This is being written the last Sunday evening before our national election. By the time it’s posted, tabulation of ballots will be under way, perhaps disclosing which way the political winds are now blowing. However, as Hegel wrote:

The owl of Minerva

takes flight

only at dusk.

He meant that philosophers are not in a position to produce political forecasts. But that constraint doesn’t preclude them from attempting to read the spirit of the times – especially insofar as philosophy has its own part to play in the Zeitgeist.

So here I am, climbing on the Owl’s feathery back (she’s the pet bird of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom) to report whatever I can see that stands out in the cultural landscape.

I’ve been advised by a reliable philosopher friend that post-modernism has peaked and is now looking a bit tired, somewhat yesterday. So far as I could see, it had not penetrated academic philosophy very deeply, though it had affected other liberal arts or humanistic fields such as literature and art history, the social sciences and even psychology.

What sort of influence did it have? What was it telling us? It’s a form of skepticism. But unlike the more traditional efforts in that genre, post-modernism did not so much refute particular claims of knowledge as disclaim any need to rely on evidence or logic – even for the purpose of refutation! Rather, refutation and whatever is supposedly refuted stand on an equal footing. Both are feats of rhetoric – thus exercises in persuasion. No data from the external world – outside the domain of speech and counter-speech – can be admitted to refute a claim. Nor can logic be admitted for its usual purpose of exposing a contradiction. I contradict myself, you say? And I say, So what! Leave us alone man, we’re dancing – and we’re not doing that refuting dance.

Is nothing in postmodernism serious? Does it all come down to mere to-ing and fro-ing? No certainly not, but the hard edges will have to be imported from the political domain. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) in his Prison Notebooks (1929-1935) lifts the whole dance above the level of pleasurable diversion. For Gramsci, the exercise of freeing humanistic source materials and methods from evidential constraints can serve his desired political purpose. In his view, the liberal arts support the culture – while the culture in turn provides a rationale for regimes of Oppression. Accordingly, he urges his readers to infiltrate the liberal arts as well as the professions they staff and service. Once taken over, these disciplines can be remade into instruments for the exposure of the regimes of Oppression. In sum, postmodernism’s purported indifference to knowledge claims can assist a Gramscian takeover of cultural and political power.

So post-modernism may be going out of style, but the Gramscian agenda it serves has not gone out of style. Anyone working in a humanistic discipline knows that one risks denunciation as an Oppressor if one deviates from whatever opinions or opinion shapers are approved at the moment. So the latest variant on what became known during the French Revolution as a Reign of Terror is still “on” – though a measure of muttered weariness with its arbitrary cruelties is getting more audible.

So what does all this stormy agitation look like, to a person flying overhead on the feathery back of Minerva’s Owl? As soon as a cultural movement openly refuses rational evaluation, it loses its purported relevance for philosophy. What I’ve delineated is the desert landscape of total intellectual emptiness. Mental stasis. Evaluative capacities at full stop.

From a Hegelian standpoint, that does not signal that there are no more real and consequential thoughts to think nor any inspired and productive and intellectual leadings to work out. More likely, what the Owl has spotted is intellectual exhaustion with resultant aridity at the surface of the culture. On a deeper level, the likelihood is that

new hypotheses and

path-breaking explorations

are dawning.

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