Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Ask, and we'd ask you to share the room or just repost it. It should be a good discussion.
Stephen, thanks so much for doing this. Tell us about Derrida and insanity.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm showing we're coming up to time now. Yeah. So thanks for that.
I wanted to talk about Jacques Derrida, who in some respects is obscure, unless you are philosopher by training or interest or followers of the postmodern intellectual movements and their various offshoots, in which case he becomes prominent and important.
But I want to focus on him by starting with our current cultural moment and working our way back to why understanding something about Derrida is important.
So if we focus on current cultural moment that we are in, most of us are struck by what seems to be a wide range of irrationalisms that are prominent in our culture, perhaps recently prominent in our culture, that we think of ourselves as standing at the head of a civilization that has accomplished a great deal. Of course, there have always been irrational people and people who are anti civilization in various ways, but many people, myself included, when we are looking at what's going on around the world, particularly when we're focusing on social media and so on, there seems to be an uptick and perhaps an exponential increase in the amount of irrationalisms. And let me give you just some general categories of those so recently fanatical religions that are willing to do incredibly barbaric things to people who do not believe their religion.
That is shocking to us. Of course, we are aware that there are fanatical religious people. But for much of our lives, I'm thinking much of my life, perhaps I'm speaking only for myself, or at least for my generation, in the sense that religion had calmed down, religion was becoming more reasonable, religious toleration. That message had been getting through. But now we have an outburst of fairly zealous, fanatical, barbaric religion. Recently, the prominence of kind of bizarre sexualities, and not just that people will have unusual, wherever you draw the lines with respect to unusual and bizarre sexualities, that there seem to be a lot more of those, and they're a lot more prominent, and not just people asserting that they should be free in the privacy of their own homes to do whatever they want with other consenting adults, that they are taking this into public spaces, into the spaces where we educate children and to the point of, again, zealotry, pushing their bizarre sexualities on the rest of us protest using not just emotionalism, but using explicitly anti civil methods, where the number of people who are entering the public space, whatever their cause is from the get go, not interested in argument, certainly not civil argument or rational argument, but rather using anger, emotion, even rage as a tool, and the idea that since they have a cause that they are passionately committed to, they should be exempt from any standards of reasonableness or civility, and that we are supposed to go along with this. Now there's a question about whether there is an increasing number of people who are irrational, and the ones I just mentioned are just a starting point, not meant to be exhaustive of the current cultural landscape. Is it that there are more and more people who are irrational in various ways and going public with it? Or is it just that we are now more aware of them because we have better telecommunications devices, smartphones and social media and so on? So not only do people who, otherwise we never would have heard from them now have a voice, but also we have the tools to be able to be aware of them. So is it an artifact of the telecommunications devices that we have? Or in fact, are there more such people out there, and not just raw numbers, perhaps more as a percentage of the population? So partly we would need to do some demographic analysis to get these numbers here and so on. But I want to focus on my area of expertise, which is philosophy, which is to say, whatever those numbers are. There has been something disturbing in the philosophical universe for the last two to three generations of philosophy that can sound like a long time, but things move slowly in the philosophy world. And philosophy's impact on broader cultural world also moved rather slowly to say that there has been a major role that philosophy has played in encouraging and in some cases using strategically the irrational.
And that whether these philosophers are true believers in skepticism, relativism, subjectivism, and all of the various irrationalist outgrowths of those philosophical positions. There are more such philosophers in the last two to three generations, whether they believe that explicitly or not, or whether they have an ideological agenda, and that they are going to use those kinds of arguments in order to further that ideological agenda in the cultural space, there is an important value to understanding what philosophy has been doing in that area. And here I want to focus on. This is partly what I want to say. I want to focus on Jacques Derrida, the famous postmodernist, or the famous deconstructionist, or the famous post structuralist. He's given various labels here as one of the huge names that is a contributor to what we now talk about in two generations later, contemporary manifestations of political correctness, wokism and those other kinds of non rational, non civil agendas. That we are dealing with, dealing with now.
[00:07:41] Speaker C: So.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: Part and parcel of postmodernism is the idea that if we look at the history of philosophy or the history of ideas, there was a premodern era when people believed that there were objective, universal, absolute standards, cognitively and morally, and that all of these were underwritten by higher authorities, the highest possible authority, p and God or the gods. But the idea here was that God or the gods provided standards of truth.
