← Thinking Fellows
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello there and welcome to the Thinking fellows podcast, part of the 15:17 podcast network of shows. You can go to 15:17.org podcasts to see all of our shows. There you can subscribe to the Think Fellows and your favorite podcasting apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict and a whole bunch more. Any of the other shows at the 15:17 podcast network can also be found there and subscribing on those platforms is free. So if you do that, you get these shows when they come out and it's, it's helpful because we can see how many people are listening. So thank you for that. Today I am joined by my father, Dr. Scott Keith, by Adam Francisco, and by Bruce Hillman. We are still in our why you should series of episodes and we have Bruce on. He's I think gonna be more reoccurring here in the near future. But I thought as we had you on for the first time in a while that we would do something that has been up your alley or that you've done at 15:17. I think you and my dad did a video series.
- [01:22]
B
That's right, yeah.
- [01:23]
A
In the past. And we're going to talk about postmodernism now. We've done a couple like, I don't know, culture ish episodes here that certainly bump up against postmodernism. But instead of sort of just doing commentary on problems that we have again, and that's not just what the last three episodes are, but there's a little bit of that. I thought we would do an episode sort of titled why you should know the intellectual origins of postmodernism. And I think this is helpful because especially in sort of conservative Christian churches of for the last ten years, postmodernism has sort of been the big boogeyman that everybody talks about. And that's challenging or you know, gonna come as a wave against the church. And what's kind of funny is I think in the non church sphere we're already talking about being post, post modernism.
- [02:24]
B
Even a thing now called metamodernism.
- [02:26]
A
Metamodernism, yeah. So. So we're, we may be beyond postmodernism, but I think if you're going to identify it, it maybe it's not this looming big bogeyman, but it's something that's already occurred within our culture and within our churches. And knowing where it come came from, intellectual origins may help us know why we're past it or not past it or what we're supposed to do about it or not do about it more than Just sort of complaining that something is going to attack the church. So. So, Bruce, could you, like, give us a working definition for the sake of the show of postmodernism?
- [03:08]
C
And then this is always fun because it sort of actively attempts to defy working definitions. So let's do it.
- [03:18]
B
There is. There is. Postmodernism does not allow itself as part of its theory to be explicitly defined. However, there is an accepted kind of two accepted definitions that in the scholarly community, like, yeah, we want. We can't say this is concretely what it is, but if we have to say something, this is what we say. And the first one comes from postmodern scholar named Leotard. It's probably the most famous, and it's. His words are incredulity to meta narratives, which in modern regular English means. Postmodernism is a rejection of stories or theories of life that can account for all things. Christianity, Marxism, scientific method. These things can account for all of human experience. They have a story about it. And postmodernism says no one story can account for human experience. The other definition is that postmodernism should be thought of as a mood more so than a philosophy. It is a philosophy, but it's pervasive. It goes into art, architecture, the humanities, anthropology, psychoanalysis. And so it's sort of a skepticism, a form of skepticism that is an operative mood in how you approach problems and things in society. And it's very much a philosophical mood that is, it's dealing with problems that philosophers in the west have dealt with, and then that trickles into other parts of life. But those would be the two, I would say, most accepted ways of talking about it.
- [04:49]
A
The mood thing is interesting because, I mean, we do this for all sorts of periods of history or philosophies, Right. Like humanism and modernism all have certain types of art styles, you know, maybe theater and music, et cetera, that come. Come with the change in. In philosophy or disposition or even the, you know, the change of power, religious power, throughout. Throughout history. So it doesn't seem unique to postmodernism. But is it saying that mood is the structure of the thing, it's not the cause that then affects those kinds of cultural changes?
- [05:25]
B
Yeah, so when it's defined as mood, it's more trying to distance itself from a concrete, content definition. And it's trying to say. It's trying to point out something very real about postmodernism, which is that what's driving the postmodern project is a sense of reacting against, totalizing and therefore power structures in society. So there's this. So you can put it this way. Postmodernists in their early origins, which we can talk about, they're anti Marxists. They're pro socialism, but they're anti Marxists. They don't like Marx because Marx gives a totalizing story. So. But they're sympathetic because they're leftists, and they're the original kind of people who are writing postmodernism. They're sympathetic because they're leftists with this idea of power dominating minority groups. And from Jews in the Holocaust to Algerians, which is a big issue. Vietnam. These are all things that are happening when they're writing and they're trying to give voice to these groups that have been oppressed or being oppressed in the current time. They're writing and then trying to draw from that the fact that institutions like. You might have heard of Michael Foucault, who's. Who's sort of postmodern and sort of not. He doesn't want to be put in that school, but most people put him there, and probably rightfully so. You know, he's worried about how power in institutions operates to coerce people before they even know it. You know, they're not even aware they're being coerced. And because the institution is set up to coerce, and the institution may not know that it's set up to coerce, but those who are in the institution are still party to it. So there's this. The mood is this sense of, like, skepticism over things like institutions being benevolent. All institutions privilege things, and why do they get to privilege this over that? And it sucks if you're on the other side of the privilege. That's sort of the mood.
