Last Dance
with Mary Jane:
A Postmortem on Positivism & Postmodernism
Philip
Blosser
[Note:
the following was originally delivered as a lecture in my Philosophy of Art
class at Lenoir-Rhyne College on October 24, 1995]
INTRODUCTION
Today we turn to begin examining a “sacramental”
outlook, a view that sees everything—all of life—as overflowing with
meanings, signs and images pointing to transcendent mysteries—not as devoid of
significance, vacuous and absurd. That
outlook is most often associated, quite rightly, with the medieval worldview.
However, it was not absent from the ancients either.
As I think G.K. Chesterton once observed, the ancient pagans were
superior to modern secularists at least in this sense, that they had a keen
sense of the supernatural, of the sacred, of the overflowing significance and
meaning of things. Modernity lacks this sense (think of French existentialism:
nothing means anything); while postmodernity swims amidst
a sea of signs with no transcendental referents (here everything means everything,
which is the same as meaning nothing).
Both are equally vacuous and pitiful.
These considerations lead us to raise the question,
once again, of the role of personal commitments in academic discourse, the
relation, if you will, of faith to reason—a question that almost predictably
leads to the temptation of mindless knee-jerk reactions.
Perhaps this question is worth pausing over momentarily.
Philosophically, the relation between faith and reason has been
described, at one extreme, as in Tertullian or Kierkegaard, as a relation of tension;
and, at the other, as in St. Anselm or St. Thomas Aquinas, as a relation of complementarity.
Within the history of the American religious experience, it may be useful
to note the variety of alternative views that have arisen: One view, often
associated with historic Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites, Baptists), sees faith
as opposed to reason, and, to borrow H. Richard Niebuhr’s categories,
“Christ” as opposed to “culture.”
Another view, linked with Lutheranism, puts them side by side but as
inhabiting two separate, unrelated realms--Christ alongside culture,
acknowledging Christ’s claims on a religious slice of life, but leaving the
rest to “Caesar,” the “world,” or “nature.”
Still other views, associated with Calvinism and Catholicism, see them as
interpenetrating--Christ as the transformer or perfecter of
culture, laying claim to every square inch of created life.
These last views are closest to my own on the matter, as I am happy to
inform you so that you may know, as they say, “where I’m coming from.”
But mine is hardly the prevailing view today.
The most pervasive view among both religious and non-religious people
today is the view that faith and reason, or Christ and culture, have, at best, nothing
to do with each other, and, at worst, are utterly opposed to each
other. On the one hand, this view
finds common expression in the popular sentiment that public schools and public
discourse and public political life ought to be free of religious or moral
commitments and sentiments, that we ought to deal with “just the facts” and
leave “personal values” aside. On
the other hand, it finds equal expression in the view that there are ultimately
no accessible facts, but only the competing interests of rival
value-commitments, and that we ought to give up any notion of objective truth or
reality as a fantasy.
Today I wish to lay to rest two pernicious assumptions, which
I will not dignify by the name of “philosophies”--two sets of assumptions or
outlooks, which underlie these alternative views. I want to argue that they care not philosophically tenable.
My aim is not to take issue with any particular religious commitment or
secularist commitment, or to impose some personal religious view of mine upon
you, but rather to argue philosophically, that two outlooks--two sets of
assumptions--underlying our discussions about facts and values (whether these
are religious, ethical, or aesthetic values), are untenable and have no future.
In fact, many have recognized that these outlooks have been long dead.
The avant-garde has long known this.
But philosophical ideas have a trickle-down effect, and it is only
generations later, often, that people catch on to the fact that ideas and
assumptions they have been bandying about as though they were the hottest thing
going, have been long dead and the flesh is already half-rotted off the corpses.
In keeping with this theme, I want to devote my discussion today to Tom
Petty’s “Last Dance with Mary Jane,” the MTV video about the poor lad who
takes the cadaver of his beloved from the morgue back to his house in order to
have one last dance with “Mary Jane.” I
am suggesting, of course, that some of us have dance partners like Mary Jane,
whom, we have not yet recognized, perhaps, is no longer a live option.
