 Hello my friends and enemies and welcome to the 23rd episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I am your host, Steve Patterson, and for about the past 10 years or so I have been on the pursuit of truth and I've discovered lots of interesting philosophies along the way. One of them I've identified and dubbed as irrationalism. It's the idea that reality is fundamentally unknowable, there is no such thing as truth, logic is contradictory, the universe is paradoxical, and a significant part of my work is exploring why people believe that this could be so. Why is it that some people passionately believe the idea that the truth is that there's no truth? So that investigation has taken me from quantum physics to the Lyres paradox to religious claims to examinations about logic and mathematics, but you can also find it manifested in higher academia, the school of thought called postmodernism. This is what I've brought my guest on to the show today to talk about. He's Dr. Stephen Hicks who's written a book called Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Russo to Foucault. Now some of you, if you're like me, might already have experience with postmodernism in the humanities departments at your current college. I'm talking about the English professors, to some extent maybe the history professors, and maybe from the sociology department, you might find yourself as one of the lone rationalist individuals saying such naive things like objective truth exists, and of course by simply mentioning such an absurd idea you're ostracized and treated as being naive. Now if that sounds like you, I do have some good news. The current sponsor of the show is a company called Praxis, and they specialize in taking passionate, competent young people out of higher ed and into the real world. They land their participants paid apprenticeships, they give them real world job skill training, and after you've completed their program, they guarantee you a $40,000 a year job offer. Plus you don't have to worry about being condemned for believing in such things like objective truth. So if that sounds like something that you're interested in, either because you're currently stuck in academia or because you want to avoid it altogether, then check out their website at discoverpraxis.com. And on their homepage there's a button that says schedule a call. Click it, set up an appointment, talk to them and see if it sounds right for you. So back to philosophy and my discussion with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who is the professor of philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois. In this interview we don't just talk about postmodernism, we also cover what he calls premodernism and modernism. So for about the first half hour of this interview, we're covering about 1,500 years of philosophy. Now if that doesn't interest you, if you don't really care about the history of philosophy, skip ahead to about the half hour mark where we start diving more into postmodern philosophy, which is very closely tied to the philosophy that I have called irrationalism. Enjoy. Thank you Stephen for sitting down and talking with me about the subject. I hope it'll be fun. A lot of your work has focused on postmodernism, explaining the philosophy. What I'd really like to do is focus first on basic concepts. I think when we're trying to understand any philosophy, any claim about reality, you gotta first focus on the basics before you get into more advanced stuff. And before diving into postmodernism, it would make sense just to first start with modernism or even premodernism. This is an approach that you take in your book, and I was hoping that you could just spend maybe a few minutes explaining some of the basic concepts in, we'll start with premodernism, and maybe I'll ask you some questions about that, and then we'll talk about modernism for a few minutes, and then the rest of the discussion we can focus on postmodernism. Alright, good structure. So I think that most ideas don't come in little isolated packets. It's not just, I think it's a mistake to just to focus on epistemological claims or metaphysical claims. Usually those claims come whole package in regards to a bigger world view. So if we could speak in broad brushstrokes, obviously we're gonna be missing some nuance. In your mind, what is the premodern world view if you could summarize it? Right, well each of the issues in philosophy, you can separate it out and consider particular arguments formed against on their own merits. But yeah, the goal of philosophy is to integrate those into an entire philosophy that guides you in your life as a whole. And then of course what we're interested in is how those ideas play off against each other over the course of history and how they then influence historical eras. So if we take very broad stroke breakdowns of historical eras, clearly something happened in the early modern world and so we say that modern world represents a break with the premodern. And I would then say, we're just gonna talk about the premodern, of course, then we can talk about lots of ancient civilizations and so on. But the target in question in the modern era, in the early modern era is to contrast what was going on then as a break with say what had been going on in the previous 1,000 years. So if we take essentially from say the decline of Rome on through the Renaissance, that's about a 1,000 year chunk of time, and we asked what was the dominant intellectual framework in the west and we call that premodernism. Then we say it's some form of broadly religious philosophy and then more specifically it's a form of Christian philosophy and then from our modern perspective Christianity break down to a number of things. We would say essentially it's a form of Catholic Christian philosophy that's dominating that era. Now then to narrow that down right more specifically we say well who are the major