Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're very pleased to have Atlas Society senior scholar Stephen Hicks with us for an Ask us anything or Ask me anything him on philosophy.
I've got questions from social media, but we want to encourage live questions as well. If you've got a question, you can click request to speak and we'll try to get to as many of you as possible.
Stephen, thanks so much for doing these.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Yeah, pleasure. Yeah, as always.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Yes, I saw your recent interview with Jordan Peterson. I just started it, so we may get into some questions as we go along. You touched on a lot of interesting issues.
This one comes from Kurt D. He says, what's the reason for interest in Kant and Hegel? Is it purely historical? Should we learn something useful from them?
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Today I see Kurt has joined us. He always has deep, thoughtful comments on the various social media that I see him. So this. Yes, as I've been publishing a fair bit on Kant and Hegel and pushing the importance of unders. Understanding them, not only because we find the history interesting or history of philosophy interesting, but for the contemporary relevance. So one way of putting this is to say that when we think about our cultural infrastructure. I'm using infrastructure a bit metaphorically here. Whereas we're grow up in a, in a culture, there's all kinds of technologies that have been developed that are in place.
Plumbing systems, refrigeration systems, electrical systems, and so on.
And when you're a kid, they're just, you know, a natural part, or it seems like a natural part of your background and you take them for, for granted. But it's often a moment of important maturity and realization when you get old enough to realize that those infrastructure elements in your home did not always exist, that they came from somewhere, that it was human beings who devised all of them. And partly it's a matter of if those are good infrastructure systems, you know, giving some appreciation to where they came from and why they are working the way they, the way they. The way they are. But also in many cases, you know, the infrastructure guides our thinking and our behavior because in ways that we don't necessarily think about it, particularly when we are younger, just because it's there. We are more or less conditioned to use water a certain way, to use light a certain way to manage temperatures in a. In a. In a certain way.
And partly as we grow to maturity, it's not just understanding these systems, but then reflecting on whether those could be done better or as in the case of many kinds of cultural infrastructure, whether the way we are doing and have been conditioned more or less to do various things are less than optimal, or in some cases, even dysfunctional. And so I need to rethink all of that infrastructure and start over. So now, to draw the analogy from that physical infrastructure to intellectual infrastructure, the same thing holds for a lot of the ideas that we accept more or less critically when we are younger and they become internalized and habituated. We think of religion a certain way, or we learn to manage our emotions, emotions a certain way, or to engage in certain physical habits in certain ways. But that's because we have been taught to do all of those things in certain ways. And in many cases, our attitudes about fashion, about music, about politics, and even about religion are part of the cultural infrastructure that we are born into. A part of maturity is then realizing when one has the intellectual power to do so, when one's a little older, to think through those things and understand the rationale for them, if there is a rationale and whether it's a. It's a good rationale. Now, that holds all the way up the abstraction ladder to philosophical abstractions and also all the way so out, so to speak, in terms of universality and generality, when we start to think, think about our lives and reality in the broadest possible philosophical terms.
And then there's a historical claim that becomes important here, that the prevailing cultural infrastructure is downstream from a philosophical infrastructure, that is to say, philosophical ideas that someone came up with about what, say, what's ethical, how one should think, what one should believe about the nature of the world, the meaning of life, and so on, that those are devised by the smartest and most deep thinkers in each and every generation. And some of them are so deep and well argued that they in effect, capture the leading intellectuals of a generation, are then turned into cultural practices, and then spread out into the culture. Now, all of that, then, is to say that philosophical ideas exert an important influence on the way we as individuals think and the broader culture into which we are born and are navigating. Now then, the historical claim to draw this back to Kant and Hegel is to say that if we are surveying the philosophical framework that is most prevalent in current philosophical thinking, that Kant is the most influential or one of the most influential thinkers such that the philosophical system that he devised, his epistemological views, his views on ethics, also his views on aesthetics and certain other areas in philosophy, the arguments are so deep and so powerfully argued that they have captured successive generations of philosophers who've worked out their implications and then urged their being put into practice. Now, tracing all of that out is an important part of the intellectual history project.