ANALYSIS:
POSITIVISM & POSTMODERNISM
The two positions we are examining today have been
called, historically, (1) positivism, and (2) postmodernism.
The first view claims that one can know and describe facts without the
obtrusion of any indemonstrable presupposition or value-laden personal bias (or
“sub-text”). The second claims
that there are no facts to be known or described, but only indemonstrable
presuppositions and value-laden biases (“nothing outside the text”).
1.
POSITIVISM:
A. Positivism is usually associated with Auguste
Comte (father of sociology and “social sciences” generally), whose “Law of
the Three Stages” (set forth by Comte in 1822, and anticipated by Turgot in
1750) claimed that history was a progression from a superstitious
“theological” stage, through a speculative “metaphysical” stage, to a
scientific “positive” stage, where the truth about the “facts” could be
immediately and objectively known. The
major assumption was that scientific description could be engaged in without
bias on the basis of directly observing sensory phenomena.
B. Scientific Empiricism (the “Unity of Science
Movement”) is a related position, historically influenced from three sides:
(1) the older empiricism and
positivism of Hume, Mill, and Mach.
(2) the methodology of
the empirical sciences, as developed by scientists from the mid-19th century,
such as Helmholtz,
Mach,
Ponicare, Dunhem, Boltzmann, Einstein.
(3) symbolic logic and
the logical analysis of language, as developed by Frege, Whitehead and Russell,
and Wittgenstein.
Scientific empiricism is also closely associated with a group
known as the Vienna Circle, closely identified with Russell and
Wittgenstein, a group founded by Moritz Schlick in 1924, whose members included
Bergmann, Carnap, Feigl, Franck, Godel, Hahn, Neurath, Waismann.
The earlier name for the position of the Vienna Circle was
“logical positivism,” but the preferred name came to be “logical
empiricism.” The emphasis was on
a scientific attitude, logic, and facts; every knowledge that is factual is
connected with experience in such a way that verification or direct or indirect
confirmation is possible. Hence:
the verification hypothesis: aside from “analytical” statements (like
“all bachelors are unmarried,” in which the predicate is already
analytically contained within the subject term), only “synthetic” statements
(like “this rose is red,” where the predication is capable of perceptual
sense verification) are to be accepted as meaningful.
The Vienna Circle’s emphasis on logical analysis of language
distinguishes it from earlier forms of empiricism and positivism.
To sum up, positivism emphasized the ideal of a purely
objective, scientific, presuppositionless description of the world
(=”reality,” “facts”). It
assumed this to be possible. It assumed that subjective language could be
brought into conformity with objective reality.
Hence the goal undertaken in the early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus of a purely logical language that could precisely and
exhaustively describe the facts of the would without surplus or defect of
meaning.
IMPLICATIONS: Objective public knowledge was the
goal of all research and education. Encyclopedias
of “all knowledge” were conceived as a possibility; value-free public
education was the ideal. “Just
the facts, ma’am.” Values and
facts were conceived as distinct and separable, like oil and water, or icing and
cake. Without the icing, the cake
was still the cake. Without
religious or moral values, education was still education, learning about the
facts. So it was thought.
ASSESSMENT: What is positive in positivism
is the healthy and robust, unquestioning assumption that there exists a
reality--a world of objective fact--beyond our subjective efforts to interpret
it, and that this reality could be known. The philosophical name for this assumption is: “Realism.”
What is negative is the assumption that this reality could be
known and described without the intrusion of any presupposition or value-laden
bias.
2.
POSTMODERNISM (focussing on its “aestheticism”):
A. “Aesthetics” in the conventional sense means what Baumgarten in
1750 said it meant: a “branch of philosophy dealing with beauty or the
beautiful, especially in art, and with taste and standards of judging art.”
