That's awesome!
Flawlessly articulatedIt's such a fucking con job. But boy oh boy is it something to behold if you get a postmodernist/poststructuralist to go on and on about how true/false, right/wrong, good/bad, etc. are "undecidable" and then say something to them that makes their skin crawl (like "Barthes is bad" or "Marx was wrong") and that they immediately lash out at you for saying because it's so obviously - so decidably - false/wrong/bad.
If I felt that someone I was talking to was genuinely ignorant but also genuinely curious, then I'd take the time to explain why that bullshit is bullshit, but in my dealings with "true believers," I'd sometimes treat them the way that Peter treated his company suck-up and just twist them up in contradictions until their heads exploded
Quick story. So I've been doing the PhD thing in my department for three years now. On two separate occasions, in two completely different seminars, I've brought up the same example to challenge people (mainly my professor, who I like and respect and get along with very well but who is regrettably a hardcore poststructuralist and who loves Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) and have been met with silence both times. The first seminar was devoted to Volume 1 of Foucault's The History of Sexuality and the second one was just a general seminar. In both instances, I was trying to demonstrate the dangerous consequences of doing away with the concept of objectivity in favor of ideas of "social constructs" and all that.
The example that I brought up was Foucault's position on pedophilia. He addresses pedophilia in The History of Sexuality and gives it the standard twist with the poor and oppressed pedophile who just wants to be free to express his honest-to-goodness sexuality. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. It's pages 31-32:
"One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called 'curdled milk.' So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration [...] This was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating."
This story never ceases to turn my stomach. You can see the equivocation, going from ignorant children playing a "game" to "alert children" who know exactly what's going on. But, putting that shit aside and focusing on the philosophical issue: If there is no such thing as objectivity, then you can't say that pedophilia is objectively wrong and that people shouldn't be free to engage in sex with children.
First off, pedophilia is just a social construct, and the concepts of "right" and "wrong" don't apply to mere constructs. But even if I were to be granted use of the concepts of right and wrong, if objectivity is out the window, then my thinking pedophilia is wrong is just an arbitrary, subjective opinion no better or worse than Foucault's arbitrary, subjective opinion that it's right. Who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that any sexual desire - or, really, who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that anything - is wrong? Since it's all just a power game, my position that pedophilia is wrong is really just my desire to arbitrarily oppress the righteous pedophiles (ignore the fact that, in the absence of concepts of right and wrong, Foucault still thinks he's right), and if I were a halfway decent person, then I'd make the "institution of knowledge and power" that is "solemnly" trying to stop, just for the sake of "pettiness," the "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" of kids jerking off hobos stop oppressing those poor upstanding citizens and let them be free.
My professor has two small children, so I'd like to think that he finds Foucault's pedophilia shit suitably horrifying - though I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't even aware that Foucault, along with a number of other members of the French intellectual "elite" of the era like Sartre and Althusser, signed a petition in 1977 to get rid of consent and statutory rape laws - but nobody knows how to respond to simple shit like this. It's easy to talk the postmodernist/poststructuralist talk, but when confronted with the kind of world they'd actually be living in/are helping to bring into existence, there's always silence as the gears of denial start to go into overdrive the second it comes time for them to walk the walk.
When people like Peterson talk about how this shit isn't just "academic" in the sense of being trivial and having no bearing outside of pretentious classrooms, this is what he's talking about. Ideas can have practical effects and consequences that FAR exceed what the ideologically possessed have ever fathomed/are capable of fathoming, and it's so often the case that, if anybody was even half paying attention to what their ideological leaders were saying - and, even more importantly, why they were saying it - then they'd run for the fucking hills.
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I've already posted this in conversation with you, but I've got to keep spamming the good stuff
On another note, I'm currently reading a novel called John Woman and you'd probably get a kick out of it: The main character is a history professor and he's pretty much Hayden White
Looking at historical accounts is my wife's area of specialty, particularly the construction of historical narratives in the Visual Arts. She started off investigating the notions of "fathers of art" and how women are omitted from the discussion for her PhD. She later expanded on some of these ideas and is know for her theory of little art/big art is which things like folk art and craft are discarded from grand narratives in modernist traditions but embraced by post modern artists as a means of revealing "little truths" that are often as poignant as the establish histories , or big truths, of a culture. One example of this is the personal "little story" of her grandmother hiding under a bridge during ww2 in poland from nazi soldiers that was published in a book someone did on my wife. Her grandmother had hiccups and whispered to her father to scare her to get rid of the hiccups so she wouldn't give away their location to the nazis. Her grandfather whispered back, "scare you, what could be more terrifying than hiding from nazis?" This story has been passed down through her family. My wife argues that this "little story" speaks, through humor, of the horrors of the second WW in the way grand narratives overlook. She argues that this personal story speaks as much about the experience of that trauma than the official account of this battle and that. Also, the use of humor is a survival coping mechanism in which they can talk about the war in ways that they normally avoid, such as talking about her grandmothers brother who was killed in the work camps.
