2017 Video Between Jordan Peterson and Stepen Hicks

I took extensive notes this week on a 4-year-old video, and interview of Stephen Hicks by Jordan Peterson. The one hour and 27-minute interview occurred on August 17, 2017, and Peterson entitled it: Postmodernism: History And Analysis. Hicks wrote a book in 1999-2000 (It is "Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.") that warned Americans and the world about the rise and spread of postmodernism throughout Academia and not across our whole society. Stephen: I went to graduate school and got my doctorate in philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic and philosophy of science, so I was well-grounded in the very philosophies from which postmodernism originated. He started to hear about postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault, and by the end of the 1990s this postmodernism was gaining ground. They made a dramatic claim that the end of modernism had occurred as it reached its nadir. We need to recognize that modernism has ended, and postmodernism will replace it. My response: Stephen is an especially pronounced modernist as a Randian objectivist, so he would detect readily when its influence was waning, and under attack. Jordan: Perhaps you could define modernism and postmodernism for the listeners. Stephen: Modernism grew out of medievalism or pre-modernism; we were then naturalistic, not supernaturalist, post-medievally. We studied and believed in cause and effect, not magic or miracles, and the natural world was no longer regarded as derivative from a higher world. Under modernism, experience is taken seriously, studied logically and rationally by application of the scientific method. We can know the world and ourselves, so both are knowable. Pre-modern world accepted the authority of the church and scripture. Non-rational epistemologies swept away. Shared traditions were neither skeptical, nor based on faith and mysticism, but the natural world was studied critically. My response: Stephen has the transition well-described, but I wonder if medieval pietism among the masses was not deeper, wider and slower to adjust than he describes it. Still, with the Renaissance and the rise of classical humanism in Italy, the modern world slowly begins to emerge. Stephen: The individual begins to read and write and study the Bible in his native tongue, so he begins to argue, think and think independently, so he is inadvertently elevated--he can think and can think for himself. My response: this change is remarkable and critically vital, the rise of the sovereign individual thinking for himself. Stephen: With Modernism arriving, new wealth, science, knowledge, liberty and technologies vastly increased and spread in influence. Postmodernists object to metaphysical naturalism and the elevation of critical empiricism belief via science as humans came to understand and have knowledge about powerful general principles. Both attacks by postmodernists severely doubt modernist epistemology where it is stated that our senses provide us with sense data put into language as abstractions, so we then form propositions about the world, collated and generalized into hypothetical networks called theories about reality. My response: Stephen seems accurate here to me, but I would make note of his metaphysical naturalism, that there is no supernatural world, but that is how a Randian does metaphysics, not me. Stephen: Stephen describes perception as the modernist epistemology, the first point of contact with the natural world, and it provides us with sense data, and under the epistemology of naive realism, perception gives us valid information or knowledge of the world by the application of the scientific method. Still, the rise of skepticism occurs as questions of illusions, varying sense interpretation of the world by different perceivers, and the questions about hallucinations arise. Jordan: Kant will object that sense data presupposition, that sense data enters your cognitive apparatus of understanding without passing through apriori cognitive structures, is impossible. Postmodernists here attack modernists: your complex perceptual structures gained via biological evolution. It is not pure information from the external world but is filtered or subject to interpretation as sense data passes through that apriori structure. Are we able to get directly to objective reality as perceivers? No. My response: I agree with Jordan that something like apriori structures do filter incoming sense data, but some of it might be direct information right from objects in the external world, and we are able to naively perceive them as pure knowledge. Still, indirect realism seems to be our natural epistemology. Stephen: Both Kant and the postmodernists use two anti-modernist epistemological strategies, skepticism about both empirical and rational modernist claims to have knowledge of the external world. Probabilistic, faulty perception, as our intellectual apparatus, cannot answer skeptical attacks. Empiricists cannot answer skeptical objections. Rationalists recommend that we not seek for knowledge by starting with empirical data but use our innate apriori mental structures, provided by God or that arise naturally. These structures filter incoming empirical data, run through these in-built cognitive structures. But how do I know that those in-built structures match the world out there? You are not able to escape this subjective process and get outside your head to see