On this view, “aesthetics” refers to an
enclosure within a self-contained realm of aesthetic objects and sensations;
thus, it also implies a separation from the “real world” of non-aesthetic
objects. On this view,
“reality” represents something underlying the flux of experience—nature,
history, culture, facts, etc.
B. “Aesthetics” in the postmodern
sense
means something quite different and almost diametrically opposed to the above.
Here “aesthetics” refers not to an enclosed realm distinct from
“reality.” Rather, there is the
attempt to expand the “aesthetic” to embrace the whole of reality (i.e., a
form of reductionism). Here “reality” consists precisely in “art,”
“language,” “discourse,” “text,” “constructs,” “fictions.”
In short, “reality” is conceived as “fictional.”
Reality IS fiction!
(Incidentally, Nicholas Wolterstorff represents a
mediating position that cannot be identified with either of these views; for
him, “fittingness,” which involves a subjective response in the person, is
also rooted in objective, really existing aesthetic qualities of objects in the
real world.)
EXAMPLES:
Nietzsche (d. 1900) views the world as a work of art, which can be
justified only aesthetically; “facts” are “created” by interpretation.
Heidegger (d. 1976) develops a similar view in his essay “On the
Origin of a Work of Art,” where he discusses how a work of art opens up a
“world”; he later extends the same disclosive function to language.
Foucault (d. 1984) collapses “art” and “language” into
“discourse” and “interpretation.” History
becomes “fiction,” on his view; and he views his own historiography as the
writing of fiction, a noteworthy detail that should give pause to anyone
planning to use his writings for purposes of conventional research.
Derrida (still dancing with Mary Jane) declares that “there is
nothing outside of the text,” extending the function of art and language and
discourse to “writing.” As he
notes in his essay on “Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book,” the
distinction between rabbinic and poetic interpretation collapses in
deconstruction, so that there is no longer any distinction between exegetical
commentary and the original text being commented upon.
There is no longer any “transcendental signified.”
To sum up, for postmodernism, reality is a
fiction, an interpretation, a text we write; there is nothing lying “behind”
the text (such as the author’s intentions) or in “front” of the text (such
as a real referent in reality) that lies outside of the “text” (or of
“art,” or “discourse,” or “language”).
There is no “truth” to which a text can refer and by which it can be
judged; as Richard Rorty said, then, after forsaking philosophy for the
department of literature at Princeton, “truth is what your peers let you get
away with saying.”
IMPLICATIONS:
the positivist ideal of bias-free access to “facts” is utterly shattered;
there ARE no more “facts,” there IS no “actual reality” beyond
interpretation; there is no “public knowledge” such as the Enlightenment
Encyclopedists thought possible and which “public schooling” presupposes,
which can be based on a bias-free consensus regarding objectively known facts.
The result: a Balkanization of rival interests and power-plays with no
court of appeal beyond our relative biases; there are only conflicting positions
engaged in a ceaseless power struggle. “Truth”
becomes nothing more than a mask for a partisan group’s “will-to-power.”
At this point, postmodernism forms an uneasy alliance with various
contemporary movements of Neo-Marxism, Feminism, Queer Studies, and virtually
any advocacy group lobbying for partisan “rights.”
Everything reduces to a struggle for power.
“Knowledge is power.” There
is no transcendental truth, grace, mercy, or forgiveness.
Once all metaphysics of presence are deconstructed, there are no “real
presences,” in the words of George Steiner, to serve as nexes of genuine love,
forgiveness and reconciliation between real, discrete selves.
There is only power—in the words of Albert Camus, “the earth
delivered into the hands of power without principle.”
It is Louis Farakhan vs. Martin Luther King, Jr.
ASSESSMENT:
What is positive in postmodernism is the fact it dispels the positivist
illusion that reality can be known and described without bias or value-laden
presuppositions. What is negative
is its denial that there is any reality beyond interpretation to be known or
described.
