently there’s really no reason at all (morally speaking) to prefer equality of the sexes and marriage equality to women chained in a basement and throwing homosexuals into concentration camps.

But even if all of the above were not true; even if the argument didn’t make an unclear metaphysical assertion, even if it didn’t seem patently false or at least unfalsifiable, and even if it wasn’t a deeply offensive, disturbing and repugnant viewpoint from the standpoint of anyone who cares to see progressive equality and protection of human dignity and rights in the future, it would be wholly irrelevant because it is simply self-defeating, plain and simple. To see why, simply understand that the hidden axiom of this argument is that social forces (you know, class, upbringing, religion etc. etc. etc.) entirely determine our moral beliefs, with those beliefs having no grounding in rational reflection or fact. Now it becomes clear that this argument has exactly the same amount of force against a moral relativist that it does against a moral realist. Presumably, by his own reasoning, if a moral relativist were born in the American South today, he would be some form of relatively conservative Christian, and therefore certainly not a moral relativist. Ultimately, the argument boils down to the proposition that, at least as far as one’s moral beliefs are concerned, one cannot possibly rise above the influences of one’s socialization and location. These forces are, according to the relativist, determining factors of our moral beliefs. This is all fine and well, but it would seem to be a fair assumption that if the moral relativist is bothering to argue with a moral realist (or anyone else for that matter) it’s because he believes that his own viewpoint is, in some sense, more rational, more true (otherwise why is he bothering to have the debate?) If this is the case, then the relativist is suddenly stuck in the position of arguing that his viewpoint is the most rational one, even though he is simultaneously arguing that peoples’ moral beliefs have nothing to do with rationality at all. There is yet another contradiction here then, between what the relativist preaches and what he practices.

It’s important when considering this argument to bear in mind the difference between “ethical” questions vs. “meta-ethical” questions. An “ethical” question is a question such as “is there any crime so heinous that the death penalty is a justifiable punishment for it?” A “meta-ethical” question, by comparison, is more abstract and focuses on what gives ethical propositions their normative force. So for instance “what is it about lying that makes it immoral?” would be a meta-ethical question (needless to say, the distinction between the two is sometimes blurry). A relativist may wish to say specific moral commands (don’t kill, don’t steal etc.) are relative by culture and at the same time say that this is the objective truth, meta-ethically speaking. In this way a relativist may wish to avoid the self-undermining nature of his own theory (this issue will be settled once and for all in my next and final post). This is, however, a bizarre move on the part of the relativist; bizarre enough to simply be labeled ad hoc. Relativism seems to collapse the distinction between ethical questions and meta-ethical questions because it is essentially connected to the notion that morality is not a real area of rational inquiry. Because meta-ethics is only concerned with what gives ethical commands their normative force (which obviously involves the use of rational persuasion) it winds up being non-subject according to relativists; the very essence of their position is to maintain that morality simply has nothing to do with reason. Thus even if the relativist tries to avoid making this an explicit part of his position, for a relativist to use the distinction between ethics and meta-ethics as a defense against the view’s otherwise self-undermining undertone betrays the spirit of relativism and is a doubtful strategy at best.

I’ve tried to keep this middle post on moral relativism short because the final post will require quite a bit of room. In my next and final post on this matter I hope to demonstrate why relativism is not only self-undermining (at least in spirit, even if a relativist might find some way to slip out of outright logical contradiction) but utterly incoherent as well.


Here comes a polemical one ladies and gentlemen, you have been warned.

Years ago, back in high school, I had a teacher who had a poster in her classroom that was an artistic depiction of people celebrating around a fire, and on it was written “other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit” (that quote is by someone famous, though I’m not exactly sure who). Much of the emphasis in this particular class was on understanding other cultures, avoiding ethnocentrism and acknowledging that people have widespread and varied belief systems, and we must avoid holding the view that our own cherished culture and traditions are “better” than others. All of this normative development on the part of the class was fine with me; like the majority of students I knew, I was all for “blending cultures,” “promoting diversity” and “celebrating equality.” What a shock it was to me then, when I learned about men burning their (multiple) wives alive with full acceptance and approval in many parts of the Middle East, the Caste system in India and the Genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia and the Sudan. These practices were not the actions of limited groups of individuals nor were they the actions of corrupt, autocratic governments. Instead they were perpetrated or approved of by many thousands or millions of people, and according to their own “webs of meaning” (according to the fashionable jargon of Social Constructionism) these actions were completely justified and acceptable. In the context of these horrors, I became very cynical about the utopian message printed on that poster; it seemed to me to be something of a bad joke.