And then the next thing then is to say, well, if though the. The result of those ideas being put into practice is bad, negative, less than optimal, or in some cases disastrous, then the project is to realize where those ideas came from, think our way back to the most fundamental of them. In this case, if their argument is correct, that Kant is responsible for originating a lot of them, then trying to figure out what's wrong with those, and then coming up with better alternatives to them. So I have devoted a lot of time to Kant in particular, partly because in my own thinking, on all sorts of issues, I always find myself coming back to the most powerful arguments. Usually they're the most powerful arguments on the other side of what I believe, and in many or most cases, the most fundamental ones are a modernized version of Kantian arguments in the first place. That is to say, the people I think are on the wrong track when I take their ideas seriously, are operating inside a Kantian framework. So that points back to thinking about how Kant set that set of arguments on a certain path. Now, I know I've quoted this in a couple of publications or so, this would just be kind of appealing to some authorities in the history of philosophy who are reaching a similar conclusion to mine. One that comes to mind is John Passmore, one of the leading historians of philosophy of the 20th century, writing toward the end of the 20th century and surveying where philosophy stands at the end of the 20th century.
And his point basically was to say that we're working within a Kantian framework. All of the various sub schools, not all of them. The majority of the various sub schools of philosophy are variations on ultimately Kantian themes. And there are some other, in my judgment, very well read, well regarded, well published intellectual historians and philosophers who will say the same thing about the stature of Kant. So to take a parallel example on the other side, it would be like saying if one thinks, for example, that some sort of democratic republicanism, some sort of respect for individual rights to life, liberty and pursuit of property, religious toleration and so forth, are part of one's cultural infrastructure, and one was raised in that system, and you come to believe many of those things, but you're wondering, where did these ideas come from?
And then you trace the origin of them, you'll find yourself back in John Locke territory. So the claim here is that that Kant and Locke, in that sense represent two different towering figures in intellectual history. And if we want to understand why we are thinking and believing and doing, broadly speaking, what we are doing in various subcultures around the world. Those are the two guys we have to think in terms of. So that would be a sketch of the answer.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: That's great. Do you find that there are patterns of, like Plato and Aristotle or Locke and Kant that you know, kind of end up being these two pillars throughout history, the history of philosophy?
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Well, yes and no. I know there's a famous line, I think it's from Whitehead who says that all the history of philosophy is a duel between Plato and Aristotle or basically everything is Aristotle and sorry, Plato and just a series of footnotes to him. My view is a little different from that. I think one way of reading the history of philosophy going all the way back to the Greeks, is to see it as a three way debate.
And to use the historical terminology, it would be Plato, Aristotle and the Sophists with the, the Platonists representing a more otherworldly focus, that there's, you know, a higher world, a supernatural world of forms metaphysically that ultimately one has to transcend empirical reason in order to gain various kinds of insights, a more dualistic understanding of human beings, a more kind of a duty oriented ethic and then a more authoritarian type of politics. If we take that as a cartoon version of Platonism and then all of that is contrasted to again to, you know, kind of a cartoon version of Aristotle that is more naturalistic, more empirically oriented and our senses working with our reason. And we work out various logical and proto scientific methodologies, seeing the human being as more of an integrate of mind and body that functions as a unity, a more this worldly flourishing and happiness oriented ethic. And so there is that contrast between the two. And much of the history of philosophy can be seen as successive waves of more Platonic or variations on Platonism coming to the ascendancy and then making its mark on the cultural institutions and then being undercut, subverted out, argued by an Aristotelian wave. And things go, things go back and forth but through to round out the Trinity, so to speak, right back to the Greeks there has been a skeptical strain as well. And I take the Sophists as representing the, the subjectivist strain that there is no such thing really as truth or objectivity, that things are subjective and relative, nobody really knows anything.