CRITIQUE
(A) “Discourse” (or “language,” or “art,” or
“interpretation”) does have creative force: it can enlighten and provoke;
but it can also mislead and prevent us from seeing what we ought to see.
But if “discourse” is to have any meaning, there must be something
that is not “discourse.” For
example, the truck coming down the road is fundamentally different from the
interpretation “Here comes a truck.” To
believe otherwise is to be trapped in an absurd and highly artificial form of
historical idealism. One can call
everything “discourse” if one wishes. But
this does not abolish the distinction between, say, an interpretation of the
experience of being run over by a truck and the reality of the experience
itself--a distinction which every language, if it is to function on more than
some purely fantastic level, must somehow accommodate.
Postmodernism (and its aestheticism) fails to give this distinction the
weight it normally has and deserves.
(B) Examples:
(1) Nietzsche: suggests that religion is a mythic
(“Apollonian”) construct that serves a “protective”
function, that it
furnishes a
“construct” or “illusion” by which to “humanize” an otherwise
inhospitable
and frightening environment and, so to speak, to “domesticate” it. But the
question, then, is: how
does religion serve to shield us from the frightening
realities of our experience?
(a) Suppose that the protective illusory function is
one that we know to be illusory. On this
assumption, Nietzsche’s account breaks down immediately; for if
we know the illusion (the
“construct,” the “discourse,” the
“language”) to be an
illusion, then presumably its entire
protective function will be lost.
(b) Suppose, on the contrary, that the illusion is one that we do not know
to be an illusion. Here
again, Nietzsche’s case breaks down; for the concept of illusion
seems to presuppose a
contrary concept--that of “reality”--and that there
will be
contact between these. But this
contact is bound to be a shattering experience
precisely because the illusion is an illusion
and does not conform to reality.
In
fact, the only contact that would not be shattering is
one between reality and a correct belief about that reality.
(2) Foucault: maintains that
his historiographical works are fictions, written with the aim of
bringing
about political change in the present. But, once again,
the questions is: how is this possible?
(a) If Foucault’s readers know that his
allegedly historical writing is fictional,
then that writing
can’t by any rational standard have the desired effect on their
politics.
(b) If, on the other hand, his reader’s don’t know that his work is
fictional, they will be brought
up short at their first contact with intransigent reality ... even if
we
choose to call that
reality, too, a “fiction.”
There is only one context where the position embraced by Nietzsche and Foucault
makes sense: the conventional aesthetic context.
In this realm we engage in willing suspension of belief.
We enter into the world of the “work of art,” the world of
“make-believe,” the world “as if” it were, through an imaginative
“play” of images and suspended beliefs. Nietzsche and Foucault generalize
the aesthetic context to cover the whole range of social and political
experience--the whole range of human experience.
There is much that one can learn from this, particularly about the
hermeneutics of human finitude, which Christianity, from its own point of view,
willingly affirms; but it must this outlook must also be considered ineluctably
ruinous, and because it ultimately comes up against its contradiction, finally
self-defeating.
CONCLUSIONS
POSITIVISM contributes a healthy and robust “realism,” a belief in a reality
beyond our interpretations, a realm of “fact” that resist our efforts to
endlessly interpret it. Yet
positivism is afflicted by a blindness to the inescapable biases and value-laden
presuppositions by which alone that reality and world of facts is accessible to
us.
POSTMODERNISM contributes a healthy understanding of the biases, value-laden
presuppositions, and personal commitments we bring to our experiences.
Yet it is afflicted by a blindness to the reality that resists our
efforts to interpret it.
Note: the word “bias,”
like “prejudice,” has unwarranted negative associations. To be “biased” or “prejudiced” is often taken to mean
that one is intolerant or unreasonable. In
fact, in view of its etymological origin, the word “bias” means nothing more
than an “angle.” Metaphorically,
we could say that having a “bias” is no more than having an “angle of
vision,” which is to describe an inescapable quality of the human condition.
