The Metaphysics of Postmodernism
James Seaton*
[From HUMANITAS, Volume XII, No.
1, 1999 © National Humanities Institute]
Fleeing the Universal: The Critique of Post-rational Criticism,
by Carl Rapp. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 272
pp. $65.50 cloth. $21.95 paper.
Are we all postmodernists now? At first glance, it seems implausible:
most Americans persist in believing in an external reality, assume there
is a difference between truth and falsehood, and even claim to believe
in the God of traditional monotheism. American culture, however, may be
postmodernist even if those who explicitly subscribe to postmodernist precepts
are few. The thesis that contemporary society is postmodernist does not
assert that most people consciously accept postmodernist doctrines but
that these doctrines reflect the working assumptions that most of us live
by but refuse to acknowledge. It seems clear that there is little public
support for the theoretical notion that there is no significant distinction
between truth and falsehood, but it is unclear to what extent we remain
willing to acknowledge the author–ity of objective truth when such acknowledgement
is politically or personally inconvenient.
If there is a debate about whether our society can be described as postmodernist,
there is also a debate about whether this is a good or a bad thing. The
"culture wars" are in large part a debate over whether the trends that
make up postmodernism should be encouraged or resisted. The claims of postmodernist
theorizing cannot, however, be refuted by condemning the social manifestations
of postmodernism, no matter how justified such a condemnation may be. Although
the latter provides a setting favorable to the influence of the former,
it is important to note that postmodernist theories do not limit their
ambitions to the affirmation or even the clarification of contemporary
culture. Deconstruction, New Historicism and pragmatism each claim a relevance
that extends to the past as well as the present; Derrida has deconstructed
Plato, New Historicism is perhaps best-known for its analyses of the European
Renaissance, and Richard Rorty, the leading expounder of the New Pragmatism,
gained fame with a history of Western philosophy from Descartes to the
present.
Arguments about postmodernism often generate more acrimony than insight,
especially when it is unclear whether the topic of debate is theory or
culture. In Fleeing the Universal: The Critique of Post-rational Criticism
Carl
Rapp wisely resists the temptation to become entangled in the culture wars.
A reader of Fleeing the Universal finishes the book without learning
Rapp’s position on family values, affirmative action or gun control. What
Rapp does offer is a convincing immanent critique of postmodernism’s theoretical
claims, a critique made all the more persuasive by Rapp’s willingness to
forgo cheap shots and polemical hot buttons in favor of a rigorous examination
of deconstruction, pragmatism and New Historicism in the light of the standards
they themselves use to demonstrate their alleged superiority to traditional
philosophy.
The distinguishing characteristic of postmodernist theorizing is its
rejection of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. The Western philosophical
tradition itself is, of course, a record of debate rather than consensus.
The postmodernists, however, claim to have rejected not one thesis or another
but rather the entire philosophical tradition from Plato through George
Santayana. Deconstructionists, pragmatists and New Historicists certainly
make assertions and criticize opposing views, just as traditional thinkers
did. Unlike traditional philosophers, however, postmodernists make no attempt
to tell the truth about reality. They realize, what in their view their
predecessors failed to grasp, that human reason is an inadequate instrument
for achieving truth. They have therefore renounced metaphysics and philosophy
in favor of what Carl Rapp calls "post-rational criticism."
Rapp wastes no time considering whether such a change in intellectual
history is desirable or not; instead, he asks the reader to consider whether
the alleged transformation has indeed occurred. Rapp’s answer, at which
he arrives through a series of close examinations of key postmodernist
texts, is that no such grandiose intellectual revolution has taken place.
The postmodernists, he finds, cannot help philosophizing despite themselves
and, even worse (from their point of view), engaging in metaphysics. Their
theorizing, therefore, continues rather than terminates the career of Western
philosophy.
Deconstructionists pride themselves on their awareness of the paradoxical
nature of language. Previous thinkers tried their best to present their
thoughts as clearly as possible, but deconstructionists know that they
labored in vain; language is radically contradictory, so contradictory
that it is impossible to use language to specify anything in particular.
No matter how hard we try, so the deconstructionists argue, we cannot refer
to anything outside language itself. On the one hand, this claim seems
to rule out traditional metaphysical claims about the nature of God or
matter. On the other hand, Rapp points out that the deconstructionist understanding
of language repeats Western philosophy’s first metaphysical move:
Just as there had been, for Thales, ordinary water (alongside other
things) and metaphysical water (the underlying principle of all things),
so, for the linguistic transcendentalists, there was ordinary language
(such as French or Russian) and there was metaphysical language (conceived
as the underlying explanatory principle of all things whatsoever) (54).
One reason the deconstructionists’ claim to have abandoned metaphysics
has been accepted despite their use of traditional philosophical strategies
was their presentation of their activity as theorizing, not philosophizing.
In the last few decades, Rapp shrewdly observes, "precisely because it
was not recognized as such, metaphysics, in the form of theory, had a field
day" (57).