And there's no such thing as kind of a supernatural source of justice or even a natural source of justice. Instead, most normative concepts rather are just expressions of subjective states. And so everything comes down to a kind of Power, social dynamic, including a power, power politics. So that skeptical, subjectivistic, relativistic, perhaps amoralistic, power politicking philosophical system was worked out in quite sophisticated fashion by the Sophists. And that has to be a mix in understanding how things have evolved over the centuries because sometimes it's the case that philosophers or smart people who are thinking through the deep issues come to be in a rather skeptical and cynical place. And so they're not enamored either by a variation on Plato or a variation on Aristotle. And typically in terms of culture and politics, things get ugly for a while there, but the intellectuals are groping around and not quite knowing what to do until again, cartoon version, some super smart person comes along at the genius level and comes up with a new variation on Platonism or Aristotelianism. And then that is on the ascendancy for a while. There's nothing deterministic about it. I don't think there's anything in terms of, you know, regular time cycles that says, you know, you'll have 2 year, 100 years of Platonism followed by 200 years of Aristotelianism, etc. Etc.
Human beings have volition and there are some other factors obviously that drive history as well. But when one sorts out what's going on in the cultures philosophically, I think it does come down to something close to those three fundamental variations battling it out over history.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Great answer.
We want to encourage people, if you've got live questions to request to speak, but I've got some more from social media here. This one is from Jeff V. He's referencing your debate with Professor Orr. If muscular liberalism is what's needed to protect Enlightenment values in the west, how does that work within the libertarian ethos of small government? Wouldn't a muscular state require a large state?
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's an interesting question. So, yes, Professor James Orr, Cambridge, he and I, we did a live debate in London a little over a year ago and then we did a three round written debate, liberalism versus Conservatism.
And I just found out about a week ago that the published version is going to come out in the academic journal Reason Papers in spring of 2025. So it will be nice to see that in print. So the phrase muscular liberalism, I like it. I don't know that if I'm claim any originality for it, but I like to use it to distinguish my kind of liberalism or the kind of liberalism that I think is fits with kind of a generic version of libertarianism and so on that takes liberty Seriously, as the, as the fundamental political value. Now, the point of the adjective muscular is to say that the liberalism is not just kind of abstract theory and nice in principle, but you're actually going to put it into practice, and that the defense of liberal values, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to property and so forth, when those are threatened, one, you know, by physical force, which is how they are threatened, people try to kill each other, or they try to kidnap each other or enslave each other or take each other's property. So those people have initiated kind of force, muscular force, that that can and should be in a principled way, require a response by liberals in defense of their values. So liberals are willing to fight using muscles for their values. And it becomes necessary partly because in the history of liberalism, there are some forms of liberalism politically that have come to conjoin themselves with kind of skeptical forms of cognition theory or skeptical epistemology. So they will say, for example, that yeah, we're kind of in favor of liberal values. We think those are good, those are nice, those are important. But we're not going to say that we think that those are true or that they are absolute or that they are universal. And that cognitive humility or cognitive modesty and sometimes that shades into cognitive skepticism then disempowers those individuals in their defense of liberty. Because then when there are assaults on liberty, then they're in the position of saying, well, I like liberty, but I can't really say forcefully that I'm sure that liberty is the right value. And so they're not as likely to react forcefully to actual threats on liberty. And some of them, when you push them, they will say, well, I don't really know that liberty is true or universal or an objective necessity of human beings. In which case, you know, if someone says, well, then liberty just is some sort of personal, subjective preference that you happen to have. And then this kind of quote, unquote liberal will say, yes, it is just my subjective preference. And then someone can quite properly and logically respond, well, then to say if my subjective preference is not to be liberal, I want to be authoritarian and push people around and try to bend them to my will, then the subjective epistemologically, but politically liberal person is disarmed. Can't really say that the other person who wants to initiate force is wrong objectively only that he or she just doesn't happen to like it. But that's no basis for any sort of muscular response to threats on, to threats on liberty. Sometimes also there's a kind of liberalism that has evolved in the 20th century, that not primarily on cognitive issues, but on moral issues, that there's a strain of liberalism that gets confused about the virtue and value of tolerance.
So then obviously liberalism starts by saying individuals are responsible for their own lives. And so you can't.