Standards of objectivity enabled us to distinguish between reality and fantasy. In the moral dimension, the gods provided moral standards to help us distinguish between the good and the bad, the healthy and the unhealthy, and so forth. In the modern world, of course, we became much more naturalistic, much more individualistic in our thinking, less likely to appeal to supernatural sources, less likely to appeal to authorities that are higher than the judgment rather of our own minds. But nonetheless, the main currents of modern philosophy were that there are standards of truth and objectivity, distinction between reality and fantasy.
And we should embark on this project of grounding the distinction between good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, in naturalistic, rational, objective, small objectivist terms. So what has happened in the last 50 to 60 years now, we call this the Postmodern era, at least intellectually, is a rejection both of that premodern and modern approach, both of which, from the postmodern perspective, believe that there are such things as truth objectivity, standards that are objective and universal. So it's a kind of then skepticism, subjectivism, relativisms. And what we find on the most famous of the Postmoderns, and Jacques Derry d'Is one of them, is an explicit, philosophically rigorous attack on the entire apparatus of trying to find standards, either cognitive standards or moral standards, that are to be grounded. Now, the role of philosophers, of course, is to develop arguments for whatever their positions are. And much of the premodern project and much of the modern project was to develop positive arguments, try to prove the existence of God or the gods, and thereby the standards that to traditional religions would articulate or in the modern world, to provide arguments for the cause and effect order of the natural world, to develop the arguments that underdrew the scientific method so the scientists can go on and do their work. What we find in the Postmoderns is a series of systematically negative arguments to break down every possible positive argument that can be made. Now, the postmoderns are one major group here. There's also, of course, the critical theorists. I'm going to set those to Side for now.
And these are philosophers who are much more obviously motivated by political ideology. You're thinking of Horkheimer, Adorno, Herbert Marcus, and others. And so, in most cases, even if they are philosophers, they are coming to their philosophy Explicitly through a Political lens. The Postmodernists, by and large, come from to the philosophy, and they deal with it on philosophical terms, however much they then might want to apply it culturally and politically. Now, a month or so ago, we did a Twitter Space, and I focused on Michelle Foucault, probably the most famous of the Postmoderns. And there I focused on his book, the History of Sexuality, where what Foucault was trying to argue was that any distinction between normal and abnormal sexuality, between healthy sexuality and perverse sexuality, is ungrounded. There is no such thing as a distinction between the two of them. Instead, all sexualities are subjective, and what one tries to do is come up with a rationalization or a theory that justifies your particular form of sexuality and puts it in a position of cultural power.
So all of the normalizing of, say, heterosexuality and sex within the confines of marriage, that is a power play of one particular form of sexuality that wants to limit and control other forms of sexuality, including the usual sexuality between males or between females. So homosexuality, but also sexuality between adults and children, the idea that somehow pederasty is a perversity, or sex between humans and animals or whatever, all of these, Foucault wants to argue, have been labeled as perversions, but there is no objective distinction. And so we have to explode that. And that's one of the reasons why in our Generation, we are seeing not only more tolerance toward alternative forms of sexuality, but emboldened forms of sexuality, pushing themselves into the cultural space and then wanting to take over other cultural spaces and saying that you have to let us, so to speak, do what we want, otherwise you are just oppressing us, and so forth. What I now want to do, though, is, as a compliment piece, turn to Jacques Derridal, who wanted to do the same thing with the insane.