My cynicism about this particular “way of seeing things” primarily has to do with what I take to be an obvious inconsistency, which is that it at the one time extols the values of tolerance, equality and diversity while at the same time denying that any set of values has more worth than any other. Of course I do support equality, tolerance, diversity etc., yet the very reason I support these values is that I believe they are better values than, say, inequality, prejudice and uniformity, “better” implying that there is at least some objectivity in terms of comparing values (particularly moral values) to one another. The rejection of this thesis, of course, is specifically the ethical viewpoint known as “moral relativism,” an utterly appalling view that has achieved an unbelievable degree of acceptance in our society today. But the point of this particular post is not to attack that view specifically (I will do so in later posts, just you wait.) Rather, the target of this post is the primary contemporary framework underlying that view, labeled “Postmodernism,” which has latched onto contemporary academia like a vile parasite, and as far as I can tell has not received enough of the criticism it so justly deserves. It would be nice to begin by defining the view that I am criticizing (that’s what you’re supposed to do anyways) but I must confess I am unable to do so, not because I haven’t tried but because the Postmodernists themselves don’t seem to have any idea what their position is. Postmodernism is a perspective spanning the fine arts, architecture, literary criticism, the social sciences and philosophy and in this sense has a remarkable ability morph into some other domain whenever one attempts to criticize it; this also seems to give it the curious characteristic of lacking any real, essential definition. I know this from having taken out books at the library, reading articles in research journals, and asking self-described ‘Postmodernists’ what, the hell, exactly, Postmodernism is, and have, each time, received almost entirely different definitions that seem to have little in common with one another.

But I have come to see that this is the point, in some sense, of the Postmodernists’ position. The Postmodernist is one who rejects hard and fast, rigid definitions, who questions the underlying motivations for adopting the dominant strategies involved in more conventional academic discourse. It’s a sort of ‘Zen’ thing apparently; the answer to the question is that there is no answer; our words are misleading us, our culture and upbringing have biased us and what seems meaningful is meaningless. All that there is left to do, according to the Postmodernist (at least as far as I can tell, from having read some of their papers and spoken to some of their sycophants) is to have fun playing around with nonsense, as well as critique our broader social order and see the ways in which dominant power structures use language and ideology to carefully monitor and control the development of our society. And Postmodern theorists, in many fields, discuss the ways in which all of this takes place. For some reason though, this sacred message would apparently lose all of its force if someone just came out and stated it clearly and concisely. Rather, we need to arrive at it ourselves, as a sort of development that comes from reading the works of the historical ancestors of the movement and meditating on them while we consider their contemporary descendants, along with their often strikingly unclear writing, peppered with big, smart-sounding words used entirely out of context. The language thus serves, apparently, as Wittgenstein put it at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, like a sort of “ladder to the truth,” that can be kicked away once understanding is achieved. Indeed, the implication of the Postmodernists seems to be that like the Zen student who, after being struck by the master’s stick a dozen or so times, suddenly achieves enlightenment, upon following this noble path we will apparently reach a halcyon point of sophistication where can finally move past our silly, antiquated notions of absolute truth and value and realize that these old ideas were just inhibiting us, enslaving our minds, and that in abandoning them we have at least achieved liberation.

Or, on the other hand, maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, this is really all a bunch of immature nonsense; maybe the Emperor really is just naked after all.  Postmodernism seems to me to be one giant intellectual scam that a portion of the academic establishment is attempting to pull on a generation of earnest young students. About a decade ago, Cambridge University decided to award an honorary doctorate to Jacques Derrida, who is perhaps the quintessential postmodern philosopher, on the basis of his numerous accolades from his colleagues in France as well as his contributions to the humanities and literary theory. Upon learning this, numerous philosophers at Cambridge along with eighteen renowned analytic philosophers from around the world wrote indignant letters to the university claiming that Derrida’s work “did not meet acceptable philosophical standards” and was little more than sophistry. Cambridge went ahead with giving the man an honorary Doctorate anyways (what can you say? They are Cambridge after all) leaving many analytic philosophers indignant, while predictably the reaction from Derrida himself was that his work was attacked because it criticizes “the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene.”