You take over someone's, someone's life. You have to threaten or respect their right to make their own life choices, including choices that you think are wrong, to believe things that you think are wrong. And that is going to be respected for you as well. It's up to you to make your own decisions and to act in the world and so on. But the expectation is, since, you know, life is complicated and people are at different stages and thinking through various things and they have different interests, that there are going to be lots of different belief systems, lots of different values, including lots of less than optimal things in both categories. And that means that you're going to have to put up with people believing all sorts of things that you think are wrong and acting on behalf of values that you also think are wrong. So tolerance objectively becomes a social virtue under liberalism. Now, if you are not careful in how you formulate the virtue of tolerance in this kind of liberal social context, if you then think, you know, tolerance means that, well, I can't say that other people are right or wrong, or I can't push my values on other people, even urge values, that I have to just put up with anything. And there's nowhere that I in principle can draw the line about what kinds of behaviors are going to be inappropriate. If I then kind of in a loosey goosey way, or even into a relativistic way, extend tolerance into anything goes and that everybody has to put up with just about anything, then you end up with a kind of liberalism that doesn't stand for anything and has no real response even to threats on core liberal values. Now, I recognize that there are subversions of liberalism that have, of political liberalism that have conjoined themselves with epistemological skepticism or with kind of moral relativism. So the point of the muscular adjective then is to say know liberty is an objective value that we can know for certain.
And we can in principle draw the lines where tolerance of other people's thoughts and actions shades into violations of individual rights and so can quite properly have a, have a forceful, forceful response. So be willing to stick up with and fight for liberal values fundamentally. There's one other part of the question that's interesting.
I don't think that liberalism or libertarianism let's just use those more or less synonymously for now, entails small government. I think I understand the impetus for this, but I think the more important point is that liberalism stands for limited government.
That there is a small, indeed limited set of functions that are proper for governments to engage in.
You know, their job is to stop murderers and then prosecute suspected murder, stop slavery, stop kidnapping and protect people's property and then prosecute people who engage in violations of those core rights. So we enumerate those proper powers of liberal government and the list is finite in principle. And then you stop and you say, beyond that, whatever we want to do as individuals or in social groupings, those are not things that are going to be done by government. Those are things that we will do in voluntary social, social organizations. So the point here is limited government in contrast to expansive or unlimited understandings of government, the ones that shade off into totalitarian types of government. But I do think it's a follow up question when you to say how big or small the government needs to be to perform any of those particular functions. So for example, if we say one of the proper functions of government is the military to protect the country from foreign invaders, that's a proper function. And then you'll specify the circumstances under which the military can and should operate. You specify your borders, et cetera, et cetera. So you have limited the scope of that, legit, that proper function of government. But the follow up question though is to then ask, well, how big does our military need to be? Do we need to have 10,000 soldiers? Do we need to have 40,000 soldiers or 100,000 soldiers? And that I don't think is a philosophical question per se, that's going to turn on the circumstances of time and place. You know, are you at war or not? And if you are at war, it makes sense to say we need more soldiers. And I think it would just be a wrong liberal answer to say, oh no, no, we want to have a small government and the military is part of the government, so we need to have a small military. Sometimes you need to scale up the military, sometimes you will scale it down. I think the same thing in principle would apply when we're talking about the courts. How many judges do we need, how many prosecutors do we need, how many police officers do we need, how many jails do we need? All of those are legitimate functions and we want to prescribe, you know, how far and how far they can, they can operate and what their limits are, but we can't specify ahead of time the size of each of those functions, they will need to be as big as they need to be, given the empirics, so to speak, of time and place.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: Great answer. We've got our founder, Dr. David Kelly, here. Welcome, David, you are muted.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: David, glad to see you're here.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: Right, so hopefully you're able to get to that unmute button. In the meantime, I still have more from social media I'm gonna grab here, and one is from Thomas. Oh, go ahead, David.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: There's David.
[00:28:45] Speaker C: Yeah, I finally found the unmoon button. Sorry, Stephen, I've got two questions. One is about Kant. Going back to that, you know, I've. I've studied Kant and written about him. Not, you know, I.
You've forgotten more about him than I ever knew. But still, when I. It's always struck me about Kant that he.
His theories, his. The content of his philosophy went deeper than any of his predecessors.
But his arguments, and you said he had the strongest arguments. I thought they were pathetic. I mean, there were all kinds of assumptions behind them. He was responding to Hume and his predecessors in the.
Both the empiricist and the rationalist British mind.
And so I. It's always been kind of striking to me that he. He has had such an influence.
This may be too large a question to discuss now, but one. But the question is, you know, what. What makes his argument so strong?
