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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

False dilemma of modernity? « Previous | |Next »
December 5, 2006

Mark Mitchell in The False Dilemma of Modernity says that we moderns face a dilemma:

On the one hand stands the grandeur of enlightenment rationalism, claiming that humans are capable of achieving certain knowledge of universal truths by virtue of the rational minds with which we are endowed. On the other hand stand the so-called postmodernists, who deny any form of epistemological foundationalism and hold that truth is nothing but the construction of a particular society; thus, all truth claims are necessarily local in nature, and aspirations to universal, objective truth represent mistakes at best and intellectual imperialism at worst.

This dilemma often comes across in the form of enlightenment blackmail: we must embrace enlightenment rationalism, along with its ideals of universalism and certainty that rejects any dependence on tradition or authority if we want to avoid postmodernism, with its particularism and relativism.

Mitchell argues that the key to understanding the progression from modernism to postmodernism lies first in comprehending the important way postmodernism rejects modernism and second, in the perhaps even more important way that it accepts the premises of modernism.

On the one hand, postmoderns reject the modern attempt to secure an indubitable epistemological foundation. There is, for the postmodern, no such foundation, and the attempt to secure such a thing is merely the vanity of a particular individual or society. In rejecting epistemological foundationalism, the postmodern rejects the primacy of epistemology. In place of epistemology, the postmodern begins with ontology. Such an ontology, like the modernist epistemology, begins with the human being and attempts to forge meaning from that finite starting point. Thus, rather than beginning with God, the postmodern begins with man...man finds himself completely embedded within a particular culture, language, religion, and historical moment. These particularities serve to constitute man's reasoning capabilities; thus, what he is and what he thinks are the products of the situation into which he has been born.

Well that is reasonable enough account, as far as it even if it leaves out Heidegger. Mitchell, however, then links particularism and relativism to give us a apostmodernism based on anti-realism, skepticism, nihilism and the twin vices of complacency and pride. That characteristation of postmodernism is asserted not argued.

Mitchell says that this overlooks a third alternative, one that does not succumb to the aspiration of a God's eye-view, as does the enlightenment rationalist, or retreat into the misshapen hovel of relativism with its attendant subjectivism, as do the post-modernists. He argues this alternative overcomes the problem of modernity by pushing beyond it while at the same time reaching back to recover a pre-modern insight that was jettisoned by those committed to the modern project.

The third alternative is practical knowledge gained through doing.Turning back to Polanyi Mitchell says:

Practical knowledge precedes the knowledge of rules, for one must possess a degree of practical knowledge in order properly to apply the rules. But if practical knowledge is not learned by the study of explicit rules, then one must acquire it through doing. But how can a person practice an art if he does not yet know how to do so? One must submit to an authority in the manner of an apprentice--we learn by example.

Or through trial and error that gives rise to skilful coping as Heidegger argued. The acquisition of skills, does not necessarily require submission to a master.

Mitchell, however, sticks with Polanyi and he goes on to highlight the importance of tradition:

...if knowing is an art, and if learning an art requires dwelling in the practices of a master, then it follows that there must exist a tradition by which an art is transmitted, and any attempts categorically and systematically to reject tradition are logically incompatible with knowing. If that is the case, then we must conclude that the ideal of a tradition-free inquiry is simply impossible.

So we have the hermeneutic insight that we live embedded in a circle of interpretations with our biases, filters and prejudices. Mitchell says that:
Tradition, for Polanyi, is not a simple and stable resource that can be accessed in a purely objective fashion. Instead, Polanyi's traditionalism is dynamic on several levels. First, it encourages a certain degree of dissent ... Second, tradition is dynamic in that we cannot participate in it without changing it...traditions do not exist apart from the communities that embrace and transmit them to subsequent generations. Thus, knowledge is essentially social. But the claim is even stronger, for rather than being merely social, knowledge is communal in the sense that traditions persist only in communities which embrace a particular tradition as an orthodoxy.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:25 AM | | Comments (4)
Comments

Comments

Gary, I would suggest that Mitchell fits squarely in to the asana that I pointed to on your other philosophy site and that he hasnt even begun to imagine how thoroughly he is trapped in the reductionist iron cage of the so called "enlightenment".

Don't have time right now to review the Mitchell, though I did note he's just written a book on Michael Polanyi. But my comment is that it might be worth going back to Gadamer's account of hermeneutics as modelled on Aristotle's account of practical reason. The point is not that Gadamer's hermeneutics is simply the revival and renewal of practical reason in the modern world, which may well-nigh be impossible, but rather that it is the distantiated form that any such consideration must take. As Gadamer puts it, he writes to "defend the honor of 'bad infinity'".

John C .
I agree. What we get with Gadamer is a practical knowledge as an ethical reasoning. As such, it offers an alternative to the utilitiarian and rights based ethics currently favoured by liberalism.

John,
I was listening to the therapeutic cloning research debate in the House of Representatives yesterday. The PM argued in terms of absolutes versus relativism--only his absolutes were religious ones (Protestanism) not those of the Enlightenment. He said that he could not support laws allowing embryos to be created and then destroyed for research purposes. He had decided to vote no to take a stand for some absolutes as we live in an age where we have slid too far into relativism He used the slippery slope argument.

You can have a non-reductionist Enlightenment ----it is a tradition in Polanyi's sense.