So someone from the UK asked me a question about postmodernism’s relationship to metaethics. I probed a little more deeply, and the question ultimately turned on the assertion that postmodernism denies the existence of truth, including moral truth. When that was probed, it turned out that this person had been listening to reporting people had been doing lately on Aleksandr Dugin.
Dugin is a former journalist, former political activist, former professor, and current, contemptible “public intellectual”. He is also a philosopher, and is almost certainly much more widely read than I am. He has a vast amount of knowledge accessible from memory which makes contradicting him feel dangerously intimidating when in-person. Given that so much of his work is inaccessible to me, and nearly all of the rest would require me to be familiar with a vast variety of sources in order to effectively challenge his interpretations and conclusions, I’m not really the one to debunk this man’s output.
But on the other hand, it’s clear that we don’t need another Dugin to carefully debunk all of Dugin’s work: he effectively discredits it all on his own. According to multiple sources, including Ricochet, The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Reason.com and Salvage.zone, Dugin has made various remarks inciting the indiscriminate killing of all Ukranians.*2 You don’t have to take their word that the comments were made, however. If you speak Russian, you can simply go to youtube and see Dugin say something I am told includes words that translate to, “We must kill all Ukranians,” “kill, kill, kill,” and “I say this to you as a professor” or, perhaps, “”To kill, kill, kill. There should be no more conversations. As a professor, I think so”.*3 Indeed according to Salvage.zone and other sources (the Interpreter being perhaps the most credible), his malicious and savage calls to genocide were directly responsible for the loss of his professorship at MSU in 2014.*4
However self-discrediting such genocidal rhetoric might seem, Putin and others in the Russian government take him seriously and his views and writings clearly influence their government’s policies. Indeed the Russian government uses many statements by Dugin either directly or indirectly in defense of their war of aggression against the Ukraine. The racist, sexist, anti-semitic, anti-muslim “alt-right” also takes inspiration from Dugin and has invited him to lecture in many locations around Europe and even in North America. But how in the world could any well-read philosopher, one who clearly has more than the basics of an ethics education, justify calls to genocide?
And thus the question that was posed to me: when called upon to defend his ethics, and in particular the ethics of his calls to genocide, Dugin falls back on postmodernism as a defense. So what does postmodernism say that can be used by Dugin in defense of genocide? This BBC interview with Gabriel Gatehouse from 2016 will serve up our examples, but his assertions of what postmodernism says will not go over so well for him with those who are actually aware of postmodernism, postmodernist epistemology, and postmodernist ethics:
Dugin: We have our Russian special truth that you need to accept, something that maybe is not your truth.
Gatehouse: Even if it’s not true.
Dugin: But if the truth is relative, that doesn’t mean that truth doesn’t exist. It means that absolute truth, one for all, doesn’t exist.
But this is not actually a contention of any serious postmodernism. The fundamental observation of the postmodernist critique is that access to absolute truth is imperfect, and so absolute certainty about what the truth is impossible to achieve for the vast majority of facts. At any given moment, there is a true and accurate answer to the question, “What is the distance from the nearest point on earth’s solid surface to the nearest point on mars’ solid surface, rounded to the nearest kilometer?” I sure as hell don’t know that answer, but that answer exists, and it is true “one for all”. Postmodernism would have us question those who claim access to this absolute truth – if the answer was actually important, postmodernism would encourage us not to meekly accept claims from authority, but to acknowledge that human fallibility may build in sources of errors to our measuring instruments and also corrupt any actually correct answers those instruments might provide during the communication of those answers to others. But this is not a claim that the truth doesn’t exist.
Later:
Dugin: The truth is the question of belief, and postmodernity shows that every so-called truth is the matter of belief. We believe in what we do, and we believe in what we say, and that is the only way to define the truth.
No. Any serious postmodernism allows us to separate categories of knowledge. Some truths are directly dependent on definitions. Once you define the number “one” and the mathematical operation “addition”, then 1 + 1 = 2, and this is independent of belief. One doesn’t have to believe the definitions of “one” and “addition” to know for a fact that according to those definitions 1 + 1 = 2. Indeed, postmodernism resists definitions and oversimplification to such a degree that to say postmodernism asserts that there is only one way to do anything, including to define the truth, is simply false. Postmodernism has much better (and more accurate) critiques of the important human enterprise of mathematics than simply “1 + 1 = 2 is a matter of belief”.
Dugin: The truth is a matter of belief, and that is not only our position. Because what I see in Western media, I ask myself how the people could lie in such a way. They lie about everything in the world. But after that I say, I say to myself, “Stop. This is not lie. That is their truth.” [crosstalk] they are completely convinced that they’re true.