The other question I Just a short one on the. On what you were just talking about with the limited. Limited government versus small government, which I totally agree with. But with limited government, there's also the issue not how much we need, but how much we can afford. Because you can imagine if you weren't keeping the taxpayers in mind, you could hire double, triple the number of police people and station one on every corner and we would be safer. But that would be horrendously expensive.
So we have to adjust the amount of risk we're willing to intolerate. Let me put that as a question. Do you think that's true?
[00:30:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah. So part of the empirics of time and space, as I'm thinking of it, is going to be budget. And just as in our individual household budgets, we will make those financial calculations as well as our risk and safety preferences and come up with an overall judgment. So, yes, absolutely.
To come back to Kant, Well, I guess I want to say two things there. I think one thing about maybe why Kant, in the first part of your question can seem as weak is that he does not go through the arguments against the Lockean position, the rationalist position, the empiricist position and so on. If we just talk about the epistemology, for example, and in his moral writings, he does not go through the arguments in any detail against Aristotelian flourishing and the hedonists and so on. I think all of that has been outsourced is not quite the right word. But what he's doing is he's taking for granted. That might be what you mean, but there's all kinds of assumptions. He's taking for granted that philosophy as a discipline, cumulatively up to his generation, has reached the dead ends of Hume, reached the dead ends of Leibniz in some way, that the rationalist metaphysical project, the rationalist epistemological project has reached its dead end. So he can take all, take more or less for granted that all of those arguments against objectivity and against eudaimonism are sound.
So when he in some cases rehearses them, he is presenting, you know, very quick and perhaps weaker versions of those arguments. And if we read them and we're not already convinced by them, then we're not going to read anything in Kant that convinces us to do so. So that, I think, would then be the first judgment. If one is in the same place as Kant that just to stick to the epistemological issues, that empiricism has reached a dead end and rationalism has reached a dead end, then your choices are skepticism or something else. And then the question is, what on earth could that something else possibly be?
And then I think this is where Kant's genius comes in. That he did come up with a something else, and it was a something else that did get worked out in sophistication. And just the fact that it was original, that it seems at first glance to solve the dilemmas of empiricism and rationalism solve, is a bit too strong because there are trade offs that he makes and he's willing to make, but that it is, that it opens up a new way of thinking about all of those issues. And once you are inside that framework, it's very hard to think your way out of. So the fact that he did come up with something original in response to some very deep problems, and he came up with something original after, you know, we've been doing philosophy for over two millennia, that I think is just the sign of the, of the power of it. Now, I would agree. I think if you and I sat down, we would identify, you know, what are the core assumptions.
Excuse me for a moment. That are built into Kant's, you know, Copernican term, you know, that first we have to abandon objectivity. And the, the core assumptions that he's making about objectivity would, Would be a small number and that we need to identify those and reject those. Those and then the kinds of assumptions that he's going to make then on the positive side, in favor of a kind of a deep subjectivity that. That's also going to amount to just a few very deep assumptions. So there's not a huge amount of territory that needs to be covered there, but it is, I think, very deep territory. And the fact that so many very, very smart people in the subsequent two centuries since Kant haven't been able to think outside of that Kantian framework is, Is a testament to the, you know, the substantive power of whatever it is that he came up with. All right, so how's that?
[00:35:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I did mute him due to background noise, so. Okay, may not be able to catch that, but we'll go back to him. I do have this question from Thomas. This may be somewhat related. Is the west culturally Christian? Or more specifically, is Britain and the usa?
[00:36:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, boy. That's another huge, huge broad strokes of history question.
So if we take the first formulation, if we say, is the west culturally Christian? So then we would say that's largely what, Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Is Japan now part of the west for the last half century or so.
And then if we narrow that more specifically to the question of Britain is Britain culturally question, I think that would be an easier question because that's obviously just a smaller. A few tens of millions of people, not. Not a billion or more people to think of in terms of. Now, I know that this question was sparked some months ago by some posting. I did. I think it was Nigel Farage who made a kind of very strong claim in one of his political speeches that Britain is a Christian nation or a culturally Christian nation, and that we need to recognize that that's the most fundamental part of British identity. And then by extension, you know, since British philosophy and British culture have been so influential on the west, the west is broadly, broadly, broadly Christian. Now, I think that's. That's an overstatement. So I think a more interesting question would be to try to say, you know, how culturally Christian is.