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A
That's interesting, because, I mean, how do you. It's. You have to, like, speculate about sort of a totally naked, blank person out there who has no forebearers, no father and mother, no institutions of any kind, no country, no nothing. Right. Because everybody's born into a time and space where history has been happening before them. And so sort of, of course, things are determined and placed upon you that you don't control you. You don't choose to be born into the world. So how do you. So the project then, is taking people who aren't born as blank slates and attempting to set them free as a blank slate.
- [08:16]
B
Can I. Yeah, go ahead.
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C
So, boy, this feels like 2020 YouTube video time, which is when we did the YouTube video series on post.
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A
We'll make sure to add a link.
- [08:27]
C
At the Height of like pandemic lockdowns, honestly. But one of the things I think is interesting about this is that anytime I've had this conversation with Bruce or I had quite a few of these conversations with Jeff Mallinson too. Anytime you have these conversations, people. So I'd say I have like a passing knowledge of postmodernism. And some of these writers, I've not studied them to the level that Bruce has by any degree, but anytime I do read them, the thing that I'm struck with is kind of what you just said where I. I all of a sudd back to trying to define and trying to say, well, what. It seems like that they're just trying to. What I always end up on is it seems like they're just trying to tear down because this. And it's this whole. And Bruce put me on this. This whole institution thing. When I first started, you know, with any interest in postmodernism was Genevieve's Postmodern Times, which basically convinced whole swaths of Lutherans that relativism was going to be the big issue in the future. But at the end of the day, one of the things I'm sort of convinced of is that if that relativism comes about, it comes about by a distrust of sort of institutional truth. So this is sort of the, you know, the, the meta narrative being imposed on you in any way. And you can think about that in institutions if you want sort of like a real life view of this that people struggle with in today's age. It's the idea that, you know, are you born a man or are you assigned a male at birth by the institute, the larger institution? Right. You can, you can see reals. I think 30 years ago, it was hard for us to say what's a real life example of this happening now. It's like, okay, well, there it is.
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A
Or especially a real life example that matters outside of like.
- [10:21]
C
Yeah, yeah, outside of a philosophy textbook, right? And now you're like, okay, there it is. Which I think gets to the fact that this is become more of a mood than a philosophy. I think most of the people that sort of operate in a postmodern mindset have probably never cracked a postmodern philosopher's book ever. They just sort of. The mood is there, and the mood is. Is pretty prevalent. I think one of the most interesting things that Bruce just brought up is that how anti Marxist some of these postmodern philosophers were. Because, you know, I would say that most, as you engage the mood, like in politics or whatever, of Postmodernism today, maybe through like progressivism or something like that, you're really picking up on a lot of Marxist themes there. And so it's, it's interest. It's interesting. I mean, I can see they're writing, they don't like Marxists, but they're kind of drawn to sort of an authoritarian socialism in a sense, maybe not Marx's version of it, but you can see why not Marx, if they're just trying to tear things down? Because Marx really does try to have sort of a one defining character for.
- [11:33]
A
Everything, and the philosophy will save the world, right?
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B
James Lindsay so here's the interesting thing about postmodernism.
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A
It.
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B
This is why some have called it either critically, in a good way, like they affirm this as a good thing about postmodernism, or they decry it as a bad thing about postmodernism is it's sometimes called the end of philosophy, because that's what Derrida sometimes thought it was doing. And he wasn't trying to do that. He just thought this is where the west ends up. Derrida's view was that postmodernism had taken all the Western and modern philosophy as far as it would go, and it unraveled when it went that far. And essentially what he was saying was, this philosophy doesn't offer you a utopia. It doesn't give you like all the other philosophies like Plato. Here's the rule book on the philosopher kings and how we should set up the republic public. Derrida was saying, the best we can do is deconstruct. Or to put it in the positive sense, the way that is not just a negative is all we have is playfulness. At the end of the day, we have playfulness. But we can't construct these institutions and think they'll offer us hope. Or maybe that might be too. They might offer us hope, but they don't fulfill the full promise of the hope that they give. So postmodernism would say, to answer your earlier question, Caleb, it wouldn't say we're going to arrive at blank slated people. What it's going to say is the best we can do is keep deconstructing the institutions, keep showing that these institutions do not have the authority and the pervasiveness that they claim to have. And as long as we keep doing that, what will happen is new institutions will pop up, they'll gain the power. But then we have to try to rip them. We have to bring them back down to earth. We have to dethrone them as the metanarratives and all these other things. So it's a philosophy of playfulness in its positive sense of speaking, and it's deconstructive in its negative sense. But Derrida was very. Said very many times that deconstruction is not destruction. In other words, he didn't say that when you pull down an institution, everything in the institution is bad. It's the reach of the institution that's the problem. It's the fact that the institution wants to narrate its view of the world on everyone else, and that it thinks it can claim a sort of ontological or eternal or truth, however you want to call it, needs an authority to be able to give itself that. It needs something outside itself to say, this is why you should listen to me. And it tends to, in Western history, claim divine access, something to the Hegel spirit, you know, the. Whatever, the eternal, the one. And Darrett is saying, that's all just nonsense to say. My way's right and your way is wrong, and I have the power, so I'm going to use it against you.
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C
What were you saying, Adam, about Lindsay?
- [14:32]
D
Well, it's back to a former conversation. So we're talking about the origins of postmodernism. That.
