A REPLY TO MAGPIE

Magpie [sigh.  Doesn't anyone have a real name anymore?] posted a comment asking the following question:

"Prof.

Now that we are speaking of leftwing cant, clichés, unthinking people, intellectual fashions and such, there is a question I'd like to ask you (as a philosopher, you are probably in the best position to answer).

But, I want to be fair and not put you in an uncomfortable situation; so, let me warn you before you give any answer: this topic could easily degenerate into a flames war; so, I honestly understand if you decide to pass.

What's your opinion of the so called Sokal affair of a few years back? What do you think of post-modern thought, relativism, Nietzsche and other things like that?"

Since answering that grab bag of questions is a bit of a tall order, I thought I would do it in a blog post, rather than as a comment on a comment.  Let me preface my response by saying that I am a retired seventy-nine year old professor on a secure pension.  Nothing puts me in an uncomfortable position.  Heaven knows, there are lots of topics on which I have nothing remotely useful to say, but someone who has picked as many  intellectual fights as I have over the years can hardly slide away from a topic simply because someone may get angry at what I say.

So.  First of all, the Sokal affair.  Those of you who are unfamiliar with it should read the nice summary on Wikipedia, as I just did.  Briefly, a physicist named Alan Sokal wrote a send-up of fashionable modern leftwing literary commentary which he called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" [no kidding] and submitted it to Social Text, described on Wikipedia as "an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies."  They published it, whereupon Sokal revealed that it was a hoax.  Needless to say, Jacques Derrida was not amused.

What is my opinion?  I loved it!  The editors of Social Text should be ashamed of themselves.  If they had any sense of honor, they would have committed ritual academic suicide by forthwith terminating the journal.  I have devoted my life to taking extremely difficult ideas and struggling to make them as simple and clear as I can.  It is not for nothing that I introduced my explication of the famously obscure first chapter of Capital with an old Jewish joke.  I have no patience with pseudo-intellectuals who take simple ideas and make them as obscure and difficult as possible by cloaking them in impressive jargon.  Nor do I for a moment imagine that that sort of cant has anything remotely "leftwing" about it.

Let me illustrate with a story that I told in my Autobiography [but, alas, I cannot assume that everyone reading this blog worked through that 800 page monstrosity.]   Many years ago, I was invited to be a member of a panel discussion on "the public responsibilities of intellectuals" hosted by the University of Kentucky.  My co-panelists were two very well known supposedly left-wing intellectuals:  Martin Jay of the University of California, author of an important book on the Frankfort School, and my UMass colleague Sam Weber, a member of the Comparative Literature Department.  Naively imagining that the organizers of the event wanted me to speak on the public responsibilities of intellectuals, that being the announced topic, and mindful of the fact that the panel was aimed at a general audience, not at members of the Kentucky faculty and their students, I wrote a clear, simply expressed, but serious talk on -- the public responsibilities of intellectuals.  Martin Jay chose to speak on images of vision in the writings of nineteenth century French intellectuals [that apparently being his research topic of the moment.]  Weber gave an incomprehensible talk on Heidegger's essay on  technology.  During the discussion period, I made a strenuous effort to get these two post-modern leftwing intellectuals to address a simple question:  What did they think about faculty unions?  It seemed to me that two professed Marxists ought to be able to handle that one without breaking a sweat.  Try as I might, I could not get either of them to take a stand in favor of the unionization of professors.

As I have explained in some of my writings, the failure of Marx's prediction of world socialist revolution -- a failure compounded of the willingness of the French and German working classes to fight one another in the First World War, the fragmentation of working class solidarity by the persistence of a pyramidal hierarchy of working class wages and salaries, and the success of the capitalist class [pace Keynes] in managing economic crises -- sucked the life out of a true revolutionary politics, which then retreated into the Humanities where it took up residence in departments of English and Comparative Literature.  The mocking epithet "tenured radicals" has more than a smidgen of truth to it.

But the Sokal affair forces us to confront a larger and more serious issue:  the utter ignorance on the part of most humanists of science and mathematics.  How else to explain the inability of the editors of Social Text to recognize what any moderately educated person should have been able to spot as a hoax?  This is an old problem, associated in my mind with the English chemist and novelist C. P. Snow and his famous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures."  Those of you who are interested can seek it out and read it.  Snow was addressing a problem that was peculiar to the English educational system, which segregated students at the high school level into a classics and literary track and a science math track, but his observations have considerable truth for Americans today.  I find it appalling that pompous, self-important people who feature themselves intellectuals know so little about science and math.  And it is particularly appalling that some of them should wrap themselves in the mantle of Karl Marx!  Just imagine what Marx would have thought of  "radicals" who could not be troubled to inform themselves about physics, chemistry, or biology!

As some of you will know, I have tried in my own explication of Marx's theories to bring together in fruitful conjuncture considerations drawn from literary criticism and formal mathematics, all in the service of a radical critique of capitalist society.

As for the remainder of Magpie's questions:  Nietzsche was a brilliant thinker and writer,  whose works have not inspired me personally.  From that same period, I find more to love in the writings of Kierkegaard.  But Brian Leiter has written about Nietzsche, and champions his thought, and I recommend you to him for enlightenment.

I will offer an opinion about post-modernism if someone will please tell me what on earth it is.  I could tell you what I think the term "post-modern" means, but I doubt anyone would be interested or find what I had to say useful.

As for "relativism," presumably in ethics [I cannot make much sense out of the notion of relativism in science!], I have written a good deal about that subject in the course of trying to understand Kant's ethical theories.  This post is running too long as it is, so I shall bring it to a close.  If anyone is seriously interested in hearing me say again what I have said before about relativism in ethics, I will have a go at it.