Is the west, or is Britain recognizing that, of course, Christianity has been the biggest of the religious traditions in the west and certainly the biggest of the religious traditions in Britain.
But I think if we scale out and we want to make an assessment of what we take contemporary British culture or Western culture to be as important as it is to say that, yes, the Judeo Christian tradition has been an important part of shaping who we are now.
We have to acknowledge that the Greek and Roman traditions have also been hugely influential on who we are in the. In the here and now. So when we think about Christianity, we think about a certain religious tradition, belief in a supernatural being, belief in faith in various sorts of things that are hard to wrap one's mind around rationally, like virgin births and trinities and resurrections and so on. A certain dualistic understanding of human beings that in some sense, you know, feeling guilty about wealth, feeling guilty about sexuality, kind of traditionally women knowing their place, the man being the head of the household and so on. So we can have this understanding of this kind of Christian tradition. And obviously it's very important to say that that's a huge part of our culture even into contemporary times. But then if we start to do the same thing on the other side, you know, the idea that we live in the natural world, that the natural world is cause and effect, that we. We can do naturalistic medicine, we can do physics, we can do astronomy, we can do geometry, and we take the scientific project, the mathematical project.
We don't pray so much anymore when people get sick or blame the Jews when people get sick. Instead, we consult physicians who are well trained in physical medicine and so on. We think that people should be. We should have some sort of democratic, republican political system. Democracy coming out of the Greeks, republicanism coming out of the Roman enrollments, checks and balances and all of that. We don't think that there should be one religion that is established politically and that everyone should be forced to believe it. Instead, we think people should be free in their religion. We should separate church and state and all of those, again, you know, just short form history are traditions that come out of the Greek and Roman era. So I think the right way to ask that question would be to say something like this. Given that both the Judeo Christian tradition and the Greco Roman tradition have been hugely influential on forming contemporary British and Western civilization, can we take the next step and try to say which one has been more influential or less influential on the way we live and think right now? Now, with that kind of friendly amendment to the question, I think we would obviously need to be doing a whole lot of history. And this would be the kind of discussion that would be fun to have when everybody is more or less kind of up to speed on what those traditions represent. Right? And so on, but I would come down on the side of saying that as we have progressed, and not even using progress as a, as a normative term at this point, just as so maybe they just say evolved. As we have evolved in the modern world, the Greco Roman elements are becoming more important and the Judeo Christian elements are becoming less important. So my sense is that right now, yes, there are a significant number of people who are Christian, but we have a huger number of people. That's not even a proper word, huger, but I'm going to use it anyway. Number of people who are not particularly religious at all and that even the, the ones, they're, they're essentially secular and naturalistic, rational, scientific, individualistic, freedom oriented people and that the mainstream of Christian religious tradition is just not part of their operative philosophy or their psychology, even if they do make friendly nods towards certain Christian elements and so forth. So that's a hard judgment call to make. But you know, if we were to do fake philosophy math right now, I would say probably we are in this generation, you know, a good 75 to 80% Greco Roman if we're going to put those historical labels to it, and less than 20 to 25% Judeo Christian. And that I would say even is including people who think of themselves as kind of good Christians, the kind of Christianity that they believe in. I don't know if watered down is the right kind of word, but it's a much more naturalized, humanized understanding of the world that has made its peace with modernity, with all of those Greco Roman traditions that are now, I think, predominant in our culture.
[00:44:03] Speaker A: Great that we could really expand on that. But we've got Bill Ryan. Bill, thanks for joining.
[00:44:11] Speaker D: Hi, can you hear me?
[00:44:12] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:44:13] Speaker D: Okay. Hey, thanks so much. Great to talk to you.
I've read a bunch of stuff.