- [14:39]
B
And we haven't really gotten to the origins, but. Yeah, well, yeah.
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D
You referred to it as playful, and it's a. It's a mood. And what James Lindsay says is postmodernism was somewhere along the line. I think he wants to put it in the 90s, maybe it's the early 21st century, that it was sort of hijacked or used by cultural Marxists. And he. And he calls that sort of this new version of it applied postmodernism, where it is. It's not just deconstructive, it's destructive to flatten everything out. So, like, where I. Where I've encountered it is in, you know, certain dissertations, for example, at university I work for, where there are some that were going after and deconstructing and in the end, trying to destruct what they called heteronormativity. You know, that. That the nuclear family, the historic nuclear family, mom and dad having offspring, that because that has worked in the past, we just sort of assume that that's normal for sexual or. And familial relations. And the intent of these dissertations was to blow that all apart so that any sort of sexual relation was possible for certain. You know, every dissertation had particular ends. Right. And so I wonder if postmodernism is over if we're in metamodernism, or is that what you called it?
- [16:15]
C
Meta.
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D
Post modernism.
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B
There's post postmodernism and then there's metamodernism. And sometimes you'll see the term hyphenated or not. So post hyphen modernism, and then postmodernism, when you see that hyphen. Here's what it's. It's to your point, Adam. So usually when you see the hyphen, it's talking about the very historic time period between 1960 and 1990, when these guys were writing the philosophy of post hyphen modernism. And then postmodernism. No, hyphen refers to the applied postmodernism that infiltrated, entrenched, was used. And of course, it was like the pool overflowed and now it's all over the place. And yeah, so there is a period of historic postmodernism, and then it's entrenched itself in the academy particularly.
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D
It is interesting because when you read them, like, you mentioned Leotard and Michel Foucault, and I forget who else. And Richard Rorty.
- [17:19]
B
Rorty, yeah.
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D
They're not as nasty as today's postmodernists.
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A
Right?
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D
They're playing and, yeah, they're just doing. They're doing. They're living in their little academic world, playing around with things. Now it's been put into kind of like action, it seems it's used as a tool for a very particular end. I would say kind of a revolutionary end, to Scott's point. It does seem that so much of this is postmodernism is just sort of a. Again, just a tool for a cultural Marxist agenda. Now, that might be me as a conspiracy theorist sitting in my basement, which I'm doing right next to my gun safe.
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C
But the picture is rather complete right now.
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A
Adam's like, look it, they're coming for them.
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C
I think that there's an inevitability to that with any project that has a difficulty describing how it would build, but is very good at describing why things need to be taken down, it's going to just seem revolutionary. And I. And I think that this is whether you're talking about sort of political conversations or theological conversations or philosophical conversations or just sort of social conversations. Right now, this is where we get stuck. Is that everybody. You can say it this way. It's easier to be a critic than to be the person with the answer, because the answer takes work. If you're wrong with the answer, you've invested time and resources into Trying to build something that doesn't work out. Whereas to criticize something or to take something apart or to take something down, in a sense, it's less risky. But everybody, everybody, you know, if this is a mood, everybody's in this mood. And so one of the interesting things I think about it is you see sort of the. If there's a tactic to sort of a way that a true postmodernist would handle a conversation to win, where it's kind of deconstructive and you're. You're not refusing to allow overarching narratives and whole night narratives. This whole mood of conversation has made its way into everything. It's literally made its way into everything. And so it's very difficult to have conversations where you are definitive about something in general. Boy, that person really did wrong. Did something wrong. What they did was really, really wrong. That's a difficult thing to say.
- [20:02]
A
There was a guy. What was he doing at my house? Must have been a. Oh, he was a photographer when I was originally trying to sell the house. And he's talking to me about what I do. He saw the Christian books on the shelf and he's like, oh, I was raised a Christian, but you know, my number one problem with Christianity is they're so certain about everything.
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C
Yeah.
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A
And I was like, yeah, that's.
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C
Well, it makes the sort of project that was real big deal when we were at Irvine. Adam, you know, the. With the core where they're trying to teach about goodness, truth and beauty makes that a very difficult project. If everybody that's come in their entire schooling career has been taught that it's. It's difficult if not impossible to say that's actually good or that's actually true or that's actually beautiful. And I think the way that they were trying to counter that in Irvine was to have them read all of these texts on the subjects of goodness, truth and beauty from the giants that have come before us so that we could stand on their shoulders and actually say, that is good, that is true, that is beautiful. But it was always a difficult conversation because of the fancy word is a melu that they grew up in. But the better way is to say the mood. The mood of everything fights against it. Unless.
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B
One of the things to think about too is just that really post not strictly speaking in its intellectual history per se as although it's connected, but one way we can think about the. What Adam's going the applied postmodernism is, in a way, modernity is paying for its own sins. It's reaping what it's sown. That's where postmodernism comes from.
- [21:43]
C
This is where, this is where you and I are like, I think we're most in line on this, what you're.
- [21:48]
B
About to say, like, like modernism gave this certainty that was just not true about everything in the world, from the scientific method to evolution to, you know.
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A
Whether you analysis two cities.
