Rick Roderick is a great lecturer and thinker, one of the best I have ever
listened to and learned from. His depth of knowledge, and at the same time his
fluent description and interpretation of other prominent thinkers and their
discourse, along with his sharp and witty rhetoric, is truly refreshing. In
this series of lectures (delivered in the 1993), he discusses the philosophy at
the end of the twentieth century, focusing on one great and over-writing
problem, which is even more salient in our lives today: “self under siege”. What
follows is the first part of an eight-part post on this lecture series in which
I have borrowed heavily from his lectures. This is an attempt to mainly summarize
(and sometimes analyze and interpret) these lectures and describe the fundamental
ideas behind them. I am hoping that this could be an introduction and a
stepping stone to future posts that are linked to these ideas.
Roderick starts with a short account of what he calls “deflationary”
philosophical attempts of the last few decades to understand the self, society,
and our place in it. Richard Rorty and his argument in his article titled “the
world well lost” is one example he invokes. Rorty develops and advocates for a
principle that has become widespread in (analytical) philosophy, the notion
that if there are problems that are still around after 2500 years for which we
still have no clear solution or answer, then the right response by the
contemporary philosopher is that “I don’t care.” Roderick argues that this is partly
deeply rooted in the anti-intellectualism of the American culture. Another
example is Tarski’s Theory of Truth (in a nutshell, Tarski argues that the
sentence “snow is white” is true “if and only if snow is white”). This according
to Roderick is another “deflationary” account of the concept of “truth”, an
account provided which is in sharp contrast with the glowing and humanistic
accounts developed by Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas and others. In these
lectures Roderick clearly distances himself from this deflationary approach by
digging deep into the work of some of the most prominent thinkers of our time.
“Information overload” and its relation to “self under siege” is one of the
first issues Roderick addresses. He talks about the information load we receive
in our everyday life, the number of images we see, the number of things that
touch our skins, and things that impinge upon our intellectual apparatus, these
are things that shape our reflections not only in philosophy but also in our
everyday life. One interesting example he invokes is Kennedy’s assassination.
He argues that in this case the problem is not the lack of complexity or
information, the problem is the fact that “we know too damn much about it!”
There are too many possible assassins, too many secret plots, too many movies,
too many books! This presents a bewildering situation for the self, to decide
what to believe in and what not to believe in, and at a more important level,
what to make of itself. Self has to find meaning now in a system that has
reached extreme altitudes of complexity, which could even contaminate our purest
motives. This wraps a web of complexity around meaning in our modern life. Our
world today is as (instrumentally) rationalized as it has ever been. We have
chased information down to its last bit of detail. This is what we can clearly
see in our universities and education system, where knowledge has been replaced
by and reduced to information, a phenomenon that can be referred to as “discipline-atomized
education” where an economist might know everything there is to know about a
subfield of a subfield in economics, but knows nothing about much broader
issues such as the history and evolution of economic thoughts, economic and
scientific methodology and how and why it has changed over time, Great
Depression and the New Deal, John Maynard Keynes and his school of thought,
Adam Smith and his views (over and beyond the caricature of his views that are
usually depicted), Milton Friedman and his instrumentalist approach to science,
etc.. The form of rationality our world has plunged into is what is referred to
as “instrumental rationality”, the kind that is measurable and quantifiable
like in banking, accounting, advertising, etc..
To highlight the importance and the urgent relevance of the issue of “self
under siege”, Roderick asks us to take a look around to see the extreme success
of advertising campaigns, both in business and politics, the number of friends
around us that are on a 12-step program to stop something (this example of
course id more relevant when Roderick delivered these lecture in the 90s,
social media is a more relevant example of our current predicament today, or
another good example is hundreds of programs to lose weight), or to ask
ourselves given the current use of the word “dysfunctional”, who is not
dysfunctional in our societies today?
One argument that might be raised to dispute the notion of self under
siege, is to give a sense of what the self was more authentically? Roderick
argues that this is not a simple wisdom that could be imparted to someone, but rather
an issue that we should have a conversation about. Throughout the history,
there have been culturally available reservoirs of meaning that were relatively
stable and within which we could find a place for ourselves, for example great
religions are one of those main reservoirs of meaning. He points out however
that this is not an argument to go back to those archaic structures (which is
what neo-conservatives in the US have been advocating for: a religious revival).
He believes we cannot go back to those structures because we know or suspect to
know that those belief systems have become under considerable suspicion. This
has been done to a large extent by three prophets of modernity, Foucault calls
them “founders of discoursivity”, and Roderick calls them “masters of suspicion”:
Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx (to which Roderick also adds Charles Darwin). It is
not only their intellectual work that began to make us feel stranged, alienated
and separated from these reservoirs of meanings such as religion. They reflect
a sea change of our view of ourselves and how we got here. They put before us
the problem of false consciousness, of the self being false to itself, this is
a problem that religion was ill-equipped to deal with. Descartes assured us
that as long as we know something clearly and distinctly then we are fine.
Freud however undermined this notion by arguing that although we might think we
know something, it could really be a forbidden piece of our sexual history,
prohibited and thus channeled through another direction, and we would never
consciously admit it. Marx comes at this from a different direction. He has
noticed that history is generally written by the sides that win, and what he
tries to unmask is economic interest. In his attack against religion, he argues
that the entire religious enterprise serves economic interest. Although
according to Roderick communism is a stupid notion, he argues that Marx’s
fundamental criticism of capitalism is correct: our being is shaped by economic
interest, by money, which adds to the complexity mentioned before. The third
critique comes from Nietzsche and it is about the reversal that comes about when
the religious, as it were, trick themselves about what they are really doing.
Roderick argues that after these three thinkers are done with our intellectual
cultur, childhood ends for our culture. Paul Ricoeur argues that the positive
significance of these criticisms is what they have in common: the fight against
the gods of men. He believes that a Marxist critique of ideology, a Nietzschean
critique of resentment, and a Freudian critique of infantile distress are
hereafter the views through which any kind of mediation of faith has to pass. These
are critiques that were developed in the 19th and into the 20th century, they
have become a common possession of our culture, and they have cut off one of
the main reservoirs within which we might find a coherent meaning for our life:
religion. Roderick argues that this does not however mean that we cannot have
religion anymore if we understand those criticisms, it means that we have to
have it under the mark of complexity, insecurity and confusion.
To sum up, these cultural critiques of the problems that are thrust upon us
by modernity cut to the heart of two traditional ways of understanding the
self: self in relation to the god, and self’s understanding of the self (the
role of economic motives, desire, resentment, etc.). This has been the attempt
of many thinkers over many decades to provide a reasonable answer to this
question, from Kant to Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, and more recently Sartre, Foucault,
Habermas, Derida, Baudrillard, and others. As a result, Roderick embarks on a
journey to deliver a series of lectures, each dedicated to one of the major
philosophers of the end of the twentieth century, to provide an answer through
an insightful discussion to this important question: what is self, and why is
self under siege today? What does the more authentic self look like?