intellectuals who frame the thinking for that era. Then certainly we have to say Augustine, say Augustine as the dominant thinker and then by the time we get into 600 years, 700 years later then we're into Aquinas who in some ways is a break with Augustine but a continuity as well. So essentially what we have is a Catholic Christian philosophy that is the intellectual framework for the era. Then we say what do we mean by a philosophy? Philosophy has a number of sub-questions. I think I did once to the tally. I think I came up with something like 113 of core issues that are philosophical issues. That's too many to go through. So we chunk those issues into broadly metaphysical, epistemological, questions about human nature, questions about ethics, and then questions about political philosophy as well. So what we get then if we go this route then is we have a metaphysics that is oriented toward the supernatural. We have an epistemology that emphasizes first mysticism in the form of revelations received by prophets back in time, delivered to a select few individuals but then the rest of us are to accept those on faith as absolutely binding. We have a view of human nature that emphasizes kind of a duality, of human nature, its matter and spirit, its body versus soul. There's a sense of the badness of human nature, a strong notion of original sin that people either can't control themselves and that's either because they don't know any better or even if they do know better their badness right out. And then the idea also that human beings are by nature subject, they should be subject to higher authority, most specifically God. You have an ethic right then if we turn to ethics issues that emphasizes or have an anti-materialism and even that kind of valorizes an ascetic approach to life. So the best human beings are people like monks and nuns who vow poverty and obedience and celibacy and dedicate themselves to living according to those values. And then we have a, when we turn to political issues essentially a hierarchical and authoritarian political structure where everyone of course is to be subject to God who is at the top and then to obey. And then God's representatives on earth, the temporal political structures manifested in the church, pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops all the way down to the broad mass of people at the bottom who are laity. And then that theological institutional structure that is a very natural fit with feudal structures where you have the king at the top with all authority and they integrate that with a kind of a divine right of king's idea and you have the same structure all the way down. So something like that then is broadly what I am calling pre-modernism and that's what early moderns are reacting against. So when you say early modern, where do you roughly put the transitionary period from those ideas maybe to the next phase of modernism? Yeah, 1400s, 1500s, and then certainly on into the 1600s. So who are some of the initial thinkers that started to question and change that prevailing paradigm? Yeah, well there's a school of thinkers in northern Italy. School might be a bit strong, but there's certainly a collection of thinkers who broadly are known as humanists. So what you find in them is an increasing interest in the natural world. A lot of it is through a great admiration of the newly-admired texts of the Greeks and the Romans with their much more worldly concerns. I like to emphasize Galileo, which is extremely important here, that epistemological battle that he is a frontman for with respect to the authority of the senses and experiment and reasoning versus the traditional authorities, so that epistemological battle is being engaged there. With respect to human nature, where we have in the Renaissance the cultivation of the individual, a re-discovery and emphasis of the idea that people are not necessarily sinners, but that human beings can be beautiful and noble. We have an ethic that encourages people to cultivate their talents in a way that enables them to enjoy their lives, to enjoy worldly values, and that's not in opposition to cultivating your spiritual values or your psychological values. Then also at that same time, in politics, you start to see a breakdown of the hierarchical structures in Florence and Venice, the reintroduction of republican forms of government, new forms of early democracies in some of the city-states, and so on. Even if you go back to the 1400s in northern Italy, you see an increasing naturalism, an increasing reliance on empiricism, the senses and reason, cultivation of the individual, worldly ethical values, and an initial flattening. That's a little bit too strong, but a weakening of the traditional political hierarchies as well. So would it be fair to say, if we were to speak very imprecisely, that roughly the modernist worldview is going from the supernatural to the natural and from what you might call the irrational or the non-rational or the mystical to the rational, and what you might view as from the hierarchical, the strongly hierarchical, to the individual? Is that fair? Sure, yes. So that would boil it down to three points, yes, and that's essentially fine. There's already that's going on in the 1400s in northern Italy, in the 1500s. Of course, we have to talk about the reformation and what that means for religious thinking, but the religious thinking has a huge amount of epistemological battle, do we, as the Protestants emphasize, say that each individual has to have his or her own relationship with God, right? So then you're saying that each individual's judgment should be respected, and then that cultivates then people's ability to debate because then people start intensely debating all of the religious texts. And even though the Protestants or reformers were not advocates of reason, as an unintended consequence to the extent that people are arguing all over the place