This is exactly the sort of stock, arrogant, hobnobbing garbage that many Postmodernists will spew when one dares to criticize their methodology as inherently flawed or deficient, and exposes the way in which Postmodernism is itself nothing more than a dogma desperately clung to by skittish academics rather than a systematic, well thought-out theoretical framework. Notice in Derrida’s reply there is nothing that refers to the semantics, no comment made about the content of the debate itself. Rather there is just a petty, almost whining remark about why the big bad academic authorities are trying to put down a voice of dissent. To one indoctrinated by the Postmodernist creed this apparently seems plausible, but to a person who has not yet achieved enlightenment this is obviously false. Stall the revolution comrades; “the rules of the dominant discourse” in philosophy are not equivalent to the “rules of the dominant discourse” in politics or the government. Believe me, I (and most philosophers I know) really sincerely wish that the common people would defer to our judgment in a whole host of matters (getting paid “the big bucks” sure would be nice too), but in case Derrida or his postmodern apostles haven’t noticed, this isn’t exactly the case. The suggestion that his work would be criticized or dismissed as sophistry on the basis of politics or bias, or preserving some philosophical status quo (which certainly exists but in a very different sense from that which Derrida’s whining alleges) rather than because it is simply unclear, unsystematic and hackneyed, is characteristic of the Postmodern approach to criticism; blame the critic for being prejudiced or “just not understanding,” rather than actually answering the questions asked.

This latter point also betrays a curious tendency amongst contemporary Postmodern ‘theorists’ (I would say “philosophers” but that would be too limited a description); if you read a large enough sample of their work, you’ll find that what looks like a development of striking, radical claims about our intellectual discourse, our ideas and our culture and society (as well as how we ought to read certain texts) is in fact a longstanding pissing contest amongst the foremost Postmodernists in the field. What I mean by this is to simply note the curious way in which Postmodernists seem to attempt to outdo one another in terms of how radical or apparently implausible a claim they can make and get away with it; Michael Focuault suggests that it is ultimately the power structures of the dominant class that determine what is “true” and what is “false,” a radical reinterpretation of the intuitively plausible Marxist thesis that what is a serious topic for intellectual study is determined by the bourgeoisie. Peter Berger one-ups Foucault by originating the idea of ‘social construction’ and with the radical suggestion that any social problem (even the destruction caused by a natural event) is ultimately a ‘social construction’ and does not have any significance in an outsider, ‘objective’ sense. Then you get to the really crazy Postmodernists like Luce Irigaray, a radical feminist psychoanalyst who suggests that the modern field of Fluid Mechanics preserves patriarchal power structures by ‘privileging’ solid, rigid, ‘masculine’ objects (‘masculine’ because the erect penis is solid and rigid, and as Freudian psychoanalysis “definitively proves,” all human thought is subconsciously concerned with sex whether you know it or not) over fluid ‘feminine’ ones. Scoffing at any one of these preposterous suggestions is evidence not of a healthy skepticism, but instead that your mind is enslaved by the antiquated modernist or Romantic notions of absolute truth and value, which we ought to abandon in favor of a healthier, egalitarian nihilism.