the world out there. You are stuck in subjective processing. Rationalism not working to find knowledge. Kant accepts that the skeptics are right: we cannot find external, objective reality: we are stuck in some kind of subjectivism. Both rationalism and empiricism failed. My response: Kant denies that we can gain knowledge of noumena, the external world, or objects in that external world, and we fail at trying empirically and rationally. My response: Kant denies that reason or empirically derived inductive reasoning can give us knowledge of the world of noumena. Rand accused Kant of being an irrationalist that killed her beloved Modern Age of Reason with his skepticism, and she may be correct that he is a brilliant Irrationalist. Below, Jordan offers pragmatism, a more fallibilist, moderate attempt to gain probable knowledge about the external world, to refute the skeptics and postmodernists. Jordan: American pragmatism is what Jordan offers and Hicks agrees that Rorty and the postmodernists are neo-pragmatists. Jordan continues: To defend postmodernism, we have instantiated within us an apriori perceptual structure, biologically developed over millions of years and it has emerged in tandem with continual correction of its presuppositions by the selection process in evolution. But it is still subject to error because we have a very limited view as specific individuals. And we make moral errors that cloud our limited viewpoint and judgment. To expand our purview and correct these errors we do two things: 1. We test our hypotheses against the world. We act them out, and if they are sufficiently correct, we get what we want. It is not absolute proof but is sufficient proof. 2. Piaget teaches us that we further constrain our presuppositions about reality with the necessity of constructing theories acceptable to people around us. These theories are integratable within the existing social contract and they must be functionally appropriate in the external world. These two constraints answer objections to rational and knowledge limits claimed about the scientific method by postmodernists. My response: Jordan is an epistemological moderate, a fallibilist scientist, accepting that probable knowledge is the only truth that will carry weight against current postmodernists and skeptics. He is likely correct for there is much scientific evidence to support that we have actual probably certain knowledge about the world. Stephen: I have a 5-point response, a postmodernist criticism of Jordan's assertions that undercut Jordan's account of evolutionary epistemology about in-built apriori structures as they allegedly worked through out human history, to serve as a reliable cognitive role in accurately representing how the world works. But that stance just begs the question: evolutionary epistemology will not defeat skeptical criticisms. That account is defeated because its adherents accept without merit certain presuppositions/premises that are taken for granted: 1. There is an external world. 2. That we are biological creatures. 3. That we have in-built cognitive structures. 4. That those structures are evolutionary, responsive and condtioned by changing forces. These assumptions are assumed to be true so we can conclude the intellect produces knowledge about the objective world from our cognitive processes, and they are reliable. But skeptics deny these premises. The idea is that we have constraints on our own theories when tested out there against competing theories held by our neighbors, so all can decide what works and what is a valid result. If my theory works, then it is reliable and true epistemologically. My response: I like Jordan's evolutionary epistemology, and he may beg the question, but his presuppositions seem to be how the world functions. I cannot prove it for sure or know it for sure, but the knowledge so generated seems probably true. Both Jordan and I are epistemological moderates or fallibilists, but Stephen, the Randian, likely is an epistemological dogmatist. Jordan: He believes in an independent, objective world as a metaphysical presupposition--the world exists. Is the objective world, the world in which other truths are nested--that is the claim of Sam Harris and the atheists. Stephen jumps in and says let us not get sidetracked discussing Sam Harris's metaphysics. My response: Sam Harris is a metaphysical naturalist like Stephen Hicks is so both would accept that the world exists, and that all lesser, subjective truths would be embedded and be derivative from objective truth, that is real and knowable through human reasoning and human experience and by application of the scientific method. Jordan: Method of proof: my theory is correct enough if I got what I want but that is not the same as my theory is true because it is in accordance with the objective world. Both cannot happen at the same time. My response: one's theory of action in the world need not be true if one gets what one wants, for one might have accidentally stumble into success or by accident. I believe what Jordan is driving at is if a theory of action works and is repetitively successful, it is more inclined to be correspondent to what is going on out there in the world. Jordan: Human knowledge is biological; its functionality is sufficiently accurate, if it is corroborated by success, and that is the best that you can hope for considering your fundamental ignorance, if when implemented, the results are reliable if these results are consistent