about what religious text means, then de facto you get a cultivation of people's intellectual abilities. You have a cultivation of more individualism because then as a result of the counter-reformation battles, you have a lot of breakaway individuals going off and starting their own churches. You have the emphasis that if individuals are going to have their own relationship with God, that means that they need to know God's word for themselves. So you have a mass movement toward teaching young people to read. And then again, as an unintended consequence, when people start to read one book, they're interested in reading other books so people start to become more educated. And so epistemologically, right, then in the early modern world, we have a strong increase in epistemological individualism, right, to use that phrase. Also in the 1500s, what is important is, you know, Columbus is crossing the ocean, bringing the worlds together. The era of modern globalization is going on. And that has, you know, huge impact for all kinds of social dimensions. So that is another social-political factor that has philosophical significance. So as we move from the early moderns to the later moderns, this sounds like this is what lays the groundwork for what most people think of as the Enlightenment. Is this essentially, was the Enlightenment then maybe the peak or the manifestation of the modern ideas? I think so, yes. So what you have is a lot of, in the early modern era, European thinkers can rediscovering the Greeks and the Romans, and in fact, they're going back to school. There's some, you know, independent new discovery that's going on, but a lot of it really is rediscovery and it's not necessarily systematic yet. And then a lot of things that are happening in lots of areas, and then as people in the 1500s and early 1600s start to reflect on the significance of the new world that's being created, right, then they're developing an explicit philosophy to formulate their understanding of the new kind of world that's going on. And then that all tours by the late 1600s, certainly the early 1700s, and then we are into what we call the Age of Enlightenment, where to some extent, a lot of these philosophical revolutions have already occurred and what's going on is that it's being conceptualized. The arguments for them are more sophisticatedly developed. The developments in epistemology and in politics and ethics are being integrated with each other. And so you have a coherent, systematic world view that you can call, say, the Enlightenment philosophy. What I find interesting is around this time period, the political correlate of this philosophy is something like a great liberalization, or a great classical liberalization, as we might have to call it today, where you had the opening of markets, you had the degradation of the institution of slavery, you had to some extent protectionism, nativism is somewhat replaced by this idea of international trade. And what I think is an error is to think that this is out of the blue, it's just an historical artifact. And I think what the underlying causes does point to something like a change in the philosophy. You're absolutely right. If you look at the arguments for liberalization across a number of dimensions, if you're going to be liberal in your religion, for example, then that is underlying the concept that individuals should be able to make up their own minds and we're going to trust people to make decisions and that it's properly private. And so that's an individualism. If you think that you mentioned slavery, for example, that slavery becomes a moral abomination by the time we get to the end of the 17s, and really for the first time in human history, that notion is there. Well, again, that slaves are individuals as well, that they are human beings, and so they have the same capacities that any human being should have. And that's, again, an individualistic theme. If you are going to liberalize markets, in many cases the arguments are that any individual with normal capacities can govern his or her own business life, an economic life, make their own decisions about what their careers are going to be, whom they're going to trade with, and so on. And again, that's an emphasis on the capacity of individuals to govern their own lives. Or if you're interested in Democratic and Republican modes of political organization, again, those devolve political power to the individual. You think about the, you know, the astonishing confidence, right? In individual judgment, if you are going to have any sort of Democratic political system, what you're going to say individuals should be able to, the broad mass of them, think about important political matters, have arguments about them, and that's the most formed and responsible of votes. So yes, I'm agreeing with your point, right, that in all of these different areas, it could look like they're springing up out of the blue, but there are underlying individualistic and pro-lesion principles that have become spread. And so the more basic set of philosophical principles is being leveraged in a whole bunch of particular areas socially. So what then do you see as the general timeframe to transition from the modern era to now the post-modern era? What, not just what are the, what's the timeframe, but who are, do you think, the foundational thinkers that started this transition? Yeah, well let me, Ernest, the first part of your claim. I think we still are living in the modern era. Essentially our culture, modern 21st century global culture is modernist culture. So when we say that we are living in post-modern times, I would make that a more modest claim, because in my view, we do have a very vigorous post-modern movement in intellectual circles, but even that's too broad in some intellectual circles, in the humanities, in some areas in the social sciences and so forth. And they've had some cultural manifestations