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B
I mean, like this idea of progress and this idea of, you know, but what it really gave us was bodies, like it just gave us piles of corpses. And so in a sense, like you're going to have a cultural reversion and aversion to certainty when you have, you know, hundreds of years of certainty being claimed as the means to make a world a better place, when in fact it gives you atom bombs and corpses. So in a way it's not surprising it's here either because the culture just sort of evolved in a, in a cultural awareness of zeitgeist, whatever you want to call it to be like, well, we're not going to keep doing things this way.
- [22:47]
C
Well, I think one of the reasons, I think that's worth saying and saying again, because the modernism wasn't wrong to ask the individual to pursue truth. What modernism was wrong about was saying that there, you know, was sort of the mood, I wouldn't even say saying the engendering the mood that everything, every single thing had a wrong and right, every single thing had a straight path, every single thing could be engineered properly.
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A
There's always a good guy and a bad guy.
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C
I mean, the social, the certainty of social engineering of the 20th, early 20th century is freaking terrifying. Now the funny thing is, is that I think we're reliving some of that social engineering now as people that were sort of steeped in a postmodern mood are now realizing that they have to put something together. And what they're trying to put together is, you know, in a lot of ways it's using all of the same sort of tactics of the earliest 20th century sort of social engineering, but on steroids in a sense. I mean, we're not building a diverse.
- [24:03]
D
Equitable and inclusive world.
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C
Well, you think of like what you're kind of getting, if even with the social engineering you go as far as sort of like the eugenics movement and how popular it was or sort of the willingness to lock certain people up because of their sort of non conformity or their differences, you know, regardless, even in this country, regardless of whether or not they had sort of, you know, inalienable civil rights or not I. People can't see a dead air quote, sir.
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A
Civil rights, I could hear it. But I'm in the same.
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C
But you. But what you see now though is in trying to build some of this, we're now social engineering, like a lot of sort of the gender questions are getting socially engineered from the, from the top down, you know, where there's legislature coming, legislation coming out upon legislation coming out that's, you know, aimed at how, how you or I can talk about some particular thing or particular person or particular sort of. It's just it, it's just, it's not, it's going to go to the same bad place that it did with the certainty of the 20th century. I mean, the weird thing is what we've ended up with is a deconstructive mood that all of a sudden said, okay, we now know definitively what's right and wrong. And what's right and wrong is to attach any of the morals or values of the 20th century to our modern conversation. And that's definitively right and wrong. And I'm like, okay, well that same definitive nature of your language is what on everything right is going, is going to get us in as much trouble as it did 100 years ago.
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A
So to get to the namesake of this episode a little bit, I mean, I think we just touched on it a little bit, talking finally about modernism and maybe even some of the really devastating ends of, of modernism in the 20th century. What are the, what are the origins, I guess, you know, historical and intellectual for postmodernism? We've talked about that it was, you know, sort of playful as it's being, you know, written as a, or identified as a philosophy and such. And that it has to do with a. We don't want to do these things over again when it comes to the effects of modernism. But what does that all encompass?
- [26:21]
C
That's where you sit back and just let Bruce shine because he knows this stuff like the back of his hand.
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B
Yeah, this is going to be hard to say succinctly which is always the fun about postmodernism. But as quick as I could put it, postmodernism is a self reflexive conversation with another philosophy that came about for a very short period of time in the 20th century, but was highly influential. And that was structuralism. And the other intellectual movement that's speaking into both structuralism and postmodernism is what we call the linguistic turn, Wittgenstein less so though than the structuralism. So to make things even a little more confusing, but it's important to understand the postmodernist philosophers. Derrida, Foucault, igiri, these guys, they're technically classified in the literature as post structuralists. That's the philosophy they're doing. And post structuralism evolves into postmodernism. So you can sort of use post structuralism and postmodernism as a synonym. But when you say postmodernism, you're talking about a very specific kind of postmodernism, the kind that originated and gave birth to postmodernism. And it is a reaction against structuralism, which is itself a attempt to get rid of subjectiveness, relativity. So let me explain this history very briefly, if I can. In Western history, going as far back as the Greeks, what you had, what Western history has as different from Eastern history, if you're going to make these differences, is Western history puts the self at the subject of its. Of its endeavor of investigation. And it wants to find the good life, it wants to find truth, it wants to try ethics. It's too. But it's all revolved around the self. And all as Western history evolves, being and self are the two things that it's always trying to figure out. Well, in the history of this, at some point it starts to move into, in the 1800s, particularly existentialism with like Kierkegaard and stuff, and the Romantic movement, you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson and these guys. And what's the Romantic movement and existentialism really doing? It's saying that the outside world, the real world, is all mitigated through this thing called the self. And so no one can really know the outside world, but they also can't really know the inside world. The inside world is purely subjective. And so what do you get with Kierkegaard in the Romantics, they're always looking for this thing they call the authentic self. And this idea of the self and the authentic self starts to get pushed back against in the 1800s. And one of the things that pushes back against it is what will become known as structuralism. Structuralism wants to essentially say, hey, we got this thing called the scientific method. It's an objective way to look at reality, but it doesn't work really well with the humanities. It's really hard to use this, the. To find objective truth. In anthropology, sociology, psychology, through the scientific methods. You can go up with experiments, but it's you. Your