Practitioners of the New Pragmatism like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish
exemplify the postmodernist inability to avoid making metaphysical commitments
even as they claim to practice an "anti-foundationalism" that renders traditional
philosophy obsolete. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty
tells the story of Western philosophy since Descartes without attempting
to judge the degree to which the systems he describes succeed in telling
the truth about the nature of the universe. Restraining one metaphysical
impulse does not, however, prevent another from breaking through. Rorty’s
very refusal to judge the philosophers he discusses by reference to their
own claims reveals that his pragmatism
is really a sort of metaphilosophy, incapable of meeting, or of being
met by, any of the views that come against it because it is so adept at
arranging those views for purposes of aesthetic contemplation on a level
or plane beneath itself.
Rorty’s ingratiatingly unpretentious tone conceals a theoretical ambition
no less sweeping than that of traditional philosophers. As Rapp points
out,
It [pragmatism] proclaims itself to be not a way of looking at things,
which might be relative to other ways of looking at things, but rather
the way of looking at the ways of looking. Assuming that this is the most
modest of all possible claims, the pragmatist looks at other intellectuals
in the same way that an adult might look at children frolicking or squabbling
on a playground (170).
Likewise, Stanley Fish’s "anti-foundationalism" does not prevent him from
offering the concept of "communities of interpretation" to serve as a "bedrock
explanation" (62) for the theories they produce in place of the traditional
reference to the real world. Rapp notes that the move from reality to communities
as one’s "bedrock" leaves one’s commitments as "foundational" as ever:
In reducing ethics and politics to the actual behaviors of individuals
and communities, the pragmatists arrived at their own set of "first principles,"
without realizing, or at least without admitting, that anything metaphysical
had happened (14).
New Historicists often attempt to set themselves off from their logocentric
predecessors by proclaiming that, although their own interpretations are
no more disinterested than those of earlier researches, as postmodernists
they are at least aware of their biases and willing to acknowledge them.
As Rapp puts it, "they often appear to be saying, ‘We are the only ones
who are willing to admit that all knowledge is contaminated, including
even our own’" (10). This admission, however, only raises another question,
one which renders the entire postmodernist project suspect. How is it that
one can arrive at such a deep insight as the awareness that truth is unattainable?
Rapp observes that an entirely "skeptical position is simply an impossibility"
since
The discovery that knowledge has been skewed by a variety of factors
or circumstances that one has come to know of cannot be used as evidence
that knowledge per se is unachievable. To do so would be to rely on the
knowledge one has acquired concerning the factors or circumstances (8).
Any answer to Rapp’s question—"And how is this knowledge to be explained?"
(9)—involves philosophical commitments as metaphysical as any thesis of
Aquinas.
Devastating as Rapp’s immanent critique is to the pretensions of postmodernist
theorizing, his project involves more than merely debunking the debunkers.
Rapp hopes to contribute to the rehabilitation of speculative philosophy
and thus to the reorientation rather than the rejection of postmodernism.
For Rapp "the most curious thing (and the most hopeful thing) about post-rationalism
is that it clearly knows more than it believes itself to be capable of
knowing" (23). To move beyond the sterile antinomies of contemporary postmodernism
requires that we summon the humility—and imagination—to entertain the possibility
that earlier thinkers may have some insights worthy of our consideration.
Rapp himself calls upon Hegel and Santayana, demonstrating persuasively
that each in his own way "anticipated, and refuted in advance, the chief
contentions of late twentieth-century post-rationalism" (17). Rapp calls
Santayana "the most important twentieth-century American thinker to bear
in mind in assessing the intellectual situation in which we now find ourselves"
(19). It is Hegel, however, to whom Rapp himself turns more often; his
Hegel is not the exponent of German Idealism but rather the sharp critic
of the various transcendentalisms and irrationalisms of his own age. Rapp
thus takes issue with his other guide, Santayana, whose "misapprehension
of Hegel as an idealist" who "believed that mere thinking . . . is capable
of generating existences" (254) prevented him, in Rapp’s view, from appreciating
to what an extent his own criticisms of contemporary idealisms amounted
to merely "his own version of Hegel’s chief objections to transcendentalism"
(254).
Whether Rapp or Santayana is right about Hegel’s overall philosophy
remains in doubt despite Rapp’s flair for discovering aspects of Hegelian
philosophy to which even non-Hegelians may turn with profit. What there
seems little doubt about is that Fleeing the Universal provides
an immanent critique of postmodernism so convincing and so fair-minded
as to render the postmodernist claim to have achieved a radical break with
past thought implausible at best. Rapp’s work is valuable not only for
its specific achievement but for the possibilities it opens. In demonstrating
that the theorizing of our era remains despite its best efforts irrevocably
connected to the thinkers of the past, Rapp implicitly encourages the supposition
that our intellectual, spiritual and moral heritage has not been rendered
entirely obsolete by the advent of an allegedly "postmodernist" world.
In doing so Rapp makes an oblique intervention in the "culture wars" which
he has wisely chosen to avoid in his explicit argument.
*James Seaton is Professor of English at
Michigan State University. [Back]
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