in the arts and other areas as well, certainly in the educational establishment. So what I would then say is that we have a broadly modernist culture and some respects, important respects is still vigorous and thriving, but that there are within some sub-cultures or sub-institutions within that broader modernist culture a very vigorous post-modern intellectual framework. Then the second part of your question is, so when this starts to happen, I put the dates to be in the second half of the 17th century. So the 1700s are the long 18th century is broadly, we call it the age of enlightenment, we call it the long 18th century, because you would have to go back to Locke and Newton at the end of the 1600s and then on, say, through Napoleon. But then what you have is within that enlightenment era, all of the philosophical issues are always vigorously being debated and all of the major positions are represented. But what starts to happen toward the end of the 1700s is that there's a vigorous reaction right against many of the Enlightenment themes. We start to see this particularly in northeastern Europe, and in my view it's in the German states. And I focus on Kant and some of the other Germans. What you find in them is a reaction right against many of the very strong claims that the Enlightenment thinkers were making about the power of reason to answer all of life's questions and dramatically to reshape all of society's institutions in a progressive direction. And so any philosophy or philosopher then that is critical about the powers of reason and sets himself to put severe limits on the facet of reason that person then would mark a turning away from the Enlightenment. So again, this is very broad strokes, but we focus on Kant's philosophy with his critique of pure reason, where he sets out as part of his project, to say that reason cannot in fact come to know the most important truths about the nature of the world and human identity, and then develops some very sophisticated philosophical arguments right in support of that conclusion that is anti-Enlightenment. And that's perhaps the most provocative thesis in my post-Patern work. And partly to speak specifically of philosophically epistemological issues, but Kant does argue that human beings do need certain regulative beliefs in their life. They need to believe in a kind of God. They need to believe in immortality of the soul and freedom of the will. And he believes that Enlightenment philosophy is going to destroy all of those beliefs. So if you can find a way to limit the claims of reason and science, then that's going to, as he puts it, make room for the kinds of beliefs that he thinks are philosophically important. And then this he's joined in a large number of early, what I call counter-Enlightenment philosophers. To some extent, this was driven by political concerns. We mentioned Napoleon right a little earlier, out of the degradation that followed from the French Revolution. Napoleon rises to power and then he sweeps through Eastern Europe, conquering everywhere. He beats the German states. They're really horrified by this. They see from their perspective Napoleon really as a Westerner. They see him as a representative of Enlightenment philosophy and the French Enlightenment. And so they are very concerned to say, how are we going to, so to speak, reinvigorate German-ness against these French imports that are being, they're not actually imported, they're being imposed upon us by this foreign conqueror. They're partly motivated by just political nationalistic reasons. You get a reaction against everything from the West. And that then includes all of the Enlightenment ideas of separation of church and state, comes under attack, the ideas of individualism, the secularism and so on, all of which are part of the Enlightenment package. I'm very glad that you make that distinction between the, what you might call, higher academia culture, which I think is, in my own experiences, thoroughly postmodern in several areas, maybe not so much in the hard sciences, but certainly in the humanities, for example, I think you see anti-Enlightenment ideas very popular. But I think you are very correct to point out that in the society at large, I think you see, well, you certainly have the postmodern ideas, but I think the majority of people have not bought on to the postmodern value system or anti-value system. And in fact, what's really interesting is right now, I think just in the last year, since you see this remarkable political Trump phenomenon, I think it has to do with people's rejection and mockery and disdain for some of the what people might call absurdities coming out of the humanities departments. Now, in my own analysis, I think they go to the absurd in the other direction, but I think that's partly a broader cultural shift that rejects the postmodern ideas. I'm hoping maybe you can talk, this would be a good segue to talk more and maybe in more detail about what is packaged in the postmodern worldview in regards to metaphysics, in regards to epistemology. So if, for example, our reason is flawed, do we have any method of accessing the truth? If there is no such thing, for example, as truth, then what are we doing by trying to communicate about philosophy and so on? And political theories too. Yeah, good question. So if we then fast forward, so to speak, to mid-20th century when the leading postmodern intellectuals are coming to prominence. So 1950s, 1960s. And here, so the big names are people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Léotard, another French, the French were really taking the lead here. On the American side, Richard Rorty is a huge name, maybe Stanley Fish, a little more in literary criticism, but a very philosophical literary critic. If we take them as representative of the postmodern vanguard, all of them are, with the exception of Fish, philosophy like PhDs, and all of them in their