ability to say something about humanities feels less so. What if we could jettison all this existential garbage and subjectivity and relativism? And what if we could find a method for the humanities that would ground the humanities in objectivity and thus science. The natural sciences would have their way of finding objectivity, and we would have our way of finding objectivity. That was the goal of structuralism. And the theory started to birth out of new movements that were happening in the intellectual world, particularly 2. Psychoanalysis on the one hand, and Marxism on the other hand. Why these two? Well, think about Freud. What does Freud say? Freud says that everything that's happening in your life, all your conscious thoughts, aren't the deepest truth of why you're thinking things. They are situated in a unconscious. What does Mark say? Religion, happiness, institutions, they are all based on essentially an unconscious. That unconsciousness is the economic foundation of what's running the world. So you start to get in the intellectual circles this idea that, oh my gosh, there's this hidden structure underlying the things that we are aware of. And this is easy for Western philosophy to do because Plato had given them this long time ago with the idea of the forms, that there was something beyond what we were just experiencing in what we now call the conscious. Of course, Plato didn't use that language, but in the visible, in the sensible, and. And there's something intelligible and. And that's what stands behind it. So Freud and Marx are in one way, whether they know it or not, they're. They're still very much in the western Platonic tradition. So the structuralists say, okay, knowing that there are these literally structures beneath what is on the surface, maybe if we could find those structures, they would be universal because they're structures. They would be causal. They would tell us how things happen. And therefore we could ground the human person, human ethics, human good life philosophy in these humanities, in these structures. So how are we going to find the structures? That's the project. How are we going to find the structures? Essentially, the way that they do it is, is they say the best way to find how it works is through the idea of language. So if you want to know the philosophy of the eight of the 19th and 20th centuries that has led to everything that you either love or hate now it all boils down to study of language, linguistics, signs. That's what all contemporary philosophy really is about. And it starts with structuralism. But just always remember, structuralism is trying to find objective truth in the humanities. It's not a relativistic project. Post structuralists are going to be against this thing I'm describing. That's what's going to lead to postmodernism. They're going to react with nausea against what I'm going to tell you. So setting the stage here, the biggest structuralist guy, late 1800s, is Ferdinand de Saussure. He's a linguist, but he's a linguist who is dealing with the philosophy of language. And he really does something that at first glance doesn't seem particularly radical, but whose after effects will be seismic and cannot be overstated. He comes up with a new view of language which is now relatively accepted by a lot of people. The old view was simply that language was what was called in the literature. It was called diachronic. So what do I mean by that? Fancy language for simple concept? If I want to know the meaning of the word, I look it up in a really good dictionary. And what is the dictionary? What is the tool a dictionary? What does it do? It gives me a genealogy or a history of a usage of a word. Or if you're in the diachronic philosophy of language, it gives me the meanings of a word. So I go to a dictionary and I have a history of meanings. What Saussure does is he says, what if that's not the way that language works? What if language works synchronically, which means that a word is completely arbitrary from its meaning. It only finds its meaning as it is used in a context.
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A
What a headache.
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B
So I'll give you an example.
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C
This is all a headache.
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B
The word tree in the diachronic way of understanding language is very Platonic. There is a big leafy wooden thing outside, and my word tree is a label for that thing. But. So sir says, that sounds nice and it sounds very reasonable. But when you actually start to think how language works across different languages, that's not what happens when we say the word tree. We have to make a distinction between the word and the concept that is represented there. He comes up with this phrase, this terminology, which is very important in postmodernism and in structuralism, which is the difference between a sign and a signifier. So a sign is. A sign would be the word tree, the actual word that you could find in the dictionary. That's a sign because it's pointing to something. When you have use the word tree, you don't. A tree doesn't create it.
- [36:09]
A
You don't create a tree.
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B
It's just a sign. Yeah, so far this sounds diachronic. It sounds like it's just the meaning of the word. But this is where sorcerers differs. He goes, but there's a difference between the sign and the signified. The signified is the concept. So you can think of it this way. There is the game of chess, and then there are the moves that I'm making while I'm playing chess. What essentially Saucer is saying is. Is the. What the. There is rules to how you play chess, and they are like, bigger and give rise to the actual experience of playing chess, the game that you're playing. And this is how words actually work. When I say the word high, that word doesn't mean anything, except. Except the reason it means, the reason that it has a definition is because there's another word that's its opposite, low. And there are words that are similar to it, but are not the same ascent going up, things like this. So sir's big breakthrough is is this. A word doesn't mean. Because it is a label for a thing. A word means because it's part of a structure or a system, because we use it. Differing things.
- [37:34]
A
Yeah.
- [37:35]
B
And that's why we can have the word tree. And it sounds like tree, and it's spelled like tree, but another language puts another sign on it. The word doesn't bring anything with it. It's just a sound that is publicly accepted as the sign. But tree and baum, in German, these are different signs because one sounds like baum is written differently, and the other one is treated different signs, but they're pointing to the same signified, the same concept of what we in English call tree, and in German you call baumgarth. But the only reason that any word means anything is because it's different from other words and it's related to other words. Okay, so this is structuralism. Now, why is this important? Well, another guy comes along named Levy Strauss, he's a later structuralist, and he starts to say, well, why does it just work with language? Doesn't everything work this way? Everything has meaning because it's not something else.