Gatehouse: I work in the Western media. I’m a reporter. I go out on the ground; I report what I see. Nobody tells me from on high…
Dugin: No, no. There is no such things: the fact’s … it’s always interpretation.
Here Dugin is much closer to the postmodernist position. In fact that last bit is something that postmodernists might routinely say, and does accurately reflect mainstream postmodern thought. The truth of 5* (1 + 1) = 10 may not be a matter of belief, but the people who say that 5 * (1 + 1) = 10 aren’t necessarily people who have ever gone back to first principles to review definitions and work out a logical proof that the statement must be true. In practice, people assert as true those things that they believe as true, regardless of whether or not those things are in fact true. But this is a statement about human behavior and about human communication. Depending on your epistemology, it need not be a statement about the nature of truth at all.
We’ve often discussed “dictionary atheism” on FreethoughtBlogs.com. As a side conversation, we have discussed the difference between descriptive definitions and proscriptive definitions. (If you watch The Atheist Experience’s shows, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen those folks discuss exactly this.) In short, descriptive definitions are just descriptions of what people probably mean when they use a particular word. They don’t mean that the word can’t be used another way, or that if used another way the speaker or writer is in error. The definitions simply provide information to help you interpret another’s communications. Proscriptive definitions are definitions that do imply rigid boundaries, where the use of such a word to communicate something other than the meaning provided by the definition is an error.
Both exist, and both are useful. When I teach a class, I might provide a definition for the purposes of the class. This is helpful because then as I grade a test or paper, I know that the word or phrase defined can be used wrongly. This provides a method for increasing fairness in grading. You don’t have to restrict your use of the word or phrase I defined once you leave my class, but it is much harder for me to evaluate what you have learned and are learning without such definitions.
Outside of such structured environments, however, definitions are generally descriptive. Postmodernism is right to observe that the way the word “true” is used in everyday life is synonymous with the phrase “believed to be true”. But that provides us with two definitions: “true” can mean something that accurately states a fact or it can mean something that a speaker/communicator believes accurately states a fact. It is useful to be aware that it is often hard for the target of communication to differentiate between these two different uses. Postmodernism is correct to encourage skepticism based on the ambiguity created by these two different uses. But in the end, postmodernism is useful because it critiques this ambiguity. Read this statement by Dugin again:
every so-called truth is the matter of belief
and this one
it’s always interpretation
Dugin has rid himself of the ambiguity. There are no underlying facts. There is no truth. It’s all interpretation. But in denying the ambiguity, in denying the differing (and both relevant!) definition of truth as things that are true and things that are believed to be true, Dugin is denying postmodernism itself.
Dugin repeatedly – in that interview and elsewhere – uses postmodernist questions of access to absolute truth as a defeater to any claims of moral responsibility. It’s here where some people begin to believe that postmodernism does have a corrosive effect on morality, on ethics. It’s here where some people begin to believe that a postmodernist metaethics leads directly to a nihilist form of relativism where nothing can be critiqued from an ethical standpoint. But this isn’t the actual legacy of postmodernism.
In critiquing the claims of special access to truth, especially (but not only) claims of special access to truth through authority founded on tribal membership, religious status, political position, and money, postmodernism is not a shield against ethical inquiry. Rather, authentic postmodernism is an attempt to update Socrates’ critique of Euthyphro for our modern gods.
Without doubt postmodernism can be used as a shield against certain accusations, but it’s a shield that Dugin himself has no ability to wield, and no one watching him, or watching the alt-right and Christian right blowhards that attack the same non-existent postmodernism Dugin uses as a defense, should be at all concerned that they must contend with his assertions as a serious postmodern critique of ethics.
*1: at Moscow State University – the Russian Federation’s Harvard, Stanford, University of Toronto, or Oxford
*2: I go out of my way to list multiple sources reporting different comments in part because none of those sources are particularly well known to me, and KHRPG and Salvage.zone are entirely new to me, so it’s hard to judge their reliability.
*3: The youtube page is linked from different articles who use different english quotes in the links or adjacent to them. It’s hard for me to know the exact nature of what’s being said, being entirely without any understanding of Russian language. I still feel confident that either all these translations are reasonable or, and perhaps more likely, the many different times Dugin has called for indiscriminate killings of Ukrainian people are being differently reported by different outlets, but with many writers choosing to bolster the credibility of their claims by linking to a single video that isn’t necessarily the particular call for violence being reported in that article.