graduate training and much of their early writing are engaged with epistemological issues. And what we do find in them is a strong skepticism about the power of reason. And so what has happened, again, this is very broad strokes, is from the high aspirations that the Enlightenment had for the power of reason on dozens of technical issues in philosophy. How does reason work out with respect to integrating with perception and observational data? How do we form abstract concepts? How do we integrate those into propositions? How do we take propositions and integrate them into theories? What's the nature of grammar? How do we develop the logical and mathematical tools and so on? So dozens and dozens of sub-issues that are necessary to develop a full and robust theory of reason. By the time we get to the mid-20th century in both the analytic and continental traditions, broadly speaking, it's a very skeptical moment in philosophy. And so what we get are thinkers, the early postmodern thinkers, who believe that reason is not able at all to come to know the truth. So what we get, for example, is someone like Foucault in a very deep way, saying that there is no such thing as truth. And so truth then starts to be a word that's used ironically. Or it's always put in quotation marks. Or it's relativized that there are only truths depending on a given person's cognitive framework, which has no more standing than anybody else's cognitive framework. Or the notions that truth and reality and reason, these are all things that really are meaningless. So it's pointless to try to exert any more philosophical energy in figuring out what the truth is and so on. And interestingly, Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty, they were all, in their historically informed way, say the Enlightenment project was based on reason and we are now at the end of the Enlightenment project. It has utterly failed. And so now our philosophical question is, what are we supposed to do right now that we no longer, so to speak, believe in truth, reason, reality, and so on? How are those ideas translated into shifts in political theory? Well, one way to do it is then to say, all right, well, if we're not really then interested in figuring out what the truth is, that's no longer going to be our core value as philosophers to seek. What are we then supposed to do? The standard substitute concept is the concept of power. So we do have values and these values are subjectivized and relativized, but it's not that anyone's values are truer or even necessarily better than anyone else's. So all we can do is say that people are trying to assert their values and then necessarily since the values are relativized, all of our values are coming into conflict with each other. And the way we're going to resolve conflict is not through reason, debate, and discussion because we don't believe in reason anymore. It's not a matter of figuring out whose values are truer, right, or good because we don't believe in objective truth and goodness anymore. So the way we resolve conflicts then is only through power. So power then comes to be seen, and this might be a bit strong, but power really is the metaphysical substrate, so to speak. The world's understood only in terms of power struggles. So here, of course, Nietzsche becomes perhaps one of the most important forerunners of the postmodern thinkers. Nietzsche, of course, he was still doing metaphysics and he had a robust metaphysical theory, but it was all a power-based metaphysical theory. Everything is reduced to power, including our philosophies. They're all relativized to our power struggles. And so that's why someone like Foucault, who actually just called himself a Nietzschean, a Nietzschean absent the metaphysics, you put power struggles to the fore. And then once you put power right to the fore, but it's not power in the service of truth or it's not power in the service of goodness or justice, then you have really an amoral understanding of social dynamics. So there's two things. First is a funny aside. I'm very glad that you give that analysis because it reminds me of my time in undergrad where I spent a semester at Washington, or American University in Washington, D.C., and I was doing kind of an internship program there. And one of the obligatory classes I had to take was a class on Russian history. And I never forget this because the professor was from Boston, so she had this very, very heavy accent. And the class was one of the most superficial or fake, or if I might be so bold, bullshitty classes I've ever been into in my life because she was obsessed with Foucault. And in her class on Russian history, she would prescribe readings that came from Foucault. And pretty much every class on several occasions she would mention the power structures of implying her analysis of how the world works. And it was so funny to me because I literally had a running joke, kind of a macabre one where I was essentially trying to see how much nonsense, fluff and irrational writing I could get away with in that class as I would submit articles weekly and see if I could still get an A. And it was to the point where I was intentionally making like absurdity, absolute, you know, abject open absurdities. But then I would incorporate Foucault into it and she aided up and I got an A in that class. That's a funny aside because that's exactly the worldview that she was emanating. But what is, go ahead. Yeah, obviously there are going to be degraded versions of postmodernism. You know, when you set aside the issue of truth and logic and structure and the idea of objective standards, then how do you tell the difference between what's good and what isn't. And so one of the issues that we're always struggling with is how do you tell the difference between bullshit and anything that's not bullshit. You stepped into that into that world. But let me do say though, you know, Foucault is a