- [38:41]
A
Yeah.
- [38:41]
B
And by the way, this is. CS Lewis makes a structuralist argument in Mere Christianity when he talks about a crooked line versus a straight line or good and bad, and how they have different meanings in other words. The structuralists are saying language shows you that there's an objective reality, but not because the word itself is truth. The word is truth. I mean, it's truth in its own language. But the. The. The sign is not what you should be paying attention to. You should be paying attention to the space between the sign and the concept, the sign and the signified. And it's these differences that are what make truth. Because I can find the same difference in other Signs. So I can take Baum and I can take Tree, but they. They're different. But they both point to the same signified concept, which. And that's why language works, because these concepts are still the same. All right, well.
- [39:40]
D
There'S more.
- [39:42]
B
That's structuralism. You have one other strain that comes in slightly after this, and it's Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is a guy who hates all this, thinks it's. It thinks it's just not that it's nonsense. He doesn't think that. He thinks that philosophy in general, the whole project of philosophy, shows that a language, what he will call language game, is broken. So essentially he's saying whenever philosophers ask how many angels can dance on head of the pin or sign versus signified, they're showing you that it's. There's a breakdown in language and that there's not a real problem that anyone has to worry about.
- [40:23]
A
Right.
- [40:24]
B
Problems of philosophy aren't real. Yeah. They're only problems because language has broken down. Now, how can he say that? Because Wittgenstein says that he agrees with the structuralist that a word only means what it means because it has a difference from other words. He'll accept that premise, but he goes a bit further, and he says, within each human language, they're playing a game. But he asked this. He goes, how do you define the word game? And he has a whole long thing on this where he goes, it's actually very hard in English to define that word because we can't agree on what it means. Do you need a competitor to play a game? He says, no, you can play solitaire, you can play a computer game now. You can have an AI competitor. So you don't need a competitor to have a game. Do you need to have something to win? No, you don't necessarily have to have something to win because people can. Can play, kids can play, you know, ring around the Rosie. It's a game, but there's no winner. And he says, or you can think about a duel where, like, someone gets shot and dies. Some people might consider that a game, but other people would not consider that a game. So when you actually go to define a word like game, it's much harder to define than a word like tree. So Wittgenstein says, yeah, everybody takes tree and bachelor as the words they want to think about language about. But you got to take a more abstract word like game to really see how language works. And. And once you find out a game, what do you find? Well, you find two Things that are interesting. He says, first, everyone knows what a gain is. There's no confusion over it. Everyone knows what the word game means, but as soon as you start to have to define gain, you can't do it. And he accepts this as actually showing that language works as a network. And there is a privileged part of this network where we might call it common usage or common acceptance of the term. And then as you move out from there, you start to get differences in how the word is used. And this is what Wittgenstein says, this is how words adopt, evolve, and change, is because they're not just that center. They're actually always being used in new contexts, and therefore they're expanding. And we don't always agree, as the further we get out from the center, the less we agree on whether something's a game or not. Duel is much harder to agree upon as a game than Chutes and Ladders. So again, Wittgenstein is saying that language is working in this sort of evolving sense. And so when it comes to the questions of philosophy, then here's where Wittgenstein goes, and here's the big breakthrough that he makes with philosophy. So if a philosopher says something like, do I exist? Wittgenstein would say, that's a dumb question, because it's like asking my dumb question, what's a game? We all know what a game is, and we actually all know what existence is. And we all know we exist. Descartes and Kant or any of these other people to do the. The reason why you're asking the question, what is existence? What does it mean? Is because you have a breakdown in language. You're on the outskirts of the accepted meaning. But the word but it's not really a question for real life. It doesn't matter. It's only a breakdown in language. If we took that definition on the periphery out and we gave it maybe a clearer word, it wouldn't be a philosophical problem. There'd be no problem to solve. You only have a problem because you have a discrepancy in the definition as it exists on the periphery. So Wittgenstein says, essentially, philosophical problems either get solved because we get better definitions and then it just all goes away. Or we find out there are some things, like the word game, that can never be solved. But that doesn't mean we don't know what they mean. They still function. So for Wittgenstein, what he says is, language is a tool. It's like a hammer. And you can use a hammer for its main purpose. To nail something into a wall. But you can also use a hammer as a weapon. Now what if you. The philosopher said, but is it really a weapon? Can't I use it to stir my cookie dough? Wittgenstein would say, of course you can, but it's only a problem for you because you're being an idiot by using it to stir your cookie dough. It's not a real problem. It doesn't actually matter. So the philosophers are all arguing over nonsense most of the time or over things that aren't nonsense but can never be solved because of the slippage of.
- [44:57]
C
Language that is shocking to hear. I've never heard of philosophers wasting so much time on useless argumentation.
- [45:06]
B
So in a sense, he tries to get an end.
- [45:07]
C
Just happy theologians are immune from such things.
- [45:10]
B
Yeah, yeah. They never do such things. All right, well, now come the post structuralists, and I'll just say this anytime you want to. And this is my own view of pedagogy, of learning something. Always ask yourself the most fundamental question, in my opinion. What is this group or proponent anxious about? If you can answer that, you can probably understand the whole thing or at least get its essence. What are they anxious about? We learned structuralism is anxious about subjectivity. They want to get. They're trying to find an objective way to. To ground.