I know that filling out this Aristotelian Enlightenment project is. This is a work in progress. And I'm wondering if you might consider that you're missing an opportunity in so wholeheartedly dismissing evolutionist type approaches that border on the mystic or the nihilistic, like Hegel or like Kuhn's Structure of a Scientific Revolution. It seems like so much of, for instance, in the latter, so much of that work independent of the conclusion that religion or, sorry, that science really has no better standing or claim to objective reality than religion or anything else. But putting that aside, so much of that kind of work is so fruitful in determining the dynamics. The fact that you have to take our categories, our language, our assumptions, our presuppositions at any given point with a grain of salt or as provisional as you continue to progress in your understanding of the world. So I hope. I don't know if that's articulate enough, but I'll leave the question there.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: Okay.
The spirit of the question is to say that as we are evolving, say, Aristotelian philosophical framework, Enlightenment intellectual cultural framework, that it's important to take seriously those who are more skeptical, and that part of their project is going to be to bring us back down to earth, so to speak, if we get ahead of ourselves in terms of how much we actually know about various things. So that skepticism does not have to be nihilistic, that skepticism can be just a recognition that we don't know sometimes as much as we think we know. And to be skeptical about claims that are arrived at too quickly or that are announced with too much certainty. Now, if that's a fair reading of the question, then I would say yes, and I think that's already an absolutely important part of the Aristotelian and Enlightenment project. Try to say that sometimes we do have certainty, but certainty in many cases requires a lot of hard work, a lot of mistakes along the way, a lot of experimenting, a lot of failed getting our hopes up, only to have them kind of dashed on the cruel rocks of reality. So that part of that Aristotelian Enlightenment framework already is to say that you have to work for truth, especially when you are doing new things and complicated things. And along the way, we need to be on guard for hasty concluding or letting various kinds of biases or false idols, as Francis Bacon put it, or idols of the mind at the beginning of the modern period. So I don't want to give the impression that the Aristotelian Enlightenment project is to say, oh, no, everything is easy. We know everything.
We have all of these universal truths that are absolutely or. Or certain, certainly true. And we don't need to be skeptical about anything or small s skeptical about anything. And all of you naysayers are just. Are just bad people. I think that would be an incorrect assumption. I would just say that sometimes we do in fact know things for absolute certainty, and we have hard work behind us that has put us in a position to be able to do so. But at the same time, we do recognize that there are lots of things that we don't know, that lots of things we have some evidence for, but not yet conclusive evidence to make any, you know, big, big pronouncements about. And in some cases we have conflicting evidence or ambiguous Evidence and part of the Aristotelian philosophical Enlightenment intellectual approach is to train oneself to be sensitive to those degrees of evidence and have good introspective awareness about what actual cognitive state one is in. Now, in that sense, you could say socially, functionally, people who are more skeptical and skeptical on principle, they can be serving a functional role because then you can always count on them to test the claims and to find the weaknesses, since that's what their cognitive set is.
So that's fine. But at the same time, I don't want philosophically to agree with them if their position is that on principle they're going to say science is no better than religious faith or science seeking mystical experiences or just believing whatever your strongest emotions are. I think we have philosophically progressed past the point where we do know, in fact, that empirical methods, rational methods, and the sophisticated working out of all of that in scientific method, objectively is the path to acquiring knowledge. But, yes, that is an evolutionary process and we need to build in some measure of caution, self reflection into that process, both individually and institutionally.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Great, great, we've got my thrill. Thanks for joining.
Well, they appear to be gone, so we've got Divine.
We're going to be bringing Divine up, connecting right now. Divine, are you able to unmute?
[00:50:57] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
[00:50:59] Speaker D: Allow me to speak again.
[00:51:01] Speaker B: So my question is, how did Michel Foucault and postmodernist ideology gain so much traction and have such a profound effect on the world, particularly Western society? Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's another big hard question. So I think we'd have to take ourselves back to the late 1950s, when Foucault and Derrida are finishing up their PhD work. They're in, they're in graduate school and becoming young professors, young intellectuals, and then on into the 1960s. And my quick reading of this is that this is partly philosophical and partly political.