deep, deep guy and I think he's a very important thinker. And some of his things I do find myself right in sympathy, particularly when he's critical of certain other pretentious philosophical outlets. So I wouldn't want to say in any way shape or form that Foucault is a bullshitter. I think there are bullshitty things that he is doing a lot of times he's a little more fooling around the same thing with respect to to Rory. I think Rory was always a very serious guy, well versed in in all the major philosophical traditions. Yeah, so you might then say that these are serious right thinkers grappling with serious issues and reaching conclusions that leave us unable to distinguish between bullshit and non bullshit, but they're not in bullshit. Yes, this is an excellent transition into what I want to ask you. Talking about this just the actual epistemology of this worldview, what is screaming in my mind is what is it not a claim about reality to claim that we cannot know reality? Isn't that a claim? Isn't that making a truth claim itself? All right, so then you get into all the self referential contradictions. You know, if you try to state skepticism, right, so you want to say, you know, the truth is that there's no truth, right, or I know that we know nothing, right, or, you know, the absolute truth is that everything is relative. There is no, there is no, there are no meta narratives, right, but that's a meta narrative claim right itself. So this is certainly something that the postmodern struggle with because at the same time, you know, they are saying that, you know, language is fundamentally in a way non communicative in the way that we have traditionally thought of language right as as communicative. And then it seems like, you know, at that point you should take the, the, the Kratylus option, as I think about Kratylus being an ancient Greek skeptic, right, who realized, you know, that, you know, if words mean nothing, right, ultimately, then the only proper response is to say nothing. Right, so he just shut up for the rest. So the question then is what are you trying to do when you are using words and apparently, right, trying to communicate people and, and marshal what you might call evidence and arguments, right, to try to convince people rationally that they should adopt your, your non rational or anti reason, right, worldview. So here, I don't know, maybe we'll take a Rorty, right, you know, at one point he says that he made a decision that he's no longer going to think of himself as a philosopher as someone who's trying to work with the scientists or work with the the physicists. And he came out of, at least in his formal training in his early career, have a logical positivistic and then a broadly positivistic or analytic right approach to philosophy. And one of the hallmarks right of that entire philosophical tradition is to say that the philosophers should see the scientists as the major exponents of what truth seeking is all about. And as the name analysis suggests that what philosophers do is they are providing analytic guidance right to the scientists who are working on all of these problems. So the job of the philosophers is to analyze the various components that go into scientific method. Various data organizational right methods and proposition formation and the logical and mathematical tools that the scientists will use so we are, so to speak handmaidens right of the scientists and the scientists are broadly speaking looking for, for the truth. But then what word he realizes right as he goes on his philosophical journal or journey rather is that you reach skeptical dead ends as the as the analytic tradition did by the 1950s. Here, Coon in the early 60s and Paul fire Robin. Also in the 1960s, sounding the death knell that it's really just a bunch of paradigms that we make these leap of faith shifts from one paradigm to another and we have to talk about science not in terms of truth and progress but rather in terms of a more socially subjective paradigms that hold for a group of scientists for a given period of time, and we leap into some other one. So Rorty is all, you know, sophisticatedly involved in those discussions at that point and basically what he says is, you know, I realize that I right as a philosopher and no longer an ally of the poets that I need to see myself as an ally of the poets. So what we ask them is if that's the important shift right well what are poets doing right. And in a way you know we can talk about poets, questing for truth and so on, but our more common understanding is that poets just make stuff up. They're totally in a fictional universe and the idea is that we are creating linguistic structures that are expressive, but they're not expressive of any sort of objective reality instead they are expressive of subjective states. I hear that, but there's still that voice in my head that says well hang on, if he's saying I am no longer an ally of the philosophers I am now doing the work of poetry, is that not still inescapably a claim about what is in reality? Even if he were to say something like I am in my own reality, we are all in our own reality, that still does not satisfactorily get over that question are you not still making a claim about reality? There is no way to escape the paradoxes and so I agree with you right on that point. So if Vordy right at this point is saying well this is what poets really do, right, poets really are, they really are subjects and they have internal psychological states and in their language they are expressing these things and that's different from various others. So yeah all of those are to make realistic objective claims about a certain kind of human activity. So this is then where the irony then comes in, so what Vordy has to say is yeah I'm not here making a truth claim, instead all I'm doing is, and I have to water it down, right, is that I'm suggesting a certain way of thinking about