- [45:45]
A
Really don't want particular. The problem words to exist game, you know?
- [45:51]
B
Right. They want to have the existence being, what, Whatever.
- [45:55]
A
They want only the, the really simple words that we. That have a signifier, a clear signifier to exist.
- [46:02]
B
Now you get the post structuralists. They're leftists, but they don't like Marx and they don't like the history of the 20th century. So they, they don't want liberals in.
- [46:11]
A
Like a philosophical sense. Them, they don't want you.
- [46:14]
B
No, no, they're radicals. They're radical leftists, but they're not Marxists. None of these true post structuralist guys. They don't like Marxism, but they. But they might be for socialism or they might be for helping the poor, but they, they're not. They don't buy Marx's account of humanity and how things work. It's a structure. And this is where they're anxious. They think structures lead. Well, there's two things. They think structures lead to oppression, which they're living out in the end of the 20th century, since the World War II. I mean, they've lived through all this. So it's very real to them. That's the one thing. The second thing is, is that they actually are going to use the post structural argument for objectivity against itself to undermine it. So that's why I said at the beginning that postmodernism is a reflexive criticism of structuralism. It's going to use structuralism to destroy structuralism. It's going to use its own weapon against it. How? Essentially what it says is, structuralism had said that there were these structures that give objectivity to the world and underlie it. But the postmodernists, post structuralists say the idea that there are structures is itself a structure.
- [47:30]
A
And it's going to be very easy to identify when people are doing that. Right. Because they're just going to, for some of these words, like game, or probably get to more meaningful things like good or especially religious questions, whatever, true faith, whatever you want to put in there. When somebody starts talking like there's one definition for these things, one mode, we very easily identified a problem, a structure, and we can just. We just have to go above that person and now see which. Which institution has given them that singular definition.
- [48:10]
B
Exactly. And now, so what this post structuralists are going to do, and Derrida does it the best, which is why he's the most famous, is he's going to combine the structuralist technique with some of Wittgenstein's view of language, some of what so sir said about the sign and the signified, and he's going to blow everything up. How does he do it? Short version is this. He believes that language works both diachronically and synchronically. So a word, when you use a word, on the one hand, he agrees that it comes diachronically. A word comes with all of its past meanings are, are in that word. All the uses of that word are. Come in some sense with that word, or you couldn't use it, but there. But, but Derrida says they're lurking in the background. You have to privilege one definition whenever you use a word. You can't use multiple definitions at once or all the definitions at once. So anytime we use a word, we do accept that there's a dichronic history, a genealogy of the word's meaning. But we choose to privilege one in our speech and that function synchronically. As we're speaking, we're privileging at that moment, a word, a meaning. And that would mean that the meaning of the word when I'm using it in a sentence is both, whatever it is in its context as I'm using it right now, plus the suppressed meanings that I choose not to use Because I want it to mean this. And you can already maybe start to sniff some of the postmodern idea here that's going on of repression and binaries and hierarchies were privileged, the very essence of language. We have to pick one meaning. But then what happens, Derrida says, is the same thing Wittgenstein noticed. There's always miscommunication. Why does miscommunication happen? Well, it happens a lot because, as Wittgenstein had said, there's all these different things that come out from the periphery. This whole diachronic history of the language, plus there's always generating new, new meanings of a word. You know, the word gay meant happy, and then it meant homosexual, and then it meant, you know, that's so gay. Like, the word is always gentleman. CS Lewis says in CS Lewis, you know, it originally meant someone who had a coat of arms and own land, and now it means someone who's civilized. And now it might mean someone who's a jerk. Like, the words are always synchronic. On the one hand, they're always making new definitions, but they're also diachronic because that.
- [50:49]
A
The new definition has to reference the old one. So it is diachronic.
- [50:54]
B
Well, it doesn't have to always necessarily, the word could be used. So what's the word I'm thinking of? This is a. Oh, it's a famous. I'm drawing a blank right now. Maybe it'll come to me. That's the way you're saying. Yes, it generally functions that it has a. It certainly has a history with its diachronic background. But sometimes a word can be used in a different way. So Derrida gives an example. He takes the French word difference, which is spelled just like our English word difference. But he. He makes. He reminds us in the etymology of the word that it combines two other words. It's a compound word that became its own word. Differ means to have difference, like between two things. But it also comes from the Latin de fear, which means to defer, to put off. And the word difference combines this. Now, he takes that word and he takes the e out, and he puts an a in, but pronounces it the same way, difference. Why does he change the spelling? Because he wants to show that when you write something down, you can. You can change the sign, you can change the word, and that you can now completely change the meaning if you want. So maybe his difference with an A means something totally different than the difference in the true French, but it still sounds like and has the etymology of to differ and to defer. So for Derda, language is playful. It's always conjuring its past. That then has to be privileged. But then context can make it mean something totally different. Even accidentally. A word could be used accidentally, meaning I use it the way I intend to use it, but you take it a different way, so you misinterpret my use. And then if that becomes a convention, it has a new meaning. So he agrees with Wittgenstein that language is, is always kind of synchronic, but also that it carries its diachronic background with it. What does all this mean for philosophy and postmodernism? Well, if this is true of language and we think in language, and then it would, it would maybe be true for everything that we are aware of in life. Everything would have. Everything's a sign that is related to a bigger concept, and that concept is distinct from the signs that are pointing to it. And the signs. What do you do when you go to a dictionary? Darradd, it says you don't find concepts, you find signs pointing to concepts. And if you want to know a meaning of a word, you get more words. And then if you don't know what those words mean, you have to look them up and you get more words. In other words, sign, sign, sign, sign, sign. And for Derrida, this means you can't ever have closure. Nothing can be universal and objective in its true sense, or if it is universal and objective, we can't definitely know it because language won't let us. Language itself is the hindrance. We can't capture anything universally because the way language operates doesn't. And we think in language. And he points out how animals don't, you know, dogs don't think in language. So thoughts are not the same as language. There's a distinction between thoughts and language. But we think in language and we divide. Or at least to put it more accurately, we get meaning from language. We don't get meaning from thoughts. We have to put it into a concept, a sign that points to something and that's how meaning is generated. That's the quickest I can.