with your continued existence, able to survive, even thrive, perhaps perpetuate the species. Jordan is a Darwinian pragmatist, and he is like American pragmatists touting our ignorance and inability to be certain of the nature of reality around us. My response: I agree with this fallibilist stance. Stephen: William James and John Dewey, 100 years after Kant and after Hegelianism, objected that we are intellectualizing too much about cognition. We are not just disembodied minds contemplating abstract ideas in another world. We need to understand the mind as a natural process, not come up with beautiful museum pieces to admire. The purpose of knowledge is functional to guide action. Like Bacon earlier, they thought knowledge is not an end but is for power-wielding and is judged by its fruits. The test of truth is not purely intellectual, matching the standards and focus of math and logic. The test of truth is practical and pragmatic. Knowledge is functional to act upon to get results, for what I want and what we want; we operate despite our ignorance. 1. Knowledge is functional, pragmatic, and to be put to the test. 2. Knowledge is put to the test. My response: In a world where skeptical objections hold sway, the pragmatic assertions of probable truth as about all that we can glean, and that it must be continually tested and verified is appealing and useful. I would not like to dismiss pure speculation, the impractical speculation over abstract ideas. As a an epistemological moderate, I claim that all queries may bear fruit, so I am reluctant to bracket off armchair speculating about idealistic fancies. Jordan: Thomas Kuhn with his book about scientific revolutions declares that these are a sequence of discontinuous revolutions, each epoch has its unique presuppositions, that cannot be compared to epochs at other times; we cannot mediate between them. Kuhn argued that there was no necessary progress from one epoch to the next, but under pragmatism your conceptions of the world are more tool-like than a claim about objective truth, though these conceptions may be objectively true. Pragmatism posits a hierarchy of truths headed towards objective truth or absolute truth, and yet the conceiver and experimenter can admit one's absolute ignorance, not beating the drum too hard about the eternal accuracy of your objective presuppositions. My response: If our conceptions that we live by are provisional and we keep an open mind about their being certainly true, we can grow knowledge, live, prosper and gain ground, despite all the doubters doubting the Western canon. This is Jordan's solution--positing biological pragmatism as probable truth--and I buy it. Jordan's fallibilism will allow us to keep our Western ethos and continue to progress in accordance with its mores. Stephen: Postmodernist objection to pragmatism's hypothesis that our cognitive results succeed in terms of their workability or utility. How do we judge that something works? What is a want? Why should we accept wants, desires, and where do they come from? Why should we accept these goals as the bottom line? My response: there is likely no perfect, unassailable apriori or empirical theory of truth that cannot be found without flaws, contradictions, counterexamples, etc. We must go with pragmatism for people must have meaning in their lives, something to do and something to believe in. My solution is not perfect, but no solution as proposed by skeptics, postmodernists and nihilistic naysayers will destroy our civilization. Jordan: We start to question the framework with which we construct the answer. Stephen: Yes, and we are now leaving epistemology and entering the realm of normative issues about our goals and means of acting in the world. Why do your mere wants deserve high status and where do wants come from? These anti-pragmatist questions are denying that science provides us with general or universal truths. Jordan: Once wants are a mere social construct, regarded as a truth, all we have left are subjective, competing truths. Unfair power relations grow out of power which are the only truths available, and these truths or wants are subjective desires only. Postmodernists are anti-objective truth, and anti-grand narrative but the ontological substrata is raw power, then it is introduced as neo-Marxist claims about unfair power struggles as the one whole truth, a contradiction. (Ed adds: postmodernists are against grand narratives, and yet as fanatical Marxist, raw power struggle is their ideological grand narrative.) These postmodernist critics of Western thinking--theirs is a social critique, steeped in political revolutionizing and class-based theory, all dressed up as scientific and philosophical, when it is but an updated push for class struggle, tribe against tribe. My response: Neo-Marxists utilize postmodernist skepticism to undermine even what objective truth was available for Westerners to hold onto and live by, the possibility of probable truths. Once the Leftists eliminate citizen belief in probable confidence in truth about Western ideals, the people are adrift without meaning or values, ripe for bringing in Marxist ideology to convert by force the masses to these cruel, false, unworkable, new grand narrative, never abandoned only hidden during the time of defeating residual Western values. Stephen: 1. Pragmatists like James favored individual pragmatism but we want not pragmatism focus to be too atomistic, there needs to be a collectivizing corrective