I've already posted this in conversation with you, but I've got to keep spamming the good stuff
On another note, I'm currently reading a novel called John Woman and you'd probably get a kick out of it: The main character is a history professor and he's pretty much Hayden White
More spam and still more spam. I'd apologize for the relentless spamming, but I just can't abide nonsense. That postmodernists aren't viewed as the humanities equivalent of flat earthers in science is a major failing of the humanities, but make no mistake: Their bad reputation has been earned and then some.
Also, on Foucault in particular, you know that that dude was a creepy pedo wackadoodle, right?
Out of curiosity, what do you have in mind when invoking the notion of "'pure' philosophy"? Because it seems like a straw man. If what it's meant to convey is something on the "theory" side of the "theory/practice" dichotomy - a false dichotomy, but we'll leave that to the side for the moment - then I'd still be curious to know which philosophers and/or which philosophical schools you think qualify, because, even on the basis of this conception of philosophical "purity," Confucius, Aristotle, Descartes...it doesn't appear that any of them would qualify.
(Incidentally, this is yet another one of the many ironies of postmodernism: Despite ostensibly being against "grand narratives," they're the best at concocting the grandest narratives ever conceived, from Lyotard's shtick on science to Derrida's shtick on Western metaphysics, for the purpose of showing how super enlightened and transgressive they are
I also read philosophy out of personal interest as well, obviously not the same stuff lol.
That's me. And I'm a fan of Ayn Rand's systematic philosophy of Objectivism
Oh, she has one of the worst reputations in academia. And the responses that academics have to the very mention of her name...well, let's just say that my joke Nosferatu gif does have one real-life application
In my book, though, that's just one more indication of how pathetically partisan, doctrinaire, and cultish academia is.
It isn't. It's just that, because she's Ayn Rand, everything that she ever said must be deemed wrong and evil. She's actually devastatingly accurate and eerily prescient when critiquing the history of philosophy and (then and still) dominant philosophical trends.
As for Objectivism and Kant: For some context and info, here's Chris Matthew Sciabarra (the founding editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies) from his book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical:
"Rand's anti-Kantianism was an outgrowth of her exposure to Russian thought [...] Most Russian philosophers rejected Kant because they believed that he had detached the mind from reality. As I suggest, such thinkers as Solovyov, Chicherin, and Lossky were aiming for an integration of the traditional dichotomies perpetuated by Kant's metaphysics. Chicherin, for instance, argued that in Kant's system, pure concepts of reason are empty, and experience is blind. Kant's view makes 'metaphysics without experience . . . empty, and experience without metaphysics blind: in the first case we have the form without content, and in the second case, the content without understanding' [quoted by Lossky in his History of Russian Philosophy].
Interestingly, Rand's own view of the rationalist-empiricist distinction, and of Kant's critical philosophy, is deeply reminiscent of Chicherin's parody. For Rand, rationalists had embraced concepts divorced from reality, whereas empiricists had 'clung to reality, by abandoning their mind' (New Intellectual, 30). Kant's attempt to transcend this dichotomy failed miserably because his philosophy formalized the conflict. Rand writes: 'His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and not others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes---deaf, because he has ears---deluded, because he has a mind---and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them' (39).
Rand's teacher, Lossky, was the chief Russian translator of Kant's works. He too had criticized Kant's contention that true being (things-in-themselves) transcends consciousness and remains forever unknowable. Lossky sought to defend the realist proposition that people could know true reality through an epistemological coordination of subject and object. In this process, the real existents and objects of the world are subjected to a cognitive activity that is metaphysically passive and noncreative. Lossky rejected Kant's belief that the mind imposes structures on reality. Such Kantian subjectivism subordinates reality to knowledge, or existence to consciousness. It resolves phenomena in subjective processes that are detached from the real world and distortive of objective reality [from Lossky's book, The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge].
Furthermore, Lossky criticized Kant for invalidating metaphysics as a science. Since Kant held that the mind perceives things not as they are but 'as they seem to me,' he institutionalized a war not only on metaphysics, but on the very ability of the mind to grasp the nature of reality. Though there is no evidence that Rand studied Kant formally while at the university, it is conceivable that her earliest exposure to Kant's ideas occurred in her encounters with the celebrated Lossky. Her distinguished teacher was among the foremost Russian scholars of German philosophy [and] Lossky's rejection of Kantianism was essential to his ideal-realist project."
I'd also recommend Leonard Peikoff's cogent critique of the analytic-synthetic/necessary-contingent dichotomy as a good example of the grounds of Objectivism's rejection of Kantian philosophy. You can also check out Stephen R.C. Hicks' eminently readable Explaining Postmodernism for a lucid take on Kant in a similar vein.
Well the point is that objectivity is the watchword, so, just as Positivism is all about positive knowledge, hence its name, Rand was all about objectivity, hence the name Objectivism.
She knows it. She just thinks it's hooey. From her 1964 book The Virtue of Selfishness:
"In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value, which, for any given living entity, is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between 'is' and 'ought.'"
So you haven't read her, you have no intention of ever reading her, and you're totally cool with taking on faith the claims of others that everything that she ever said was wrong?
Mind you, I'm not here to "convert" you or to persuade you to drop what you're doing and start reading Atlas Shrugged. Do what you want. I'm just pointing out shit that seems problematic.
