“Listen to me. Postmodernism will be appropriated by reactionary conservatives to destabilize commonly-held notions of evidence. Farewell.” Werner Herzog
Such conservatives reject the epistemological foundation of the Enlightenment (facts, logic, science, data).
The problem is that the epistemological foundation of that Enlightenment itself lacked foundations, discarding transcendent standards for the contingency of the empirical world. Nietzsche rightly pointed out that with the ‘death of God,’ the notion of foundations for either science or ethics could no longer be sustained. Objectivity is merely a rational projection of power. The idea that science could be stabilized on its own grounds once metaphysics has been discarded and morals rendered subjective, contingent, and relativist now stands revealed as a delusion. Science needs metaphysics. It is only one small step from the argument that individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit in ethics to the argument that they can choose truth in like manner. Nietzsche was right to draw attention to the emptiness of modern morality. Either transcendent standards exist or they don’t. Nietzsche said they don’t. Postmodernists and reactionaries draw us into the endless cycle and unwinnable game of power/resistance. I believe that Foucault himself understood this to be a dead-end and sharply qualified his conception of power/knowledge. If he did, then that was a wise move. Because if transcendent standards of truth and justice do not exist, then one either strives to become powerful and succeeds in making others submit to one’s power, or one submits to power. These are the choices – transcendent standards or the contingency, conventionalism, and constructivism of an endless power/resistance. There are no others. And I will say it openly: those transcendent standards entail the existence of God, the immortal and immaterial soul, eternal and innate ideas of truth and justice, and the free will to either choose or reject such views.
The absence of God, when consistently upheld and thoroughly examined, spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we have been used to think of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction of good and evil, the claim to dignity, the claim to creating something that withstands the indifferent destructiveness of time.
Leszek Kolakowski
And the people that Werner Herzog refers to are not conservatives at all, they are sophists who make truth conditional upon material wealth and power. It was the conservative Plato who took on such views when expressed by Thrasymachus. It is interesting to note, however, that the quote on the graphic from Pope John Paul II could almost be repeated by Karl Marx. Almost. Marx, like Hegel before him, stands somewhere between and beyond the traditional natural law and the new legal (and logical) positivism. I believe Hegel and Marx held to certain values, certainly with respect to the critique of an alien social order in which human beings, the true subjects, became mere objects of external things. In locating transcendent standards within the historical process, however, those standards cannot but become conditional upon power and power struggles. Subject the values and principles of Hegel and Marx to a close testing, and you will find transcendent normative commitments will be revealed in no time. Rather than make those standards conditional upon power struggles relative to time and place, it is wiser and healthier to hold those struggles to account by way of transcendent standards of truth and justice. Modernity has paid and will continue to pay an enormous price for discarding the metaphysical assumptions upon which a morally sustainable position and society is built.
Either we recover transcendent standards - and rediscover the sacred - or there is nothing but contingency and arbitrariness, with little reason to search and strive for truth, not least because no one is obligated to respect it. You won't find truth via logic and evidence unless you have already found the road to truth without either.
To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the heavens, Dante looked down at the "threshing floor" of the Earth at the activities in which we are embroiled and which cause so much rage and despair. In the heavens, he learned to see all things under the aspect of eternity. If all we do is look down at the contingency of empirical reality, then we will be overcome by the difficulties that confront us and yield to despair. Dante understood that the only way to inspire effort and sustain energy, whether as an individual or as a community, is to turn our gaze upwards in hope and be prepared to live into the mystery that lies beyond the horizon, the horizon of hope. When asked what the purpose of philosophy is, Wittgenstein stated that it is “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” We are all flies trapped in that bottle. We see only the tangible, but not the intangible. We cannot see where the two become confused and conflated. We search for the way out of our predicament but repeatedly bang our heads against the glass until, defeated, we give up and, despairing and exhausted, we die. And yet if only we had looked up to once more see the stars, we would have seen that the bottle is open at all times. In an age of disenchanting reason, human beings have lost the habit of looking upwards.
Seekers of truth, Boethius argued, gather their thoughts, which unchecked leap outward to this issue and that worry, and turn them. Spiralling inward, they come to circle a centre and a light that is more radiant than the sun. This is the Light of lights and the Mind of minds. Dante brought us to that Light.
It was as though a more complex interlocutor had spoken.
Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim'
But the Lord God called to the man, 'Where are you?'
Genesis 3:9
This laboriously won self-contempt of man.
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Michel Foucault
Transcendent standards are eternal and can never be destroyed; conventional truths, being subject to contingency, are all to easily destroyed.
People don't have to respect the value of science when the realm of fact has been identified as the only rational realm as the realm of the only true knowledge and the realm of value identified as a realm on non-reason, concerning value judgements/subjective opinion only. The age is addicted to a blunt, one-sided reason, stripped of its ethical component and detached from the sacred. It is powerless against the forces of irrationalism, coming from the repressed depths of the human psyche, it has unleashed. Such reason is silent on the most important things in life. It can merely count the things of the surface.
As for Herzog's statement, my work in rational freedom has, from the start, identified this danger in postmodernism, postructuralism, liberalism shorn of its metaphysical underpinnings and becoming an overtly political doctrine, social constructivism. A theorist I studied deeply and wrote extensively on is Jurgen Habermas. Habermas surveyed the post-whatever thinkers and described them as 'young conservatives' for the way they remain on the surface level of reality. Habermas saw that such thinkers would never transform society, merely confirm its existing relations. He was right. I just wouldn't call them conservatives. Conservatism according to my definition holds to a sense of the sacred, affirms transcendent norms, sees history as a pact between generations, holds views of human nature that are diametrically opposed to notions of infinite malleability and plasticity. But point taken - it was only a matter of time before those reactionary forces committed to maintaining the status quo against those progressives who seek its transformation would turn the arguments of the postmodernist and identitarian left against the left and in favour of reaction. It's as easy as falling off a log when standards are plastic and conditional upon power. In my book, these 'conservatives' are not conservative and this 'left' are not left - they are sophists engaged in playing the unwinnable game. And both sides drag politics into an impasse.
The principal task facing men and women who cleave to standards independent of this age is to keep the intellectual and moral virtues alive in times that are hell-bent on rendering them sophistic.
Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise.
Schiller, (1794) Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man Letter 9
While we allow ourselves to melt in the celestial loveliness, the celestial self-sufficiency holds us back in awe.