on individual emphasis here. 2. Dewey provides this corrective: social groups have competing wants so seek uber-group that has the superior, best goals to chase after, but these could lead to cultural imperialism. Jordan: the postmodernists have now arrived fully with their political revolution against the West. Stephen: After classical pragmatism, this 2nd generation pragmatism emerges as postmodernism. We relativize to various types of relativism. Each group sticks to itself--all groups are equal in terms of formulation of the truth. And yet postmodernists contradict themselves with their universal moral claim, their superior moral claim, of Marxism. This paradox, this ethical objective claim of power for the have-nots in the name of justice and mora superiority, is an unvarnished meta-narrative. Both Marx and Nietzsche avow that there is no objective truth, only relative truth. All that exists are conflicting groups with conflicting values. There is constant war and struggle, no peace, no reconciliation, only endless class warfare. Some groups have more power. Marx favors the oppressed with less power, and Nietzsche favors the oppressors with more power. Those that are stronger and fitter and healthier will use weaker, lessers for their own ends to evolve towards some evolutionary goal. All live in a world without objective truth, without objective morality. These 20th century false alternatives: Marxist or Nietzschean. My response: Both Hicks and Peterson have done humankind a great service in calling out how dangerous is this postmodernist attack on Western values and democracy, and how they seem benign and relativistic but totalitarian ideology and totalistic power-grabs are their only aim. This most wicked attack on all that is dear and good in the West must be thwarted at all costs. Jordan: Their apriori position s that power determines things because there are only competing groups and their competing truths. Jordan contrasts this cynical, corrupt power grabbing with socially beneficial power of legitimate authority and competence. The nihilists want to use force to get their wants met. Theirs is a hierarchy of interpretation based on tyranny and corruption. The West is based on hierarchies of interpretation based on merit, competence and authority and value from mutual consent. Jordan accuses the postmodernists of willful blindness--society is not always set up for oppressors--at least not in Western democracies, not set up this way. In the West the social contract prevails, and yet it is subordinate to the sovereign individual. The West is not set up to serve the oppressor or any collective. Yes, we are all limited by the social contract, but that is subordinate to the sovereignty of individuals. Logocentrism was criticized by Derrida, but Piaget emphasized intrinsic constraints on the social contract to address the insufficiency of wants to justify your claim to truth. Piaget offered the concept of the equilibrated state, that you put your wants and needs over time out there in society--as do all others--and it sort of works itself out cooperatively as a playable game. My response: Jordan likes Piaget as an evolutionary psychologist, and I do not quite understand it, but these psychologists are balancing the needs and wants of atomistic clashing individuals in ways iterated over time that meet individual needs while maintaining the social contract. Hierarchical relations and power-allocations are negotiated and opposing truth claims are mediate peacefully. Stephen: He refers to Piaget as an example of Enlightenment Humanism, the state has power, but its power is seriously constrained to protect the individuals yet enable them to make beneficial social networks over time. Power is just the ability to get work done; it is neutral, but we must evaluate power by the ends, normatively evaluated. There are many kinds of power: muscular, social, military, political, etc. Do not judge power but judge the ends of power-wielders. My response: Stephen and Jordan seem to be differing over power, but they really saying the same thing in different ways proposing that normatively evaluating power as good when it allows for freedom and individual agency within a social contract, and it is bad power when tyrannically wielded in corrupt hierarchies as power struggling of haves against groups of have-nots. Jordan: Nietzscheans and Marxists see all kinds of power under one master power type, but these secondary powers compete against each other. Stephen: Nietzscheans and Marxists make the mistake of seeing unitary power interpretation but the sovereign individual must be respected. (Ed Adds: which they do not do as collectivists.) In the Enlightenment the individual devolution of social power to the individual as each individual respects each other's power and domains. Jordan: Postmodernists are wrong here. Freedom of the individual is not just about rights but must also be responsible and wield power, acting as a locus of power in the world. Each individual is not powerless, and he is not just an avatar of a social group. The radical Left is profoundly anti-individualist; they do not possess trait conscientiousness, a deep flaw. My response: Jordan is right: the individual is sovereign and must enjoy his rights, his power and his responsibility to stand up straight and make his mark and contribution in the world. As an individuating anarchist supercitizen, his contribution and powerful gifts back to society will be