#stephen hicks

[obsessedbyneon]

Riva Rose 🥰

[shadowfromthestarlight]

Philosopher explains history of and difference between Critical Theory and Postmodernism. 

[certifiedhypocrite]

Great video, first 5 minutes opens by showing Stephen Hicks fucking up his sources when trying to explain what Postmodernism is, which convinced me to watch the rest.

[mountain-west-individualist]

[obsessedbyneon]

Riva Rose

[shadowfromthestarlight]

[linear9]

Hicks wrote an entire book on Postmodernism, yet his grasp of it seems rudimentary.

[amatorfilozofus]

Stephen Hicks on Postmodernism and Nietzsche

There is a video on YouTube which I have just watched now where Stephen Hicks “analysis” the postmodernists using Nietzsche’s concept of “ressentiment” which basically means “resentment”. In this post I am going to reconstruct his main argument and will argue that Nietzsche was already fundamentally mistaken in his analysis and Hicks is doing even worse by reapplying it.

First what we need to do is to define postmodernism. Hicks does not do this in this clip, but I am going to give him the benefit of doubt that this clip is from a longer lecture and he defines postmodernism at some point. Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define, since this word is used for such a diverse set of people that it is hard to find a common thread running between all of them. I am going to use the most common definition, which is that postmodernism is scepticism about metanarratives. A metanarrative is a kind of framework which is meant to explain the course of history. For example a metanarrative would be that social progress represents the will of god, or that Marxist class struggle is the key to understanding history. As we can see already here there is a tension between postmodernism and Marxism, to which I am going to refer back later.

Next we need to present Nietzsche’s original idea. As Hicks correctly says Nietzsche differentiates between master and slave morality. Master morality is the morality of the “strong” the “life affirming”. Slave morality is the morality of the “weak” the “cowardly”. The masters resent the slaves and the slave resents the masters. But the slaves also resent themselves because actually they are envious of the masters. This makes them bitter and since they cannot confront the masters due to them being weak they try to hurt them by more insidious ways, such as telling lies. Now Hicks does not give us the full picture here. In Nietzsche’s view the main representative of slave morality is Christianity itself.  Hicks lists patience, obedience, humility, and being on the side of the weak as values for the slave morality which are clearly Christian values, while he lists: aggressiveness, pride, independence, physically or materially success as the values of master morality. Of course what is a value or good for one is evil for the other. If Hicks told his audience this he would have alienated a large part of it. Even worse Nietzsche was an antidemocratic thinker, and thought democracy was slave morality as well, he says in Beyond Good and Evil that “the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement”, this would have alienated another large part.

At this point I would just like to point out the obvious: it is silly to think that those who are for example materially successful (and hence independent) are like that because they are somehow by nature “stronger”. If we consider a cast society where you are either born rich and inherit wealth or you are born poor without any chance of owning wealth then you would be rightly angry because you were never given a chance. So Nietzsche is completely wrong, the “weak” were “weak” for social reasons not because they were inherently weak and the “strong” were also “strong” for social reasons. And of course this has nothing really to do with who embraces the Christian faith and who does not. Christian religion is not a conspiracy against the strong by the weak. Nietzsche is doing real scholarly work in setting up his “theory”, he is just daydreaming. It is also funny to note that Nietzsche accuses Christians for being resentful while he himself is being clearly resentful towards Christians.

Now let’s see Hicks argument.

Hicks assumes that postmodernists are just socialists in disguise. This is already a very weak generalisation. Why would socialists/Marxists need to hide behind postmodernism? Terry Eagleton and Richard D. Wolff are Marxists and they don’t seem to need to disguise themselves. Eagleton is actually critical of postmodernism which is quite understandable given his Marxist stance and the definition of postmodernism we have given above. Fredric Jameson is associated with postmodernism yet he too does not shy away from calling himself a Marxist. The two examples Hick himself gives are Stanley Fish and Andrea Dworkin.

Stanley Fish has supposedly called all opponents of affirmative action “bigots” and lumped these people with the Ku Klux Klan. I couldn’t find the exact text for this but it seems this is from Fish’s book “There's No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too”.

Andrea Dworkin supposedly said “all heterosexual men are rapists”. For this I have found a Guardian article, which I am going to quote now:

“The attacks on Dworkin were not only personal; they also applied to her work. John Berger once called Dworkin "the most misrepresented writer in the western world". She has always been seen as the woman who said that all men are rapists, and that all sex is rape. In fact, she said neither of these things. Here's what she told me in 1997: "If you believe that what people call normal sex is an act of dominance, where a man desires a woman so much that he will use force against her to express his desire, if you believe that's romantic, that's the truth about sexual desire, then if someone denounces force in sex it sounds like they're denouncing sex. If conquest is your mode of understanding sexuality, and the man is supposed to be a predator, and then feminists come along and say, no, sorry, that's using force, that's rape - a lot of male writers have drawn the conclusion that I'm saying all sex is rape." In other words, it's not that all sex involves force, but that all sex which does involve force is rape.”