To argue that what has happened, to a lesser extent, prior to the modern world, but especially in the modern world, is to say there's a distinction between the rational and the irrational, between the sane and the insane, but doing exactly in parallel, the argument that Foucault had done said, there is no such thing as a distinction between the sane and the insane, or between the rational and the irrational. And as a result of that, all of the epistemologies, all the ways of using language, all of the rules and regulations and the way we deal with people who are perhaps eccentric or people who are labeled insane, including institutionalizing those, all of those are ungrounded philosophically. All of those then agreeing with Foucault amount to one type of using one's mind, trying to legislate and exert a power play over those who want to use their minds and use language in a different way. And so we want to explode that allegedly objective distinction between the rational and the irrational. And that this, of course, is not going to, for Derrida, have only some philosophical significance, but also some cultural significance. Just as in the case of Foucault, the implication is going to be that all of those different forms of sexuality, we can't be labeling them and trying to marginalize them or in some cases putting people in jail for some of the things they do sexually. What we should not be doing then in the case of the people who seem eccentric or insane, is treating them differently, marginalizing them, and in some cases institutionalizing them. All of that is going to be a power play that needs to be exposed and exploded. Now, I want to go to Dairy DaW's text a little bit, but I don't want to just totally turn this into a lecture on Dairy DaW. So what I want to do right now is just say one hypothetical point and put a couple of hypotheses out there. And then in this Twitter space, get some reactions and kick things around. And then I'll come back and do some quotes from this text. The text I have in mind is a piece that Derry Dahl wrote in 1963. It's a follow up piece to a piece that. To a book rather, that Foucault wrote about the insane and so on. It's called Cogito and the History of Madness.
And what both Foucault and Derrida are doing is using the crazy or using the Insane or using the mad against what they consider to be the pretensions of modern civilization. That it has a Monopoly in some sense on sanity or on rationality, and that it's using that monopoly to marginalize and oppress people who have different epistemologies or different regimes of truth or different kinds of discourses and so on. And in Derry Daw's title, he says it's the Cogito and the History of Madness. The Cogito he has in mind is the famous Cogito Ergo Song from Rene Descartes. And the point I want to suggest here is that this is explicit. If you read a Standard history of philosophy textbook, the Modern Philosophy Textbooks will all start by saying something like, Rene Descartes is the father of modern philosophy, or Descartes is the founder of modern philosophy. And you can actually check this yourself, just go to Google, search and type into the search Box.
The father of modern philosophy or founder of modern philosophy. And I predict that the first 100 Kits that you get will say, Renee Descartes is the father of modern philosophy. And there's a good argument for this, that Descartes is taking philosophy in a foundationally different direction from philosophy of the preceding Thousand or perhaps almost 2000 years of philosophy. So he is important here. But what the suggestion is, this is my hypothesis that quite explicitly, what Foucault and dear Derry Dah want to do is to say modern philosophy stems from what Descartes does. What we are doing is identifying Descartes, including his foundational Kogito. Ergo, soon. I think, therefore I am as grounding the Modern project in philosophy. And if we can explode Descartes, if we can go after the Cogito, if we can show that Modern Descartes is wrong in the way in which he took modern philosophy in another direction, then what we can do 350 years later is set aside Descartes, and then by extension set aside all of modern philosophy as faulty as on an inappropriate foundation, as institutionalizing distinctions that need to be exploded. And by doing so, we will be opening space for the postmodern. It's going to go beyond whatever it was that Descartes and all of the rest of modern philosophy, whether it's valorization of naturalism and objectivity and reason and logic and science and so forth. So there is going to be at least a philosophical agenda, a very deep philosophical agenda. And then the other part of the hypothesis is going to be that this also then is going to inform a strategy. If you are interested in rejecting modern philosophy, you're also going to be interested in rejecting and setting aside the civilization or the entire culture that has been built up in the modern world, this culture of the individual, of science, of pro technology, capitalism, liberalism and so on, that as postmoderns, you are interested ideologically in exploding all of that and then taking the world in a modern direction. Then the insane, the crazy people, the people who are allegedly perverse and so forth, all of those are going to be people you can use strategically as part of your cultural activism to break down current civilization or current culture, to replace it with perhaps some other culture. All right, that said, I want to pause because I realize I've been talking now for a little over 20 minutes and get some initial reactions. So let me turn it back to Scott. What should we do next? Are there questions?
[00:21:52] Speaker A: Yeah, we've got a few requested. We're going to start with Zulu one and then go to John H.
So go ahead, Zulu One.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Go ahead.
[00:22:11] Speaker D: Can you guys hear me? Hey, Dr. Hicks. Thank you guys for having this interesting conversation.
I'm not an expert in any capacity of this conversation, but one thing that I've noticed from postmodernist types is an absolution of responsibility to the collective. And I think that this in some capacity Boils back down to the Dynamic of Cain and Abel, the victim and the perpetrator. And if you identify as a victim, you'll always find a perpetrator.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:49] Speaker D: And this profound absolution of responsibility and continuing this pattern of unresolved trauma, that's kind of the work that I do.