culturally, intellectually and spiritually revolutionary. Stephen: Both Marxists and Nazis are deeply hostile to individuals and individual responsibility, denying the individual is the loci of responsibility. Jordan: Yes, ideologies disallow for individual power. Stephen: There is no individual loci of power for both the Extreme Left and the Extreme Right believe that the individual is a mere conduit for historical trends and forces--this is a strongly deterministic view of people. My response: Both thinkers are correct. Jordan: That cynical disregard for people is a perverse consequence of the scientific revolution. Modern scientists cite causal forces that regulate human behavior. These two sources are nature/biology versus culture But humans are not just crudely determined by nature or nurture for there is a missing third element: the active force of individual consciousness is not accounted for. People are self-empowering, not just puppets. Stephen: Individualism arising under humanism: individuality must be respected im moral terms and in political theory and in social relationships. My response: the statements by both are articulate, accurate and uplifting. Stephen: as modernism grew out of medievalism, two things happened. 1. The elaboration of a conceptual frame that enabled us to work with the external world. 2. The elevation of the individual as valid critic because the individual is worthy to be a critic. The problem is the elaboration of objective, scientific work led to view people either as nature or nurture, as the source of human mode of power. Yet, there was talk of individual power, an independent social critic with a soul to justify everything. Science was in its infancy, early crude versions of cause and effect, how it operates as nature or nurture. How does the world work as volitional consciousness for the individual as self-power. My response: the Western ideal of the sovereign individual grew out of these baby steps culturally. Jordan: I find meaning in Jungian myths. Take for example the story of Pinocchio. Geppetto is the classical, mythological tyrant of society. The Blue Fairy represents nature. Geppetto created Pinocchio but wants him to be free of culture. The Blue Fairy wants him to be a real free boy too, but it is not enough for cultural influences and natural inputs to push for Pinocchio to be free: he has to do it for himself, self-liberating so to speak. (Ed Says: Mythical genius is at work here; profound truth thus revealed.) Pinocchio has the autonomous ability to begin to come alive. Only he can create himself. Scientists deny this third element. Stephen: The scientific account of human consciousness is an impoverished account. Jordan: Scientists believe only nature and nurture make people what they are. They are materialist determinists. There is no added 3rd element of individual consciousness, yet when scientists are off duty existing in society, they like all other humans, act, interact and react with others as all were free, responsible individuals. Stephen: These scientific skeptics in theory, but in life live like none are determined. Jordan: We naturally assume conscious free will in human interactions, and this is evidence for consciousness. We act like people are free, not biologically determined. My response: This could be biological and sociological and psychological evidence hinting that something like the soul, elan vital, is behind biological and cerebral, individual consciousness. It could even be further extended to hint that there is an immaterial world and a deity funding individual consciousness. Stephen: Truth, goals (ethics), power are the big three--we need to integrate these theories. Knowledge is good power if used good, then it is proper power. If knowledge or truth is bad power, then it is an illegitimate use of power. Power led to truth, and if we act ethically, people will be treated as individual agents My response: Amen. Jordan We cannot let the Enlightenment be overthrown. My response: Right on. Stephen: By the time of Marx and Nietzsche, people no longer believed in knowledge, due to the power of skeptical epistemology. People no longer believed in objectively standard morals. Power is all that is left. My response: I reject the postmodernist assertion that power is all that is left: we can achieve probably certain truth, knowledge and objective morality near enough to absolute certainty that we can maintain our Western way of life. Jordan: A psychoanalytic critique of postmodernist objections to the Enlightenment must be unfurled, for we cannot accept that now you can do whatever you want--rank moral nihilism. Postmodernism is not always believed by its adherents, but it is a useful ideological weapon to get more power or advance their cause. Jordan asks Stephen what motivated him to warn against postmodernism. Stephen: I enjoyed uncovering the intellectual history behind the rise of postmodernism. Postmodernists deny that facts are believable, and logic is not believable. The power of postmodernism comes from its multi-dimensional attacking on many fronts: metaphysical, normative, political and epistemological critiques. So, the counterattack to defend modernism must be integrated and multi-dimensional. My response: the attack from those of us that are traditionalists and lovers of the West is to remember that our counterattack must be integrated, multi-dimensional and activated right now before the West in lost forever--it is in grave peril at this moment.