So it seems if this article is right then clearly Hicks is misrepresenting Dworkin which is bad enough but there is another question: what does she have to do with postmodernism? Yes, Stanley Fish is considered a postmodern literary critic, but Andrea Dworkin is a feminist author, and unless feminism is inherently postmodern she couldn’t really be called a postmodern thinker.

So already Hicks is on shaky ground assuming that postmodernism is just a disguise for socialists. But let’s move on.

What Hicks does next is basically just recasting postmodernists in the role of slaves and capitalists in the role of masters. The idea is that postmodernists are just socialists who were defeated and so they are now the representatives of slave morality. Again if the conservative audience were informed about Nietzsche’s original target, it would be really funny to see how they would have reacted when Hicks basically assigns traditional Christian values to postmodernism.

So for him the capitalists are the strong and the socialists are the weak. But since they are weak they cannot confront the capitalists, all they can use are words. According to Hicks deconstruction is the method of the defeated socialists which they use for this purpose. Deconstruction originates from the work of Jacques Derrida, and it became popular in literary criticism, it is clearly not a weapon to destroy the achievements of western culture. Hicks tells us about a dismissive deconstructive reading of Shakespeare but does not tell us about the author, so I couldn’t check his example. But even if he is right about that specific piece, are we seriously supposed to think that all literary critics who employ deconstruction in their readings of texts are secret socialists who in face hate literature and because literary critics just to destroy it?

Hicks tells us about two “examples” from the visual arts to illustrate this malicious intention. His examples are two works from Marcel Duchamp: Fountain so called readymade sculpture, which is actually a porcelain urinal and L.H.O.O.Q. which is a parody of the Mona Lisa. Now I find this part the most embarrassing. Hicks is not willing to engage with Duchamp’s work. He claims that Duchamp is just envious of past masters and realizing that since he himself is incapable to creating such works decides to destroy art for the sheer thrill of destruction. Marcel Duchamp is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. This simplistic idea that Duchamp is just filled with rage and resentment because of his own lack of talent is such an simplistic understanding of his work that it is simply not worth discussing. I would just like to remind Hicks that earlier he criticized postmodernism for ad hominem so it is quite surprising that now he himself makes one against Duchamp. I would also like to assure Stephen Hicks that Duchamp did not destroy anything; the Mona Lisa is still the world’s most recognized painting and is still displayed in the Louvre. It is actually hard to see the relevance of these examples: I guess the examples were only meant to illustrate how the slaves can hurt the masters but how is Marcel Duchamp a representative of slave morality here? The Fountain is from 1913 and L.H.O.O.Q, is from 1919 long before the postmodern philosophy. Hicks told us that deconstruction is weapon of the postmodern but Derrida, the inventor of this “weapon” was not even born yet.

Finally it seems postmodernist didn’t even need deconstruction since all they do is spread lies.  Hicks says that the worst way to hurt a family man is to accuse him being child molesters or to hurt a women is to say that she is a gold-diggers. Now again I must point out the obvious that spreading such lies has nothing to do with being a leftist or a postmodernist. This is the oldest trick in the book and is done constantly on all political sides. Hicks draws an analogy with spreading such lies about people to lying about western civilisation itself. So accusations of racism and intolerance are somehow only lies about western civilization. I think there are many episodes in history where the west could not live up to its own expectation. Slavery and segregation in the United States or colonisation by Europeans are clear examples and only a delusional person could dismiss criticism for these terrible acts. The west must face up to the horrible things it caused.

There is an important point here, which is only obscured by Hicks, so let me turn now to a much more capable philosopher: Richard Rorty. Rorty in his book “Achieving our Country” discusses similar issues as Hicks does here, but his presentation is much more sympathetic and insightful. Rorty says that national pride for a country is like self-esteem for person, without it there is not much hope for a change for the better. He acknowledges that the United States did some horrible things, and he says that the new left deserve praise for calling attention to racism, misogyny, and the status of sexual minorities. However, Rorty thniks the truly important question is if we believe that things can be changed for the better within the current political system or not. His complaint is that many on the new left seem to think that the US has passed redemption and they turn away from everyday political matters to academic theorizing. Rorty regrets this outcome and proposes that we take inspiration from the progressive era. I think Rorty’s advice here is just what we need in our time, and what we really don’t need is the kind of moral panic Stephen Hicks represents here.