I'm trying to understand that. It seems that in today's society there's a retreating of religious traditions that are giving way to this Amplification of the worst tendencies that we have as humans. These postmodernist ideas that we are the collective rather than the individual. So we can, through this righteous judgment, we can absolve our responsibility and justify genocide or process. Just wanted to get your thoughts on what this movement looks like from that perspective. And I have this thought that this is all rooted in unresolved trauma that is inherited through systems. So I'm just trying to kind of Square this and suss out this idea.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a rich question. I think there is obviously a lot more victim language that is in our culture. And part of that, I think, comes from healthy sources, the idea that we should be able to identify problems, physical problems and psychological problems and then solve them. So part of the modern project has been an increasingly scientific attention to how the body works and how the mind works, with the idea that we can improve trauma treatment in all of these areas.
And so there's a lot more than attention to those problems. And then when we solve the major traumas, we go on and try to focus on the lesser traumas and we get the microscope out because we are more perfectionists and try to solve the 99.9% of all traumas that are possible, and we're not going to stop there. So all of that, I think, is healthy. An increasingly perfectionist and optimistic sense that we should be able to become maximally healthy, whatever that is. But at the same time, I think what you are pointing to is another approach to trauma which is a recognition that if you have a trauma, you can get a lot of attention and a lot of resources can be directed toward you. And so there has been a valorization of trauma among people who probably could solve their own problems, but recognize that they can, in effect, be parasitical on other people, get not only material resources, but psychological resources from other people if they play up their trauma. Now, that, I think, would require some more demographics, and it would require some expertise in dealing on a firsthand people basis with people who have these traumas to sort out the ones who are genuinely in a trauma situation, and those who are exaggerating their trauma or using their genuine trauma for social purposes rather than trying to solve it themselves.
The angle that I would be most able to speak to would be those who want to use the victims of trauma or to manufacture victims of trauma for an ideological purpose. So there are those who will recognize that we live in a culture that takes itself seriously, in the sense that it takes responsibility seriously. And if it can be shown to be responsible for something, then it will experience a certain amount of shame, it will experience a certain amount of guilt, and then it can be manipulated to a certain extent. So we know this at an individual level. If you are made to feel guilty, then you feel defensive, and you're less likely to assert yourself, and you're more likely than to want to make amends in some way, even in some exaggerated way, to the extent that you feel guilty or ashamed. So there has been, then, the development explicitly of an industry devoted to trying to find traumas, in this case, not so much physical traumas, but psychological trauma, and exaggerating the trauma and directing that trauma against certain cultural targets that one wants to attack. So if, for example, you want to say, we have say in Western civilization, I'll just call it Western civilization because it got there first.
The idea that there has been lots of racism in the past or lots of sexism in the past. And Western cultures, like all of the other cultures, did engage in this. But now we started to recognize for the last couple of centuries that that's wrong and to change our culture so that we are not so racist, not so sexist, and so forth.
And we take this seriously as a moral responsibility. But that then means that those who are against our kind of culture, that are opposed to Western culture, will recognize that we will take accusations rather, of racism and sexism seriously, and we will feel guilty about any residual amounts of racism and sexism that are in our society. So there are those who will use accusations of racism and accusations of sexism. Whether they believe them or not, they will make the accusations because they know that will make us feel guilty and put us on the defensive, and therefore less likely to resist various ideological moves that they want to do. So the accusation will come easily, and then at the same time, they will manufacture incidents of racism, incidents of sexism, and encourage the traumatic expression of that in order, again, for ideological purposes. Now, all of that explicitly, this is the hypothesis that I'm advancing today, comes out of the work of Foucault, Derrida, and their postmodern fellow travelers. So I haven't spoken to the religious language, and I know that the question was put in a Cain and Abel formulation, but I do believe there is a religious history element to this.
But I will leave that to the follow up.
[00:30:29] Speaker C: Doc, thank you for. Great question, great answer to the question, and I just have one follow up question, thought, and I'll be quick.
I do have this concern that mass humiliation or mass shame is a potent Tinder for genocide, as was Germany post World War I. And Young stated that Hitler was the voice of the collective subconscious of 78 million Germans. And the crowd had Hitler as much.
[00:31:04] Speaker B: As Hitler had the crowd.