I have attempted to be ironic, in this post, by subjecting Postmodernism to something of a Postmodernist critique itself, in paying little attention to that approach’s philosophical content and merely noting the absurd degree of undeserved dogmatic power it seems to wield. I speak to that power from my own experience in secondary education as well as in college; throughout secondary school I was subject to all sorts of “forward thinking” educational programs, their methodology lifted from the latest Postmodernist, constructionist and’ whole language learning’ paradigms, which I now have the good sense to see, upon looking back, were thoroughly mediocre in terms of the amount I actually learned compared to students enrolled in the “Traditional” programs at our schools. It was only until I reached the end of high school that I actually began to question this framework; and at many times in my phase of questioning I felt the way I suppose an Atheist feels at Church, that is, completely out of place. I would debate entire classes of my fellow students, who, upon hearing that I believed certain actions (rape, infanticide, slavery etc.) were simply immoral actions or practices, regardless of who did them and when, and without giving a damn what their “culture” said about the matter, were baffled, and often looked at me as if I had said that I believed I was a space alien. My fellow students and teachers would then play the classic relativist/ subjectivist/ postmodernist (or whatever) card of noting some culture that regularly practiced exactly some action that I find horrifying, and triumphantly ask if I “really thought an entire society could just be wrong,” to which they would again be baffled (and usually a bit irritated) when I would answer with a big, obnoxious “YUP!” As I noted, relativism is, as far as I can tell, a huge part of Postmodernism, and will receive its own bashing within my next several posts, so I don’t want to get into it too much  now. Suffice to say that all of these Postmodern dogmas, relativism, constructionism, structuralism etc., were held to tenaciously like a cherished creed by so many of my fellow students and my teachers (though they frequently didn’t consciously recognize exactly what it was they were clinging to), and one of the most profound experiences of being a deviant has been, in my experience, rebelling against them.

But now for the bottom line; what support does the Postmodernist have for his own position? In this vein I will again, for the time being, ignore moral relativism, since it will be the subject of such vitriolic later posts of mine. Instead of this let us briefly consider “anti-foundationalism,” the viewpoint that all of human knowledge is ultimately without a certain belief or principle as its fundamental basis. Now I’m not keen on this, but the really relevant variant of this view is the sort supported by Derrida’s notion of differance, which argues (in this context) that ‘knowledge’ is always given its foundation from a certain social or political context, in an analagous way to that in which certain words acquire their significance from the context in which they are used (a similar notion to Wittgenstein’s ‘language games.’) Therefore, it follows, apparently, that ‘philosophy’ conceived of in the way that its founders (or its contemporary American, British and Australian practicioners) conceived of it is impossible; the “web of meaning” in which we are trapped is simply too sticky for us to escape, and anyways, our language, on this view, has been radically cut off from the world to which it supposedly refers. Thus what is important to keep in mind about the fundamental difference between any variant of Postmodernism (and what seems to me to be its bare naked distinguishing factor, all of the rhetorical and dogmatic mumbo-jumbo aside) and other “Traditional” philosophical views is that Postmodernist perspectives usually take the stance that we are simply incapable of escaping from some essentially blinding forces, usually social or cultural ones. Thus the postmodernist ultimately believes that the result of our socialization and acculturation has been the complete fixing of even our very understanding and experience of what it is to “know” things, such that we can never “escape” the blinding force of our socialization and must learn to theorize and pursue knowledge within it. Considering the excessive focus on the ‘social construction of reality’ also present within this view (Postmodernism is the most contemporary sociological approach, and ‘social construction’ predated it, but the latter has strongly influenced the former) ‘learning’ takes on a pretty different meaning than it does under a more traditional approach, usually something along the lines of “learning how to create meaning” (the basis of the very popular ‘whole language learning’ approach in reading education, though this approach is highly unsupported by scientific research).

After years of education, mixed with my own research and reflection, this seems to me to be the essential philosophical framework of Postmodernism, which does not consist of arguments per se, but more consists of the implications created by a basically very simple set of philosophical assumptions. Having done my best to present it concisely but accurately, please allow me to now show why this framework is, all things considered, pretty much demonstrably false. In the first place notice that this variant of anti-foundationalism, which is based upon a sort of cultural relativism, is radically self-undermining; it claims that we are trapped by our socialization or upbringing and therefore cannot understand the “objective” state of the nature of humanity and human knowledge, and in doing so claims to understand something about the “objective” state of the nature of humanity and human knowledge. ‘Self reference’ is a problem that plagues all such radical generalizations; simply ask yourself whether the proposition “there is no truth” is true or not and you will see why radical relativism is blatantly false to anyone concerned with having consistent beliefs, rather than having their Postmodernist buddies in the department think that they’re cool. In fact sociology (which I am well acquainted with, and which has contributed greatly to the Postmodernist ‘school’) makes all sorts of ballsy generalizations about people that seem to refer to basic, essential characteristics of humanity; that we are “social beings,” the Thomas theorem, hell even saying that people “socially construct” some issue (deviance, obesity, race etc.) is nevertheless saying that all people engage in a certain process, thereby implying that there’s something about humans, that is, that it’s in the nature of humans to engage in this process called “social construction.” Thus the tough-minded Postmodernists who think that silly talk of innate human nature can be coherently abandoned do nothing more than reveal their own lack of systematic rigour in formulating their philosophy; the very core of the Postmodernist ethos is incoherent, which on its own ought to be enough to cast this view into the gutter.