The, the philosophical part is that philosophy in the 1950s had reached an extraordinarily skeptical phase. So there had been various kinds of positivistic philosophy, analytic philosophy, pragmatic and neopragmatic philosophies, some continental schools that had been worked out and explored in the 1800s on into the early part of the 1900s. By the 1950s, those all had reached a very skeptical place. And they were seen as, as failures. And philosophers in all of those major sub schools were saying things like, you know, we don't know what truth is, we don't know what reality is, we don't know what facts are. In fact, we don't even think that those are meaningful words. So we should probably just stop using them. So the point then is that someone like Foucault, who's very smart guy, is getting a PhD in philosophy, is getting a first rate training in high tech skepticism, so to speak, that was operative in, in the 1950s. The same thing with Derrida, same thing with Leotard. It was Leotard who gave us the phrase the, the postmodern condition.
Richard Rorty kind of sometimes called himself a neopragmatist, but his kind of neopragmatism has, I think he's a postmodernist, but is certainly at least very close. There is also tracing kind of the devolution into this skepticism and the bankruptcy of all of the leading schools by the time we get to the 1950s. So what you then have is first rate intellectuals, very smart, active, dynamic, next generation people saying what we need to do philosophically is figure out what we are doing, given that nobody knows anything, that we don't even think knowledge, fact, reality, truth and so forth are meaningful concepts. How are we going to do whatever it is that we intellectuals do without trying to do philosophy in that traditional sense? Now the other thing that I think is important is the political. So I do take and put great weight on the fact that all of the postmodern thinkers in the first generation and in the second generation are far left in their politics. Michel Foucault joined the French Communist Party for a few years in the early 1950s. They all published in those journals, thought of themselves as various sorts of neo Marxist or far left or whatever label they assigned to themselves. Neo Trotsky ites right and so forth. And that this was put them in what was a political climate that was intellectually dominated by the left. And so, you know, so many intellectual historians will say 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, it is various forms of leftism, fairly far forms of leftism that are dominant. And of all of the forms of leftism, it was Marxism in its various incarnations that was the towering version of leftism. And the Soviet Union as the great Marxist experiment, was meant to be the role model for leftists the world over. So if we then put ourselves back in the context of the 1950s and 60s, there's widespread intellectual sympathy for left, far left, Marxist, neo Marxist kinds of political ideologies. Now why this is important is because at that same time, though Marxism in its classical form was seen as being in trouble intellectually, that its predictions were not materializing, that there were lots of Problems in its theoretical analysis that had been exposed and so forth. And then also important in the 1950s was that with respect to the Soviet Union, which was supposed to be this great beacon of, you know, leftist thought put into practice, guiding the world to a bright, sunlit future, the Soviet Union was recognized by most people, even on the left and on the far left, as having been, at a minimum, a disappointment, but more forthrightly a humanitarian disaster and an economic failure. And so there was a crisis among the far left thinkers saying that if we had put so much of our hopes in Marxism and real Marxism in the Soviet Union and all of that is being exploded in the 1950s, what are we going to do next? So I think what gave the postmoderns then in the 1950s and 60s so much cultural influence was that they came up with a strategy in the 1960s when the left is groping around, when the philosophers are groping around for an intellectually deep and intellectually respectable philosophical framework that can guide political strategy in the 1960s. So where, you know, it's again kind of standard history to say that the old left died in the 1950s and the New Left was born in the 1960s. The New Left had hundreds of sub variations and was splintering on all over the. All over the place. That the postmoderns were one of the most prominent groups to carve out a new space in the 1960s for a new strategy for the far left, an intellectual, cultural and political strategy that is using what they take to be the most high tech, skeptical epistemological strategies available to them, like deconstruction as weapons, tools, rhetorical devices to carry on this political activist stripe. So they were the best positioned intellectually and strategically in the 1960s, and so they were able to exert outsized influence. And that influence then is what we see culturally and intellectually downstream in the 70s, 80s and on into the 90s.
[00:58:51] Speaker A: We gotta find a way to make a clip of that. That was just a fantastic historical analysis.
It's a great note to end with. Sorry, real JSP and llpoh, we didn't get to you, but thanks so much for doing this.
Whoever, everyone that participated asked questions or just listened. And if you enjoyed this or any of our other materials, please consider making a tax deductible donation at atlasesociety.
[00:59:22] Speaker B: Org.
[00:59:23] Speaker A: Thanks everyone.
[00:59:24] Speaker B: Thanks Scott for hosting. Thanks everyone.