[00:31:06] Speaker C: And I'm concerned that genocide, the mass death of Chinese, after the century of humiliation, we see this humiliation, shame, be a potent and powerful tinder for genocide. I'm just very concerned about the current situation that we're in and this weaponization of shame to justify atrocities.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: Yes, I think that's a perceptive point, and the historical lessons are perennial, and we do need to pay attention to those. And again, the point of that that I would pick up on is that the weaponization of guilt and shame is part of the postmodern strategy.
So using those moral emotions which do have a proper price in any moral code, but manufacturing them, exaggerating them, and undercutting people's ability to resist unhealthy versions of those is going to be part of the strategy. So you mentioned, for example, the word collective in your summary, and I think that's an important part of it. Part of the distinction between healthy and unhealthy, shame and guilt, is the recognition of what you are responsible for as an individual.
And so if you can then undercut philosophically the concept of the individual, including an individual's sense of his or her own agency, his or her own sense of responsibility, the cultivation of their rational faculties so they can make those very fine grained, often moral judgments about oneself and other people, and assigning responsibility, if you can undercut all of that, then you undercut the person's capacity for individual self responsibility and sorting all of that out. To the extent that you undercut all of that, then you weaken individuals. And weakened individuals look for some sort of protection. They look for some sort of way to escape responsibility or to not have to answer all of those questions themselves. And to the extent that people are not able to be individuals in this agency moral responsibility sense, throwing themselves on God's mercy and asking God to help them is one standard place that people will go psychologically. Another place people will go is to the collective. They will merge themselves in some group, in some tribe. That will give them a sense of who they are and will give them some source of what they're supposed to believe, what they are supposed to do.
And so a collective psychology, then, is a natural resting place for people who are not capable of doing so on an individual basis.
And so that collective shaming that you then mentioned, where we can start saying, well, you are a member of this collective that can be weaponized against various collectives, because then you just point out whatever bad things some members of that collective did in the past, and then that guilt and shame and responsibility is now supposed to be inherited by the current generation that are the instantiations of that collective. And then you can strategize more effectively and have activism more effectively against that collective. So this also, though, is part of my hypothesis that I'm floating today explicitly part of what Derrida Foucault and the other postmoderns are doing. Part of the strategy is not simply to break down the distinction between the healthy and the perverted, or between the rational and the sane, but to break down the very idea of an individual, to dissolve the subject, to dissolve the self, to break down all of the categories and apparatus that goes into properly Constituting an individual and leaving us with a new sense of who we are, which is just kind of as a locus through which various collective forces flow. And so, yes, that philosophically sets the stage once again for the potential for genocide that you are rightly pointing out.
[00:36:28] Speaker A: This very rich whole hypothesis. It's great. I have some follow up, but I do want to get to John. John, thanks for joining us. You can unmute yourself if you'd like to be part of the conversation if you're able to, but otherwise I can go ahead. We invite other people to raise your hand if you want to ask, but I wanted to know.
They talk about how we emptied the institutions in the partially a reaction to like, one flew over the cuckoo's Nest, painting these institutions as these shop of horrors, was that somewhat a result of Dairy Dah's influence?
[00:37:20] Speaker B: Well, that's an interesting question, Scott. So I will say I've only seen snippets of one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was a famous movie when I was young, but I got the sense that I wouldn't enjoy it. So I have not watched it through, and I've also not read any of the literature on it. So I don't know. Ken Casey, I think, is the author of the original book. I don't know who Ken Casey's influencers were, whether he read Foucault, whether he read Derrida or not.
So I can't answer that question. I do want to say, with respect to.
Excuse me, I'm taking a little tickle in my throat. I think I'm fighting something off.
[00:38:08] Speaker A: Traveled a lot lately?
[00:38:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the stuff that's going on.
So there was, of course, in the Anglo American tradition, a development of psychiatry that was not at all reflective of anything that was going on on the continent with respect to Foucault, Derridot and the others, and that the merger came a little bit later. Now, it's a question that's interesting. The one that you're raising about once flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, because, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that book was written in the then the movie was made in the 1970s. So that would make it contemporary with the rise of Foucault and Derry Da in the 1960s and then into the 1970s as well. So it could very well be that these ideas are starting to cross the Atlantic, so to speak, from France to America and manifesting. But I don't know that level of detail with respect to that particular book.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: That's a fair answer.