what we are doing with language. So a better way to think of it might be to think in terms of what poets do, and that then is a subjective self expressive thing that, you know, rhetorically, when you turn to the reader or the consumer's perspective, right, might press certain value buttons in you and cause you to have a certain, right, subjective experience. So that's then the model of what's going on if we generalize it to all of language and all of discourse, that everybody is merely expressing the way poets do their own subjective value preferences wherever those come from, we'll talk about that later. And we're all, so to speak, rhetorically trying to influence each other the way good rhetoricians do, and that it doesn't help us in understanding this phenomenon to use the concepts of truth or reality. Now I would love to dive in specifically to unpack more of the philosophy that you've just presented because I find that really fascinating. Maybe I'll have to have you on sometime in the future because I don't think we're going to have time for this episode, but I do want to ask you something that I find really interesting and maybe you can help me with this because when you explain that philosophy about the subjectivity of everything and to me it is, you know, as you said the paradoxes are inescapable and I would add the paradoxes are inescapable, elementary and self-evident and however my perspective is to say a thinker who is serious about analyzing phenomena to arrive at such obviously patently inaccurate beliefs, self-contradictory beliefs, it's very hard for me to accept the idea that that is in reality a very subtle thinker that Rorty or Foucault in regards or Nietzsche in regards to epistemology that for me is kind of an unforgivable thing if your epistemology is such that you make such a base level confusion then it's very hard for me to accept that there's much else that's not going to be reflected in the other areas in which you've applied your rational analysis. Can you help me? Part of the response to be there is say if you reach a self-contradiction then your reaction like Steve Patterson then is to say wow this is a huge problem and I should be embarrassed by this. But the implicit in that is the idea that self-contradiction is a bad thing. And self-contradiction is a bad thing only if one is supposed to be logical. So what we then would need to do is again look at the history of epistemology here and again look at the continental tradition, the post-Contean continental tradition. If you start reading people like Hegel in the next generation and ask what's the status of logical contradiction in Hegel or the status of logical contradiction in Marx. Here you have two thinkers both of whom are rejecting any sort of classical logic coming out of the Aristotelian tradition in favor of what they would call a dialectical logic which builds into it the whole notion that contradiction and self-contradiction are metaphysically built into the universe. If you then look at the early and proto existentialist thinkers like Kierkegaard and then a little later Nietzsche in the subsequent generation after Kierkegaard. And again you find a very strong disdain for logic as essentially pointless and that carries on through thinkers like Heidegger. And all of these guys right Hegel, right Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger are extraordinarily formative in the thinking of the postmodern thinkers Foucault, Derrida and so on. So when they get to the point of saying oh we've reached a self-contradiction here that's not a problem because they've already bracketed logic in a fundamental way. And I don't disagree with that in terms of historical analysis but from what I would say is it might be true that these thinkers are historically influential. That they wrote a lot of words but for me it's as close, it is I suppose the ultimate litmus test that if it's the case that your understanding of self-contradiction is something which does not worry you. I can't escape the idea that that's a reflection on your own intellectual shallowness which sounds preposterous. Yeah I have to push back on you. I think what I would say is that what you have is logic working against itself because then when you read all of these guys, they are very logical. So if you just take Richard Rorty as an example here he starts off as a gung-ho right advocate of analytical philosophies methods and he is able to follow the development of very sophisticated arguments over the course of many generations. And that requires a high aptitude for logic and an embracing of logic. But what then happens to you if as a result of pursuing this intensely like logical investigation you reach skeptical anti-logic conclusions. What you've then got as a person obviously who's got some psychological torment right going on inside. And then maybe the next time we talk we can talk about some of the psychology here or how to evaluate people reactions to that self-contradiction when they reach it. Yes I would love to. I think that is just a fascinating topic. I really appreciate you. This has been an excellent introduction, an excellent overview. So thanks so much for talking about it. My pleasure Steve. Bye for now. Alright so that was my interview with Dr. Steven Hicks of Rockford University. I hope you guys enjoyed it. There's obviously a great deal more to say on this topic and I'll make sure to get Dr. Hicks on the show again so we can continue talking more about the psychology of logical contradictions. That's obviously something that if you've been following my work you know I'm very much interested in. I freely admit that I am biased towards logical coherence and I just can't get over the idea that if you're okay with self-contradiction you're probably not a genuine intellectual. But hopefully he can help me overcome that bias in the future. So that's all for me today. I'll see you guys next week.