- [54:47]
D
We're about like 14 minutes over.
- [54:49]
B
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I was reminded once, you know, if you, if you ask a complicated question, you, you can get a complicated answer.
- [54:57]
A
Well, fair enough. Oh, my. Well, I, the. We do have to then continue to go over a little bit because we just got to get our wrap up question here because we got to tie the front end of this show and now our sort of history, end of the show. And I think, I mean a lot of opportunity for reading for those who are actually really what interested in where this is and where it's, where it was and where it's going kind of questions, but the, the why you should that does. Why this matters. It, you know, I'll let anybody take a shot at this, but it seems to me that if you're going to live in one of these spaces with structures, that means you're going to see them, the attempt for them to be deconstructed. Right. And you might also be able to identify times where you are part of deconstructing some other sort of structure. And that this has to do with the way we use language and the way you want to use language, and whether or not that is like commonly accepted, you want it to be universal, or you're just kind of going with the flow and letting the game, the playfulness of language and evolution of language and change happen. And whether or not you can remain play. How long you can remain playful is how long you can remain sort of at peace with everything.
- [56:23]
B
So I think, and I have not read this anywhere, so this may be a dumb analysis, but I think to your point, you can hold both. And I think one of the things that, that answers your question is actually the Incarnation. This is my thought here, because on the one hand you have the eternal begotten Logos. So you have this word in Western history that becomes flesh, that is in a sense ever generative and eternal. The Logos is the reason of God. He is the Son of God, and eternally he's always there. And so in one sense, he's eternally generative. He has no limits or boundaries, but he comes into earth in a human form as Jesus in a body, and then he resurrects in a body. So he maintains that human form. You know, he's God from God, light from light, true God from true God, all that. And so what you actually have in the Logos in a way is you have an affirmation on the one hand of sort of the playfulness and the endlessness of what Wittgenstein and Derrida might see in language. But you have a very bounded set in the Incarnation as well, where truth is actually there and concretized and is limited. I mean, he suffers and he dies. These are limited things. These aren't. You know, he comes. He's the Messiah who comes. So maybe, just maybe, the Christian theologian has to sort of accept an uneasy summary of the Two. And knowing that the mystery of these things probably ultimately resides in the way the truth and the life himself, who is both endlessly eternal and generative and bounded and set at the same time. And that we as creatures, you know, as much as we may philosophize on, on these things, and as much as language may indeed show us our limitations on conceptual abilities to grab truth, the incarnation at the same time pushes back. So it's not just fully. The truth is not just fully obscurely out there and too big for us to see. It takes on flesh and lives among us. So there's a lot of room for the theologian to go, I think, with these two differences.
- [58:49]
A
Holy smokes. That sounds like two more episodes, Bruce.
- [58:52]
D
Yeah, we know what he's doing next week.
- [58:56]
B
Yeah, it might take more than two episodes, but.
- [59:01]
C
Well, we did like 10 YouTube episodes and didn't get to the end.
- [59:04]
A
I was gonna say. Yeah, I feel like, you guys, the postmodern thing was like eight episodes or so. So that's, that's a long, long time. But there's a lot to unpack here. And I mean, I think, I think the reason to do it and to do a little bit of the unpacking is because like I said at the beginning, everybody is calling things postmodern, is trying to identify it, is trying to identify it, I think in especially our space with the problems that they're experiencing in society and their churches and their lives right now. And I think it's useful if you're going to have this thing that you're constantly referencing that you have semi. Some picture of what it actually is and not just. Not just the negative consequences that you think you're experiencing from it right now. So thanks for coming on, Bruce, to, I mean, do a sweeping history on that. So we will, we will catch you next week. If you enjoyed found this thinking fellows useful or informative, we would really appreciate your support. You can go to 1517 to do that. Another great way that you can support the show is by becoming a subscriber to the Thinking Fellows. If you do that, you get episodes as they come out. You can subscribe on your favorite podcasting apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, anywhere basically that podcasts are found. And if you run out of Thinking fellows to listen to, you can always go to the other shows on the 15:17 podcast network. You, you can find those again on any of those podcasting apps. We will catch you next time.
- [60:41]
C
Bye Bye.