Showing
that a movement leads to nihilism is an important part of understanding
it, as is showing how a failing and nihilistic movement can still be
dangerous. Tracing postmodernism’s roots (...) explains how all of its
elements came to be woven together. Yet identifying postmodernism’s
roots and connecting them to contemporary bad consequences does not
refute postmodernism.
What is still needed is a refutation of
those historical premises, and an identification and defense of the
alternatives to them. The Enlightenment was based on premises opposite
to those of postmodernism, but while the Enlightenment was able to
create a magnificent world on the basis of those premises, it
articulated and defended them only incompletely. That weakness is the
sole source of postmodernism’s power against it. Completing the
articulation and defense of those premises is therefore essential to
maintaining the forward progress of the Enlightenment vision and
shielding it against postmodern strategies.
The names of
the postmodern vanguard are now familiar: Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. They are its leading
strategists.
Members of this elite group set the direction and tone for the postmodern intellectual world.
Michel
Foucault has identified the major targets: “All my analyses are against
the idea of universal necessities in human existence.” Such necessities
must be swept aside as baggage from the past: “It is meaningless to
speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.”
Richard
Rorty has elaborated on that theme, explaining that that is not to say
that postmodernism is true or that it offers knowledge. Such assertions
would be self-contradictory, so postmodernists must use language
“ironically.”
Against this Kantian ethics postulates:
1. Moral dignitarianism, the anti-egoistic, anti-utilitarian, and anti-relativistic
universalist ethical idea that every rational human animal possesses dignity, i.e.,
an absolute, non-denumerably infinite, intrinsic, objective value or worth, beyond
every merely hedonistic, self-interested, instrumental, economic, or utilitarian
value, which entails that we always and everywhere ought to treat everyone as
persons and never as mere means or mere things, and therefore always and
everywhere with sufficient respect for their dignity, no matter what merely
prudential reasons there are to do otherwise.
2. Political dignitarianism, the anti-despotic, anti-totalitarian, and anti-Hobbesian-
liberal yet also liberationist, radically enlightened idea that all social institutions
based on coercion and authoritarianism, whether democratic or not-so-
democratic, are rationally unjustified and immoral, and that in resisting,
devolving, and/or transforming all such social institutions, we ought to create and
sustain a worldwide or cosmopolitan ethical community beyond all borders and
nation-States, consisting of people who who think, care, and act for themselves
and also mutually sufficiently respect the dignity of others and themselves, no
matter what their race, sex, ethnicity, language, age, economic status, or abilities.
Husserl:
Whatever is true, is absolutely, intrinsically true: truth is one and the same whether men
or non-men, angels or gods apprehend and judge it. Logical laws speak of truth in this ideal
unity, set over against the real multiplicity of races, individuals and experiences, and it is of
this ideal unity that we all speak when we are not confused by relativism.
P. Tichý (Foundations of Frege's Logic):
Fate has not been kind to Gottlob Frege and his work. His logical
achievement, which dwarfed anything done by logicians over the preceding
two thousand years, remained all but ignored by his contemporaries. He
liberated logic from the straight-jacket of psychologism only to see
others claim credit for it. He expounded his theory in a monumental
two-volume work, only to find an insidious error in the very foundations
of the system. He successfully challenged the rise of Hilbert-style
formalism in logic only to see everybody follow in the footsteps of
those who had lost the argument. Ideas can live with lack of
recognition. Even ignored and rejected, they are still there ready to
engage the minds of those who find their own way to them. They are in
danger of obliteration, however, if they are enlisted to serve
conceptions and purposes incompatible with them. This is what has been
happening to Frege's theoretical bequest in recent decades. Frege has
become, belatedly, something of a philosophical hero. But those who have
elevated him to this status are the intellectual heirs of Frege's
Hilbertian adversaries, hostile to all the main principles underlying
Frege's philosophy. They are hostile to Frege's platonism, the view that
over and above material objects, there are also functions, concepts,
truth-values, and thoughts. They are hostile to Frege's realism, the
idea that thoughts are independent of their expression in any language
and that each of them is true or false in its own right. They are
hostile to the view that logic, just like arithmetic and geometry,
treats of a specific range of extra-linguistic entities given prior to
any axiomatization, and that of two alternative logics—as of two
alternative geometries—only one can be correct. And they are no less
hostile to Frege's view that the purpose of inference is to enhance our
knowledge and that it therefore makes little sense to infer conclusions
from premises which are not known to be true. We thus see Frege lionized
by exponents of a directly opposing theoretical outlook.