John, I don't know if you were able to come back and if you want to unmute and have a question for Stephen, but if we, we talk about the Fountainhead and Ellsworth Tui Tui was a critic.
These guys are all into critical theory. I even read that Derrida said he influenced architecture via his deconstructivism. I mean, how close is he to a real life Ellsworth Tui?
[00:40:09] Speaker B: That's another interesting question. So can we assume that many of the people on our Twitter space here today are familiar with Ellsworth Tui, the book the Fountainhead?
[00:40:24] Speaker A: I think so. I mean, if you haven't, he was the antagonist that basically a collectivist.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And the important thing about Ellsworth Tui is that he is a strategist of not so much the irrational, but certainly of the anti individualism and various forms of anti individualism. So we see him using sometimes generically collectivist strategies against individualism. Sometimes he's using more narrowly altruistic strategies against any sort of self interest or healthy self assertion.
And sometimes he's using egalitarian arguments against any standard of achievement and greatness. So on all of the moral side of the issues and all of the moral and evaluative concepts, he is attacking them, breaking them down, and he's doing this strategically. But I don't recall that he is on the epistemological side of things, ever breaking down the positive epistemology, arguing that our cognitive apparatus of perception and conceptualization and logic and so forth are not true. So in that sense, Ellsworth Tui is more limited than either Foucault and Derrida, because for both Foucault and Derrida, it is the epistemological concepts and the moral evaluative concepts that they are explicitly identifying and trying to break down and subvert. It's also the true clear, rather, and this goes back to an interpretive issue with respect to Tui the villain.
Tui has some sort of a collectivist, socialist, small C communist regime that he wants to replace the current liberal capitalist one with, in which case that would also differentiate him from the postmoderns, because postmodernism, at least in its more principled form, wants to say there is no positive regime that we want to replace modern civilization with. And that's part and parcel of their philosophical approach. There is no grounded distinction between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the better and the worse. Everything just is contending different power regimes, and we happen to be wanting to be tearing down the current one. But it's not that we've got some idealistic regime that we want to replace that with. So they are, in that sense, just ongoing power struggle theorists or ongoing nihilists. This would be a slightly narrower use of nihilism, which is to say there is no positive ideal that we are striving for. It's all just amoral power playing its way out. At least on one interpretation of Tui, he does seem to have, or at least he does offer some sort of positive agenda to replace the current society. Now, I don't know that that's the best interpretation of Tui, and I need to think more about this. But my sneaking suspicion about Tui is that he also, in the end, is a kind of nihilist, that he wants to break down all of the positive moral individualism, self responsibility, being independent, having integrity, being a creator of values, particularly in that book, Architectural value.
So he wants to destroy that. And he's deploying a large number of negative strategies to destroy all of that. And at various points, he says he wants to acquire power and that he is using the amoral or the anti moral or the replacement morality as a weapon against all of the moral concepts that he wants to destroy. But then if we ask, well, what does Tui want that power for?
I don't think there is anything in Tui. There's no positive value that he wants to have that power for. I think instead he just wants to have that power so that he can destroy.
Peter Keating does a pretty good job of destroying himself, but Tui helps them along the way. Tui destroys his niece, Catherine Halsey. And toward the end of the novel, he says explicitly he just wants to destroy Howard Rohr. So it's not that he wants to destroy them because he wants there to be a better version of human being. I think he just likes to destroy human being. And to the extent that's the right reading of Tui, then he is a kind of nihilist.
And that would be a point of overlap with Derrida and Foucault, because at least on my reading of them, when you push them, they end up in nihilism as well.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: Okay, we'll actually be discussing this next Thursday on the Fountainhead Book Club Zoom meeting. You can find atlassociety.org. But I just want to go back to this idea that, of course there is objective. You can tell when someone's not right, and they are obviously severely mentally ill. But what about the idea that sanity is somewhat cultural and changes over time with the Overton window?
[00:46:52] Speaker B: I think for both Foucault and Derrida, they would be more radical than that, and they would disagree even with your first statement. But obviously we can tell when someone is, excuse me, insane.
At least if we just take the reading of them straight. They want to say, there is no way, obviously or unobviously, to ground a distinction between the sane and the insane. So you then, or I might point out someone who is to us, obviously unhinged.