*4: Terribly, the university didn’t act until being called out publicly: Dugin’s language was called out in a petition to fire him that was signed by over 10,000 persons, many of them influential Russian academics, and many of those at MSU itself. Only after this petition got significant journalistic attention did MSU rid itself of Dugin. Worse: they apparently got rid of Dugin by not rehiring him, rather than firing him and standing publicly by the action as well-deserved.
Yes, that’s the “motte version”. But of course, although true, it’s neither original, nor in any way unique to postmodernism. And I’ve repeatedly encountered the “bailey version” (that there is no truth, there are no facts) in arguing with postmodernists.
Who gets to say what counts as “authentic postmodernism”? You? If so, why?
But this is not actually a contention of any serious postmodernism.
Sounds more like a college sophomore’s idea of a Nietzschean nihilism, based on the Classics Illustrated version.
It’s relativism, which as you say isn’t quite the same thing, even if they’re often paired up. However, I think you should at least acknowledge that and not be so quick to dismiss the connections between them. It’s also worth talking about various constructivist views, while we’re at it.
At any rate, it’s still up for grabs whether there is any serious postmodernism to speak of, no? Let’s start there. Then, without you authoritatively (and quite abruptly) telling us what’s what, we might all be in a better place to decide the matter, if it’s worth doing.
This doesn’t look like a great example of the opening assertion (or “critique” if you insist), nor like much of a “fundamental observation.”* That distance can certainly be measured and calculated, as it changes over time. It’s not clear who’s supposed to think that one is not allowed (or shouldn’t bother, etc.) to question the accuracy of such measurements/calculations. Newton and Einstein, for instance, would’ve welcomed the opportunity to check your work and compare it against theirs. That is, they will ask you entirely sincere questions about how you got the answer, because they would not just take your word for it. They would jump at the chance to learn something new and/or learn that they were mistaken.
It’s a strange example…. But my point is simply that many people, ones who definitely (sometimes adamantly) have zero affiliation with postmodernism, ones who couldn’t have been such if the claim could plausibly have a shred of historical validity, would happily make exactly the same statements: that you should not meekly accept claims from authority, that we are fallible, etc. I got into the same crap with Marcus Ranum recently … is this going to be a pattern now?
Anyway, suppose that’s right, for the moment. Then, this isn’t what the difference is fundamentally about (if there is any coherent thing to discuss). It isn’t even mildly useful for distinguishing postmodernists from practically everybody else who ever lived. Try again, with a new fundamental thingy? Some very obscure (and almost all dead) philosophers and theologians would contest such claims now and then, perhaps after a few drinks and/or severe boredom; but aside from them, this is not an intellectual development that is “post” anything like modernism. It’s prehistoric probably and ancient certainly. That’s not something you need to advertise these days, just like non-delusional people don’t go around saying they invented the wheel, and will you look at all those fools over there (*points nowhere in particular*) who said it couldn’t be done.
That’s what it sounds like to me: utterly ridiculous posturing, not what I’d call a serious and non-trivial claim that has some merit or is worth defending. Are there a few so-called “pomo” writers/thinkers/etc. who you want to endorse? Maybe that’s where you’re coming from. Go right ahead and defend what they’ve said/done, but please do not credit them for what is not theirs. That’s where I’m at right now. Maybe they are all bigger than Jesus, as it were, but I think they are almost certainly less significant, less radical, less groundbreaking, etc. than people like you make them out to be. If you were advertising me, I’d ask you to stop immediately, because I’d worry it turns people away from anything of value that I may have actually done. At the end of the day, they’re not going to believe I invented the wheel, or even that I had anything to do with its adoption or popularity or what have you, so it would be rather pointless and probably counterproductive to put that on my list of accomplishments. It should not be counted as a mark of distinction making my views/actions/etc. different from others’ somehow. So if I wanted them to get some kind of idea about what my real contribution is (if anything), then I had better tell them something that is at least not wildly and transparently false.
*A strange description, given that it’s an assertion regarding all kinds of unobserved stuff. I figure some people are more or less fundamentalist about it, so just to be clear, I’m not criticizing that part. Just the notion that you somehow witnessed this wacky thing, like when you may “observe” a sunset or a report on the intertubes that Trump said something idiotic again. It’s certainly not an observation of that variety. (And I’ll assume you don’t mean it’s a more fundamental observation than other observations are, whatever that would even mean; but instead that it’s supposed to sit at the base of this ideology like the foundation under a building.)
