Month: July 2022

Faulty postmodern pillars

by kurto

Two of postmodernism’s original contributions, the unreliability of Cartesian science and the instability of language, are premised on sophomoric understandings. So writes John Ellis in ‘What Does Postmodernism Really Amount To?’.

Postmodernism’s components include skepticism, cultural relativism, the shortcomings of rationality, and neo-Marxism, all of which are unoriginal. Its attack on science and language are new.

…General skepticism about scientific knowledge [is postulated], for example, by the postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard, who advocated incredulity toward all such ‘meta narratives’. [In the 1860s Charles Sanders] Peirce put paid to that attitude in a devastating riposte. He argued that generalized doubt was impossible, because when we doubt something our doubt is grounded in specific knowledge. If you doubt a theory, it will be because you know something that causes your doubt. If you are skeptical of Darwinism and people ask you why, they’ll expect a specific reason for your doubt, and they won’t be satisfied with a theoretical rejection of all scientific narratives. Indiscriminate doubt is nothing but empty posturing.

Regarding the instability of meaning in language, French critic Jacques Derrida misread of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure said the assignment of words to meaning was ‘arbitrary’ but that the meaning made sense in its context (e.g., 20C or 70F are both accurate measurements).

Because he misunderstood what Saussure meant by this second sense of ‘arbitrary’ Derrida jumped to the conclusion that meaning becomes unreliable and indefinite. This mistake was amplified by Derrida’s stylistic habit of dramatic verbal exaggeration. And so, for him, the absence of a reference that exists independent of language (what he called the ‘transcendental signified’) extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely. Meaning becomes indefinite, limitless, indeterminate. The play of signifiers is endless. But of course Saussure’s point was exactly the opposite — that the meaning of a term is created by its place within a system of terms and is specified within that system.

Appraising Isaiah Berlin

by kurto

Berlin deserves a place among the second rank of philosophic greats for his defense of liberalism against the tyranny of communism as well as his definition of ‘negative liberty’.

We should surely forgive him his posture in the face of the Left establishment: what appears now as pusillanimity was probably, at the time, the only effective anti-Communist tactic, even if it did serve to entrench the left-liberal attitudes which have since dominated British intellectual life. His defense of negative liberty (liberty as personal sovereignty) is of enduring value, as is his critique of the ‘positive’ alternative — the idea of liberty as ’empowerment’ — which comes to the fore whenever egalitarians seek to ‘liberate’ us from our traditional freedoms.

Many praise Berlin, too, for his defense of ‘pluralism’, attributing to him the view that human beings have different and incommensurable values, for which no ultimate or shared foundation can be provided. This idea does indeed play a large part in Berlin’s later and more long-winded writings…

Roger Scruton, ‘Back to Berlin‘,

    New Criterion

, September 2009

Crisis sharpening statesmanship

by kurto

‘Perhaps statesmanship of the noblest and truest kind has always been associated with crises of one sort or another’, Daniel Mahoney writes in ‘Ballast on the Ship of State: Statesmanship as Human Excellence‘.

In this framework, DeGaulle finds his place among Cicero, Burke, Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill. Bonaparte, to the contrary, exemplifies ‘greatness without moderation’.

Also:

One cannot promote justice on the ‘willful’ premises of Machiavellian (and Nietzschean) modernity. If one begins with nihilistic premises, if one reduces every argument to a pretense for domination and exploitation, one necessarily ends with the self-enslavement of man. A barely concealed nihilism cannot provide a foundation for common humanity, the civic common good, or mutual respect and accountability. In the end, it can only negate our civilized inheritance despite the perfectionist or utopian veneer that invariably accompanies it.