And they would just say, well, whatever your distinction is between hinged and unhinged, there is no way of grounding that. If you say, well, they are not speaking grammatically, their sentences don't make sense, then they would say, well, that's just because your grammar is one possible grammar, and you are just being universalist and imperialist with respect to your form of grammar. So we would deconstruct language, including deconstructing grammar, and then say, well, you have to then leave open the possibility that there are different grammars.
But just because you've conditioned yourself with respect to one grammar, you're just not in a position to understand this alternative grammar. So the fact that the person is speaking ungrammatical nonsense sentences doesn't work as an argument against this person. If you then say, well, look at the person. He is not eating properly, or he is not paying attention to hygiene or doing physical damage to himself or others, they would just be very clever at breaking down any distinction between healthy and unhealthy nutrition and not nutrition and so forth. To say that all of those theories themselves are not objective, they can't be universal. There's just alternative nutritions, alternative standards of hygiene and so forth. What they then will argue even more forcefully, though, is that reason, they say this explicitly, Western reason, modern reason, is itself a construct that has tried to become universalistic and imperialistic. And what we need to do if we want to attack this oppressive society, liberal capitalism, the scientific and technologically imperialistic society that we live in, if you take it as your premise that that's a terrible society that needs to be broken down. The implication of Derrida and Foucault explicitly is that we need to cultivate the irrational in ourselves, let ourselves go into what seems crazy, into the destructive, into the nihilistic, to break out of the confines of civilization, to break out of the confines of rationality, to try to find some sense of liberation. So the analogy I would do here, it's a historical analogy, is in the art world, if you go just to the generation before these philosophical postmoderns, and you think about movements like Dada and surrealism in the art world, where you might just dismiss, well, this is just artists, and they're just artists. We always let them be a little crazier than the rest of us and so on. But all of those experiments that say what we need to do to liberate ourselves as artists is abuse drugs or use alcohol to excess, or to cultivate anything inside ourselves that will enable us to become crazy, to liberate our minds, to go into alternative realities in order to have some sort of different state psychologically, that is against everything that we are taught is normal, logical, rational, civilized. And then, and only then, is one going to be more authentically artistic. So take all of that surrealism and all of that artistry Dada in the art world and then develop those arguments in very sophisticated form philosophically. That's Derry Daw and Foucault. So I think they're more radical than you're Suggesting.
[00:51:59] Speaker A: Scott, fair answer. Thank you very much. We are pleased to have David Kelly, our founder at the Atlas Society. Dr. Kelly, thanks for joining us.
You'll have to unmute yourself with the button in the bottom left.
Well, while we're waiting for David to be able to get his speaker unmuted, they say it's his most famous quote. There is no out of context.
Is that his way of saying everything's connected?
[00:52:53] Speaker B: I don't know if that's his most famous quote, but that certainly is one of the ones that's up there, because Derry Daw, he approaches all of these issues primarily through language and linguistics and some of the narrower theories of language that had been prominent in the early and middle part of the 20th century.
Excuse me once again.
[00:53:25] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[00:53:29] Speaker B: What he wants to do is argue that what we call language is not in any way referential of an extra linguistic reality.
So the idea that words are symbols that we use as tags for abstractions that we have formed in our consciousness, and that consciousness then is aware of external reality and the methods that we use to keep track of external reality.
What Derrida is doing is severing the link between an external reality and language and then marshalling various skeptical arguments to say that there is no such connection. What you're then left with is just language as a self contained reality of its own.
So there is nothing outside of the text. It's all just words or it's all just language. And then, of course, once you're in the text and you start putting different chunks of text together, that's when we start using the language context. So with the text, or the text is with the text, but you never get outside of the text. Words link to other words, and those words then point to other words, but they never point to anything outside of the linguistic realm. They never point to objects or to reality.
Great.
[00:55:04] Speaker A: David, are you able to unmute yourself with the button in the bottom left?
If not.
Oh, there you go.
Well, he left, apparently. But let me ask you this.
Can it be said that slipping from a more rational culture to a less rational culture is maybe part of what makes some people snap?
[00:55:40] Speaker B: People who say are predisposed to being themselves rational, but then when they are confronted with what seems can you hear me?
[00:55:53] Speaker A: Yes.