And how does that critique go, exactly? You could tell me “I’ve critiqued this ambiguity X,” and I’m pretty sure I’d have no fucking clue what you think you just did, even if I have a clear enough idea about X, because it just doesn’t sound like a thing that people do to ambiguities. That’s not really and literally what happens, is it? What should you say about it, other than “people sometimes equivocate and confuse different concepts, so watch out!”? Is that it? To whom is this criticism directed, and what specifically is there to criticize about their entire worldviews (and not individual claims), if at the same time you yourself treat it as an ordinary and useful/relevant feature of human communication (even if it also causes a mess occasionally)? In short… What is the critique, who needs it, why do they need it, and what makes you think that?
You mean the legacy of the “serious” kind … and as you say, the one that people don’t tend to interpret from postmodernists when they talk about postmodernism. It sounds like their profound lessons for us about communication, etc., ought to be practiced in front of a mirror.
I have to admit, though, that it is an interestingly convoluted style of apologetics: we shouldn’t take your word for it, but let’s take your word for it that there isn’t any one correct interpretation anyway. Also, these random people all just happened to stumble on precisely the false/non-actual ones, as opposed to all of yours. Sam Harris would be proud … not a whole lot of others, I imagine.
There are no gods, and there have never been any. Turn this statement into something non-metaphorical, and explain clearly what is supposed to be non-ancient about postmodernism.
@KG:
First, let me thank you for your comment, though I have some disagreements. Permit me to articulate them?
1. There are few original thoughts. As I understand it, evolution by natural selection was a combination of ideas that each had already been present in thinking about the natural world before Darwin assembled them into a mutually supporting structure and provided the evidence sufficient to persuade the academy that he was correct. Nonetheless, whether the observation is original or not, it is still fundamental to postmodernism.
2. Further, you might note that I actually got there before you, your critique that this is not original is not original: In the text I asserted that postmodernism can be understood as extending Socrates’ critique of Euthyphro’s definitions of piety (which critique questioned the authority and special knowledge of the Greek gods) to “claims of special access to truth through authority founded on tribal membership, religious status, political position, and money”. I’m well aware of the limitations of postmodernism.
3. I think you have the motte/bailey metaphor wrong, as I’ve not put forward the weaker argument. That was Dugin. Thus I’m not engaged in the fallacy of equivocation you suggest is present here. Nor is Dugin, really. Dugin uses the “bailey” version consistently, often framing it (weirdly) as the Russian nation having its own special truth*1.
4. I do want to thank you very much for the metaphor and the link, however. Though I was familiar with historical motte & bailey constructions (well, at least enough to define them, I don’t remember ever visiting one), I’d never heard of the motte/bailey metaphor for this particular version of the equivocation fallacy. It’s helpful.
5. I have no doubt you’ve encountered people asserting that there are no truths and no facts. You can find such expressions in various places in authentically postmodern writings, but generally the context shows them to be speaking about things other than mathematical or logical facts. Also, when you examine what is being said in influential sources, it is generally clear that what is being doubted is access to facts rather than the existence of facts. Take the Theory of Narrativefor example. By the time an account is placed into language, interpretation has occurred. A story is only an interpretation of what happened, and a text is only one particular manifestation of that story. Yet in the Theory of Narrative, we don’t speak only of story and text. No. The ToN speaks of fabula, story, and text. The fabula is the location of facts – events that actually happened, causes that actually determine events – and it is essential to understanding a Theory of Narrative.
As for encountering people in conversation who would assert that there are no facts or truths, I’m sure those people and conversations exist. However, the assertion that there are no facts and no truths is too superficial to produce any criticism of value to the world and thus also too superficial to be a valuable core of any critical movement of any kind. While some doubt the ability of postmodernism to create original things of value, if postmodernism is anything it is criticism. Criticism (or at least any significant, widely applicable criticism) cannot be based on the idea that humans have nothing true to say.
6. Finally,
yes. Me.
Postmodernism.*2
However, lucky for you, if you want to argue about it, you can claim just as much authority and understanding as I have, and then we can compare sources and analytical methodologies for justifying our arguments and the people reading us will make up their own minds about who has the better and/or more useful understanding of postmodern epistemology and ethics.
=====================================================================
*1: I say “weirdly” because it’s an entire nation: if he really embraced postmodern thought as something other than a convenient shield against accountability, he wouldn’t advance the idea of one truth for an entire nation. Dugin’s anti-postmodern thinking actually runs quite deep: if what I’ve read about his work (since I haven’t read anything but short excerpts of his own words) is accurate, most of his political thought advances strongly authoritarian ideas. Postmodernism is highly anti-authority. That alone should make you deeply suspicious that Dugin employs postmodern thought in any honest way.
