The hegemonic Left has for some time now been engaged in what amounts to the dismantling of the Enlightenment and its intellectual foundations. On one front, progressive ideologues in the universities are eroding the foundations of scientific knowledge—and this is not at all a “right-wing” conspiracy theory intended to defend privilege. Instead of argument and rational debate, the progressive camp imposes authoritarian speech bans, replaces enlightenment with denunciation, and reduces science to a relativist power discourse that they themselves seek to dominate. Yet on the other front, they indulge in an uncritical, unenlightened scientism.
What at first seems like a blatant contradiction is really the product of a political theory that takes neither the standards of reason as its foundation nor the creation of a society of autonomous individuals as its aim. The sole objective is the struggle for intellectual hegemony and discursive control, which is elevated to the supposed law of motion of society. For the progressives, science has a purely instrumental value. The pursuit of truth is not their concern; what matters is the power that ideological dominance can yield.
Progressive ideology entirely overlooks the fact that science is neither a positivistic mirror of reality nor merely a language game of power. These two extremes—premodern, naively realist scientism on one hand, and postmodern, nominalist (de)constructivism on the other—both negate the subject–object dialectic inherent in all knowledge. Science selects and constructs on the basis of theoretical presuppositions, which in turn are reshaped through interaction with empirical experience. These two elements mediate one another—something that neither the epistemologically naïve notion of objective knowledge as a mere reproduction of reality (a notion embraced by certain state-Hegelian positivist fact-checkers in their crusade against the “virus of disinformation”) nor the postmodern conceit that science is nothing but the exercise of power can adequately grasp.
Progressive ideology entirely overlooks the fact that science is neither a positivistic mirror of reality nor merely a language game of power.
The link between these two false extremes is an authoritarian mindset. The progressive denial of the materiality of our bodies and sexes is mirrored by their enthronement of “nature” (whether in the form of the virus or the climate) as an imperious authority to which humanity must submit. In the progressive will to power, infantile fantasies of omnipotence and authoritarian submission form two sides of the same coin.
Relativism and Standpoint Thinking
All the key elements of radical postmodern critiques of knowledge and science ultimately trace back to Friedrich Nietzsche’s overdrive “enlightenment”, the product of a radicalizing “nominalism of power” that Michel Foucault—arguably the most important Nietzschean of the twentieth century—carried over into the postmodern age. Nietzsche and his followers embrace a consistent fictionalism and perspectivism, in which the objectivity of the world dissolves into fluid constructions produced by a self that is itself a fiction. This subject, along with its constructions (mistakenly understood as “knowledge”), is held to be nothing more than the outcome of power processes that shape the very nature of languages, discourses, and every practical approach to the world. In this view, knowledge and science become identical with the will to power, which is purportedly the ultimate foundation of all human access to the world and of all social institutions in the broadest sense. Objectivity and truth are no longer ideals of knowledge, but rather deviously camouflaged claims to power and domination, which disguise their culture-relative, power-driven constructions as universal and objective truth. As such, neither they nor “reason”—which, for postmodernism, becomes the very embodiment of power and violence—can serve as the basis for rational criticism of domination.