Obvious incoherence aside, this sort of balls-out social theorizing might seem intuitively plausible, but is obviously a massive oversimplification upon further reflection, such an oversimplification that it can almost be dismissed as simply false. There is a curious idiosyncrasy amongst Postmodernists, which was sort of what my anecdote about my teacher’s poster at the beginning of this post spoke to, which is the way in which Postmodernists seem to extol tolerance, diversity, equality etc. while at the same time doing all they can to demonstrate how people in different areas of the world have such vastly different experiences we are apparently incapable of understanding philosophical issues the same way. To that end, a classic Postmodernist trick is to take some tribe of 20 people on an isolated pacific island and attempt to argue, from this pathetically small sample size, why eliminating any concept of ‘gender’ from our social discourse will lead to a more egalitarian society. The far more balanced explanation, that it is both labeling and biological factors that contribute to human gender categories, and in different circumstances one or the other will play a bigger role, is never even considered because of the dogma of “social construction,” which rules out any such essentialist or naturalist silliness a priori. But this is nothing more than dogma; this sort of ‘explanation’ doesn’t actually explain anything, but approaches a social phenomenon from a particular lens and purports to explain it by ruling out any other perspective as “biased” or “prejudiced” from the start. Thus even if the extreme anti-foundationalist’s position wasn’t utterly self-undermining (which it is,) the arguments given in favor of it certainly do not support the radicalism characteristic of Postmodern approaches, but interpretations that, while true, are far more modest. Furthermore, the differences among conclusions reached, belief systems or the experiences of different peoples’ and cultures are often drastically overemphasized by Postmodern apologists. To take a very good example, consider religion, that one area of human experience that seems to be so widely divergent among different places and times. Yet while it might seem this way, the more philosophical side of even vastly different religions often resemble one another; careful consideration of Vedantic philosophy for instance, can reveal definite similarities with Aquinas’s variant of the Unmoved Mover (and there is the classic philosophical comparison of Confucius with Aristotle.) Of course, most Postmodern philosophy is far too shallow to analyze these great historical works (the Vedas and the Summa Theologica respectively) as their authors intended them, and when it considers these great works usually adopts a stance rather like a crazed artist slathering paint over the Mona Lisa and claiming to be “creating a new meaning for the picture.” Nevertheless, there are often, in my opinion, far more similarities between cultures and belief systems (particularly philosophical belief systems) than the Postmodernists want to let on. When the differences are considered from a calm, systematic standpoint, rather than one eager to come up with the newest, craziest, most counterintuitive interpretation, they serve as evidence of far more moderate sociological and philosophical conclusions than most Postmodernists ever seem to make.  The social theorizing underlying postmodernism therefore, is hardly supported by the observations made, and the philosophy underlying postmodernism is nothing more than a bag of wind, a shell-game that appears exciting and novel, but is irrational down to its very core.

But I know, in the end, that I probably “just don’t understand.” I’m sure some knowledgeable (or should we say rhetorically appealing) Postmodernist could swoop in right here and, with a wave of impressive verbiage, purport to “deconstruct” my writing and show that I’m just another stubborn traditionalist, unwilling to open my heart to this utopian, nihilistic Brave New World of his. But if such a Postmodernist wants to do so I invite him to try, since I’m pretty secure in my belief that all of his creedo, all of his scary deconstruction and big bad Postmodernist language tricks are really just (to really drive the point home) a giant crock of sh*t. And moreover this is the part that I think us in philosophy, or those in the humanities not intoxicated by the deceptive poison of Postmodernism, ought to play in simply walling of Postmodernism as the decadent slum of academia that it is. If the Postmodernists want to play their language games, going in circles and wasting time let them feel free to do so, I will not say a word. However the moment some Postmodernist steps forward to offer another brilliant idea for how we ought to remake society, or with their unsupported, preposterous ideas about “humanity’s place in the world” (ideas that ascribe trivial or simply bad definitions to all of these words), or most of all with some social critique of scientific literature that deigns to ridicule it as “absolutist,” “prejudiced” or in some other way deficient, we ought to pour down the disdain and skepticism that this absurd philosophical obscenity so righteously deserves. The domain of philosophical and intellectual inquiry is a difficult enough world to navigate already, and grasping the truth is a process that takes a long time and a lot of work. We ought not make it all even more complicated by endorsing such poorly thought out a view as Postmodernism, which spits in the face of the very spirit of philosophical investigation.