We're just waiting for Stephen to finish this. Quick answer.
[00:55:58] Speaker B: Okay. An uptick in irrationality. Or if they're immersed in social media and it seems an overwhelming amount of irrationality, that causes them to become somewhat depressed and pessimistic. And so to give up on rationality, I think, yeah, that certainly is going to be a cultural consequence.
I think it's one that the strategists, rather of irrationality want to encourage. They want to encourage that trend.
[00:56:33] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely.
I'm not sure what happened to David. I think he got bumped down to the listener route.
[00:56:45] Speaker B: Let me then throw in just one quotation. Go ahead.
From Derry Dog, because I've been speaking about him, so you don't just have to. It's worth always checking these guys out for oneself. So the article is Kogito and the history of madness.
I want to say that what Dairy Dawg explicitly is doing is saying that what philosophers, rational philosophers, have been trying to do is to say there is a distinction between the rational and the mad.
And they have then imposed one conception of reality, of rationality, rather on everyone. And that what's behind that is this cowardice and unwillingness to let themselves go into the crazy or go into the mad. And so they confine their own internal potential for craziness in order to console themselves and pat themselves on the back that they are rational and logical. And then philosophy goes in a certain direction. So he wants to argue it's a fear based self limitation. And so the quotation I want to read is Derry Dawg's encouragement that we try to get past that. So here's the quotation. He says, this is speaking about modern philosophy. It's the philosophy which lives. This is the direct quotation. Now, the philosophy which lives only by imprisoning madness, but which would die as thought, and by a still worse violence if new speech did not at every instant liberate previous madness while enclosing itself within itself, in its present existence, the madness of the day. It is only by virtue of this oppression of madness that finite thought, that is to say, history of philosophy, can reign.
And so the idea, I'm stopping the quote there for a moment, is that we have to let go of this unwillingness, this fear, this terror of going crazy, in order to become genuine philosophers in Derry Daw's sense. And so the final line is, if you're going to be a genuine philosopher, this has to be your attitude. Quote, I philosophize only in terror, in the confessed terror of going mad, unquote so that's Derry Dot encouraging us to try to go mad to overcome our terror of going crazy in order to become genuine liberated philosophers.
[00:59:37] Speaker A: Good stuff. I remember the seal lyrics. We're never going to survive unless we get a little crazy.
Maybe that was also inspired. David, do you have a quick, like, 32nd question?
[00:59:50] Speaker E: I think so. If you can hear me now.
[00:59:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:59:54] Speaker E: Okay, great. I just want to go back to the Fountainhead because I've always thought that Ellsworth Tui was Ein Rent's brilliant projection of what postmodernism would be. She was writing, of course, way before the time, but I was just looking at my notes from in part four of the Fountainhead, Tui's confession to Peter Keating about his real strategy and his real evil. He says, men have a weapon against you, reason, so you must be very sure to take it away from them.
Cut the props out from under, but be careful. Don't deny outright. Never deny anything outright. You give your hand away. Don't say reason is evil, though some have gone that far and with astonishing success.
Just say reason is limited, that there's something above it. So that's all I quoted from the excerpt. I don't know how it goes on. And maybe that last statement is she's thinking more of religion than of postmodernism. But Tui is so postmodern in highlighting trash and erasing attacking standards of all kinds that I just want to say a word for Ren's prognostic brilliance in outlining this way before her.
So anyway, but thank you, Stephen. This is not to take anything away from your unbelievably learned exposition, okay?
[01:01:48] Speaker B: That quotation from Tui is very.
Yeah, thanks for pointing it out.
[01:01:57] Speaker A: Great. That's a great note to wrap things up on, Steven. It's a great topic. I think it would make a great talk at an upcoming seminar, if not even a book. But one branch of philosophy is politics, and the third GOP presidential debate starts in about 30 minutes or less. The only reason I bring it up is that our senior scholar Richard Salzman and student programs manager Abby Behringer will be analyzing the debate tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m.. Eastern, 07:00 a.m.. Pacific Bright and early. So tune in for that across our social media channels. Thanks to all who joined, and thank you, Steven, for discussing the topic. Hope to see everyone again at our upcoming events.
[01:02:44] Speaker B: Okay, thanks for hosting, Scott.
[01:02:47] Speaker A: Thank you. Bye.