There is no “point of view from nowhere,” in Thomas Nagel’s
memorable phrase. As humans we all
have inescapably “biases.” Likewise
we have “prejudices.” A
“prejudice” is nothing more, literally, than a “pre-judgment,” that is,
a “prior assumption” about the way the world is and the way things, persons
and events are related to one another in it.
We could not function practically without making assumptions, or having
prejudices, in this sense.
Our goal should be,
not to eliminate “biases” or “prejudices,” but to have the best possible
ones. “Biases” and
“prejudices” are like lenses through which we see the world.
Our goal should be to have lenses that correct our vision to see things,
as much as possible, as they really are. If
there is a truck coming down the street towards us, we should be critically
aware of our need for lenses that project a sharp image. “Biases” and “prejudices” are related to our
“constructs,” our “discourses,” the “narratives” and “stories”
we tell one another and ourselves to make sense of our lives.
Our goal should be to tell stories that come as close as possible to
describing the way things really are, so that we are not under any illusions
that will shatter our worlds, the way a romantically naive story might be
shattered by the reality of a truck crashing through our living room wall.
Nicholas Wolterstorff (Art in Action)
and Thomas Howard (An Antique Drum) point the way toward what I regard as
a viable alternative to the foregoing. They
suggest a moderating view; not one that tries to patch together eclectically
bits and pieces of each into a pathetic rag doll composite of both, but one that
weds the healthy realism of positivism with the healthy appreciation of human
bias found in postmodernism. In
Wolterstorff’s analysis of “fittingness,” there is both a profound
appreciation of the subjective element of a personal response that is involved
in the apprehension of cross-modal similarities (e.g., the fittingness of
“loud” with “heavy,” as opposed to “light”), and a clear
articulation of the conviction that “fittingness” is grounded in objective
qualities belonging to the aesthetic character of objects, including works of
arts themselves, independently of our responses.
Wolterstorff does not separate the aesthetic realm from the “real
world” of non-aesthetic objects, as does conventional aesthetics (since
Baumgarten, 1750). Rather, he very
clearly rejects the elitist claims of the institution of high art, which
separates “fine art” from everyday life, and sees all aesthetic
considerations --whether they concern works of “high art” or the mundane
works of “the tribe”--as firmly grounded in everyday existence.
“Fittingness” is rooted empirically in the real world through his
psychological analysis of kinesthetic phenomena of the sort researched by
Osgood. Fittingness is seen as
rooted in objective qualities of things underlying our “constructs.”
The fact that we have biases and value-laden presuppositions does not imply that
reality cannot be known or described accurately.
It does not trap us in a solipsistic monad or bubble of our own
consciousness. It simply means that
our biases and presuppositions must be true to what is in order for us to know
and describe what is accurately. How
can we test whether our biases correspond to reality?
By remaining open to correction and being willing to look and look again.
No human being can escape the finitude of the human condition.
But we have all had the experience of having been mistaken and learned
the truth about something or someone, or having corrected another’s
misapprehension of a state-of-affairs. This
experience alone, as Plato repeatedly avows, suffices to demonstrate how our
opinions are susceptible to progressive correction by the resistance offered to
our respective interpretations by the reality we seek to interpret.
VERDICT:
Positivism is dead. Postmodernism
is dead. What we see waltzing
around us in the apparel of these phantoms is nothing but their dancing
cadavers, held fast to the bosom of pathetic necrophiliacs who cannot bear to be
parted from the dead or let them have their rest.
For these lost souls, at any rate, the light of life has not yet dawned.
They remain, perhaps, under the dominion of the dark lord, perpetually
dancing their last dance with Mary Jane amid the night of the living dead, where
it is always Halloween but never Christmas.
But I say: for heaven’s sake: bury Mary Jane.
She’s dead. She stinks.
Her flesh is falling from her bones.
Get a life. Bury the
stinking corpse.
Home
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© 1995, 2004 Philip Blosser