One of my favorite philosophers is George Edwin Moore, one of the originators of “ordinary language” philosophy in England in the early 20th century. GE Moore is something of a hero of mine, not only because he wears sport coats and smokes a pipe (both passtimes that I happen to enjoy) but also because he is historically known for being a defender of “common sense” in philosophy. His unashamed defense of this rather unpopular form of reasoning was often as humorous and polemical as it was insightful; consider the following passage from his Principa Ethica (1903):

“That ‘to be true’ means  to be thought in a certain way is, therefore, certainly false. Yet this assertion plays the most central part in Kant’s ‘Copernical Revolution’ of philosophy, and renders worthless the whole mass of modern literature, to which that revolution has given rise, and which is called Epistemology.”

There are many words that a commentator might use to describe this passage; “polemical,” “rhetorical,” “opinionated;” but I prefer to use the far more evocative vernacular term, “ballsy.” GE Moore certainly could not be said to have lacked balls, a trait that philosophers in today’s day and age could use a bit more of. Moore’s arguments, from his Refutation of Idealism to his Prinicipa Ethica and on, were by themselves intuitive, commonsensical and easy to understand. It was his defense of the premises of those arguments that spanned many pages and showed extremely systematic attention to very abstract details; I also think he was great for possessing the rare ability to make points that, upon hearing them, make you slap your forehead and yell “well of course! How the hell did I not see that?” For instance, he innocently (almost naively) questions the view that to “know” a proposition is true means we must have absolutely no reason whatsoever to doubt its truth, and instead suggests that perhaps simply increasing our degree of skepticism to an absurd level has no effect on what we actually “know” and what we don’t. His dismissal of Kant in the passage above, whose ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy was (this is the Cambell’s soup condensed version) to suggest that the human mind plays a role in the definition of ‘truth’ (in the same way that the motion of the Earth plays a role in the apparent motion of the stars) could be said to help lay a groundwork for the general de-emphasis of Kant in analytic philosophy as opposed to his predecessors, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

Moore raises an important question, in my opinion, not only for philosophers but for pretty much anyone with even the most modest education as to where we draw the line between the domain of ‘common sense’ and the domain of special study. The history of philosophy is littered with philosophers who would try to convince us of the most counterintuitive and seemingly crackpot conclusions, and I don’t only mean unconvincing religious philosophers or arguments such as the Ontological proof for the existence of God. I include in this domain philosophers such as Nietzche, with all of the ridiculous talk about “the Will to power” or Ayn Rand, who would have us believe that what’s “really” good for society is for everyone to blatantly act in their own self interest (an obscenity of a moral theory known as ‘ethical egoism.’) What is amazing though, for a student of philosophy, is that careful study of the actual arguments of these philosophers and their background assumptions can reveal them to be extremely systematic and well-thought out, even if the conclusions reached are utterly appalling (though personally I find even the humble Ontological argument, for all of its implausibility, a far worthier argument than any defense of ‘ethical egoism’ that I have ever read, but perhaps I’m just benighted and old-fashioned). And while non-philosophers who seem to absolutely love Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzche et. al. seem to abound, the reaction is exactly the opposite when one brings up Idealists such as George Berkeley or his descendents that were alive and well in Moore’s day (and who Moore worked very hard to refute). When these philosophers are brought up, the reaction I have seen is almost universally derisive, since no one wants to think that there’s no such thing as matter, or if they do they don’t seem to want to admit it (this is probably also explained by the simple sociological fact that while it sure would suit some peoples’ self interest if they could justify why ignoring the needs or desires of others is “really” the moral thing to do, there isn’t much utility in thinking that no material world exists, hence the vast majority of people can remain unbiased enough to affirm that this is a load of crap, even if they aren’t capable of providing quite a thorough demonstration of that fact as Moore did.)