*2: Though I suppose with a side of existentialism.*3
*3: That was a philosophy joke, in case you missed it.
An assertion that there are not facts or truth appears to me to be self-refuting, as it is an assertion (implying that it is a fact that there are no facts) – the pyrhhonian skeptics got this right, by witholding judgement about any statements that were not clearly personal opinion. It’s not quite “there are no facts” but rather “I am unconvinced…” and it always appeared to me to be a much stronger position. Various forms of extreme skepticism appear to be conversation-killers since at least 300BC; I suspect that it was as annoying as post-modernism, to dogmatists.
consciousness razor:
Please don’t crudely stuff words in my mouth. It’s not nice and it’s not honest.
@consciousness razor:
I actually think that postmodern narratology is incredibly useful and very well developed. It may not be useful in your life if you don’t write or engage in other art forms that involve story-telling, but it’s certainly serious postmodernism that is coherent, well-developed, and useful to a large number of people.
In any case, Dugin is dishonestly employing what I believe to be pseudo-postmodernism. My last comment (though not directed at you) added as much as I think I want to say on the subject for now, so I’ll leave it there.
Crip Dyke@4,
Not really. There had been a couple of more-or-less throwaway comments (from obscure writers Charles Wells and Patrick Mayhew) which can be seen in retrospect as proposing the mechanism of natural selection, but no-one before Darwin had seen the vast implications of the idea. Natural selection was not accepted by “the academy” during Darwin’s lifetime – and even he rowed back somewhat in later editions of the Origin. Darwin’s overwhelming evidence for evolution did lead to its acceptance, but since he (like almost everyone else) believed in blending inheritance (that offspring would tend to “average” their parents’ features), the scepticism about whether natural selection could be responsible for long-term change – “indefinite departure from the original form” if I’ve got Darwin’s phrase right – was well-founded. Only around the turn of the 20th century, with the (re)discovery of Mendelian genetics, was natural selection accepted as the main mechanism of evolutionary change.
I got it exactly right. I said nothing about “weaker” – that’s your term, and (perhaps fittingly) an ambiguous one, since it can mean either “less defensible” or “less radical” – more-or-less opposites. In the motte and bailey metaphor, the “motte” position – which is the one you’ve adopted, and which, as cr says, does not distinguish postmodernism from almost every other philosophical position ever – is more defensible precisely because it’s less radical, usually, as in this case, not radical or controversial at all.
In the first place, that doesn’t make such an assertion any more correct, since there are vast (indeed, infinite) numbers of non-logical and non-mathematical truths and facts. In the second, I did actually find myself in an argument with some postmodernists on Pharyngula (I can’t recall if you were among them) about whether “17 is a prime number” is true.
Your own link gives a quite different definition of “fabula”:
“a series of logicially and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors”
Notihng there to say whether the events actually happened, nor reference to a “location of facts”. Moreover, scepticism about our “access to facts” can itself – in cases where such scepticism is unjustified – have exactly the morally corrosive effect critics of postmodernism are concerned about. Climate denialists (“Science is never settled”), creationists (“Were you there?”), Holocaust deniers (“Where’s the “kill all the Jews” order from Hitler?”), have all eagerly adopted the idea that our “access to facts” is never sufficiently secure to dismiss scepticism as unjustified and intellectually dishonest.
Since you were the one making the claim about what constitutes “authentic postmodernism”, and this claim appears to be central to your argument, it would have been helpful to provide your readers with some sources and an analytical methodology.
No, they didn’t. Are you still “witholding judgement” about evolution, anthropogenic climate change and the Holocaust, Marcus?
KG@#8:
Are you still “witholding judgement” about evolution, anthropogenic climate change and the Holocaust, Marcus?
I’m not a pyrhhonian skeptic. Here’s your sign.
FWIW, I’m comfortable making assertions because it’s my opinion that everything anyone says ought to be interpreted as their opinion. Even when dealing with apparent facts about climate change, the holocaust, etc, one’s interpretation of fact is heavily influenced by opinion, which is a fill-in for gaps in fact (and we all have gaps in fact). I am not automatically dismissive of opinions, because many of them appear to be true on closer examination.
Radical skepticism appears to me to have evolved in an attempt to always win philosophical debates and doesn’t seem to have much to offer in terms of practical lifestyle. I’m more aligned/in agreement with Popkin, who sees radical skepticism as a scorched-earth tool for arguing about religion and problems where we lack knowledge. See [stderr] for a better view.
Naturally, I don’t expect you to understand my viewpoint; you’re welcome to engage in all the uninformed speculation that makes you happy.