But then again, even the more radical voices in philosophy, both in contemporary ‘Postmodern’ departments, who attempt to show that there’s no such thing as truth (i.e. Jacques Derrida), or ‘Analytic’ departments, who try to show that there’s no such things as beliefs and desires (i.e. Paul Churchland) have a point when they say that we should not let the limits of what we imagine is possible or plausible limit our inquiry. Who is to say that the truth isn’t weird? How do we know that things might not all change tomorrow? I must grudgingly admit that it was ‘common sense’ that told us the Earth was flat, ‘common sense’ that tells us that heavier objects fall faster, and ‘common sense’ that tells us we can drink seawater. There seems to be no clear line to differentiate the acceptable domain of ‘common sense’ from the domain of more systematic and thorough reflection, or thorough empirical testing. Does this mean we have to abandon common sense altogether, and that Moore’s viewpoint is fundamentally flawed?

As far as I can see, no, it does not, because it’s the spirit of common sense, in a manner of speaking, rather than the letter, that matters. What I mean by the ‘spirit of common sense’ is that rather than ‘common sense’ being conceived of as a certain framework (or worse, as a sort of ‘folk theory’ in the appallingly over-scientific way that a lot of modern philosophers of mind approach it) ‘common sense’ more means a certain kind of principles in approaching information, arguments, claims etc. It means approaching these things in a spirit of a straightforward, earnest desire to know what’s going on, one that “cuts the bullshit” if you won’t mind a slight bit of obscenity. I think what Moore was really responding to in his quote above, which explains his rather dismissive tone (and which I can really relate to) is the tendency of intellectuals, not only in philosophy but in a whole host of fields, to dogmatically treat certain theoretical frameworks, certain assumptions, certain guidelines as simply given, based not upon actual arguments for those assumptions but because we like the conclusions, and furthermore with no reflection upon how those assumptions are affecting the final outcome of chains of reasoning. This may seem obvious, or even worse it may seem like a charge that anybody could make. However, what seems to me to be a key aspect of real, good ol’ fashioned ‘common sense’ spirited philosophy is really paying attention to unspoken details. Moore, for instance, brilliantly observed the distinction between a sensation (an experience considered on its own as an object) and the object being sensed, and was able to show that an inference going back to Berkeley (which concluded that, because any object being conceived of had to be conjoined with some sort of consciousness, logically all objects must exist conjoined with consciousness, vindicating Idealism). This extremely technical detail made the difference in terms of undermining an argument that, like so many in philosophy, led to a conclusion widely considered undesirable, yet seemingly unavoidable. It is this sort of attention to detail, not only to the starting assumptions of an argument but to the assumptions made by every one of its premises, that is what I would label “the spirit of common sense,” a spirit of calmly looking at the premises to an argument themselves, without letting oneself get too excited by the mystery or wonder of an argument’s conclusion.

I think in the end every camp in philosophy could be accused of, at some point or another, getting so excited by particular conclusions of particular arguments that they began to overlook critical details of certain premises. Religious medieval philosophers, thrilled by what they thought they had proven about God, overlooked critical considerations to be made about whether the language their arguments were using were really applicable in that way. Early Modern philosophers, thrilled by how their arguments seemed to provide an airtight philosophical basis for the conquest of science, overlooked ways in which their mechanistic assumptions were far too limited to really capture the complexity and detail of the natural world. Idealist philosophers, impressed by how obviously their arguments seemed to show that the extremely counterintuitive conclusion that in fact there was no material world was true, overlooked critical details underlying the premises of those arguments. 20th century philosophers, in their excitement to “do away” with so many ‘traditional’ problems of philosophy simply by dismissing them as figments of unclear language, overlooked ways in which this thesis can, if taken too far, become radically self-undermining. Everyone has been there at some point; but what I think “the spirit of common sense philosophy” entails is, in all things, showing a bit of moderation, and always remembering that “we must follow the argument wherever it leads,” rather than having it “follow us wherever we lead.”