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Many people think that the differences between the left and right political spectrum have to do with the issues and policies they feel strongly about and the solutions they offer for those issues . But, as many have realized, classifying people by the causes they find important and the solutions they propose, often leads to 'strange bedfellows" and a somewhat convoluted classification system. Still, it can't be argued that the designation of "left" and "right" do seem to have some affinity with certain political stances. What accounts for this though, in my opinion, is not the stances taken, but the more general philosophical opinion held by each side which lead to those policy stances. This little essay will lay out some philosophical differences underlying the left and right and attempt to clarify the muddy waters of political classification.

At the center of the left/right political divide, I would argue, is a basic distinction or attitude about nature itself. The left is much influenced by Romantic Idealism in it's basic assumption about the value and purity of nature. The division between man and nature is artificial in the left leaning ideologies and man's place is within nature as a part of it. And since to the left nature is "pristine," it follows that anything "unauthentic" is to be avoided. Nature is untainted by artificiality and if left alone free to be fully self-balancing from that reasonably stable over time. This reliance upon the Romantic Ideal leads to a fundamental political stance which emphasizes the intrinsic value and equality of the individual acting in nature. The goals are a harmonious whole where each part is assumed to have been supplied by nature to fulfill a particular niche in the overall enterprise, a niche where that particular part will experience fulfillment and even enlightenment. Writers influencing this view through their works include Jean-Jaques Rousseu ("Discourse on Political Economy", "The Social Contract or Principles of Political Rights"), Herman Hesse ("Siddhartha"), Karl Marx ("The Communist Manifesto" -- with Frederick Engles, Michael Foucault ("Discipline and Punish"), and many, many others. In this system humans are actors on the stage with many other actors all attempting to coordinate things so that each receives what is needed to survive in a balanced and harmonious manner.

In contrast the right views nature as separate from man. Nature is neither good nor bad, but neutral. Nothing in nature is pristine but all of nature is in flux and it is the job of the human species -- end-result of the progression of nature -- to re-order nature to the benefit of the human species. In this system of thought whatever merit the indivudual has is subject to what he or she makes of himself or herself and the rewards for that effort are in accordance to the degree his or her effort reinforces the status quo. It may be that an individual can imput value to another, but no individual has value intrinsically. In this system of thought humans are the agents of change -- as guided by those superior. Authors who are important to the right are: Frederick Nietzsche ("Thus Spake Zarathrustra", "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks". "Twiligh of the Idols"), Charles Darwin ("On the Origins of Species"), Ayn Rand ("The Fountainhead," "Atlas Shrugged"), Herbert Spencer ("The Study of Sociology","The Principles of Ethics"), BF Skinner ("Beyond Freedom and Dignity"), and others, of course. What might be added here are the theist who also inhabit many of the right of center groups. Their belief system generally follows the strictures of the right but adds to their concepts, in contrast to the evolutionary-materialist view, the focus on creationist-dualism (the idea that the material world is not the only realm of existence). Authors that might be included in the list of what supports the right are often at odds with the other favorites of the right, but the distinction is only skin deep. A theist who believes that man was put on earth to dominate and control nature, that nature is morally neutral, and that humans do not have intrinsic value only differs from the other side of the right in believing that value can be imputed as well as earned. The end results are about the same in both cases, which, of course, while making the authors influencing each branch somewhat divergent, also creates a lot of overlap.
AJ

While I would agree that the relationship of mankind to nature can play a large role in the formation of ideas and certain political positions, it doesn't define the left and right. The key issue dividing left and right is hierarchy. Leftists believe that we should strive to eliminate hierarchy and achieve equality, while Rightists believe that some inequality or hierarchy is either natural or desirable.

Exactly. If you follow Romantic Idealism you know that any hierarchy of power is detrimental to the expression of nature. This hierarchy, to the right, is necessary to the ordering nature because nature is chaotic. The left finds nature ordered enough and the right seeks to order it. So you are right that it's hierarchy, but the reason it's that is because of the different views of nature. You might say one side wants nature to express it's own order, the other to impose an order on an un-ordered universe.

It was Rousseau who expresses this and begins the application of Romanticism to politics, a journey which goes through Marx and eventually to the Anarchist and even farther, the New Left of the 1950's. If you think nature good then the absolute last thing you would seek to do is make hierarchy's out of it. Kenneth Burke, the Marxist critic spoke of people being "goaded by hierarchy" and in doing so observed the conservative element of human nature.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

AJ

There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, though it should be noted that it applies more to anarchists (especially anarcho-primitivists) than it does to small/limited government socialists and authoritarian socialists (Marxism-Leninism(-Maoism). Technocrats and Stalinists certainly believe in imposing order on people and nature. Your point is indirectly applicable to the conception of how property should function according to nearly all far-left theory, the distinction between personal and private property, defined based occupancy, use, labor, and defense. That's how it functions in nature, things like rent and stock shares, among other phenomena in modern finance and law are not natural phenomena.

The emergence of leftist thought was born from a desire to see a continuation of enlightenment values, the desire to finish in the 19th century or later what it could not in the 18th. Romanticism certainly has some influence on the left, but mostly it inspired medievalists, and agrarian primitvists, as well as early nationalists, and by extension of these, what would become modern day conservatism.

It's important to note that the earliest socialists were followers of David Ricardo and Adam Smith, the modern left was very much born out of the new field of classical economics and enlightenment analysis of political economy. You're also placing a little too much emphasis on Marx, yes, he was the most influential thinker of the left, but he got most of his ideas from early socialists and contemporary anarchists (who he would then proceed to aggressively criticize). Socialism did not in any way begin or end with him.

Your assessment of the important thinkers of the right is also a little questionable. Nietzsche, similar to Stirner, can't really be placed in the left-right paradigm and was important to both the right and left arguably in equal measure. Darwin was only influential because of Spencer's misinterpretation of Darwin's theory. Ayn Rand, while popularly influential, is not taken seriously by intellectuals regardless of their political views, mostly because her ideas were just a much dumber, more arbitrary version of the egoism put forward by older, much smarter thinkers.

The point I'm making with all of this is that the idea that different conceptions of nature and man's relationship to it as a defining feature of left and right isn't generally true, or to be more fair it's a small, indirect component, with a single exception (anarcho-primitivism).

While I would agree that the relationship of mankind to nature can play a large role in the formation of ideas and certain political positions, it doesn’t define the left and right. The key issue dividing left and right is hierarchy. Leftists believe that we should strive to eliminate hierarchy and achieve equality, while Rightists believe that some inequality or hierarchy is either natural or desirable.

This is an oversimplification, authoritarian socialism is obviously hierarchical, as is the technocracy movement, and neither are capitalist or feudalist. Hierarchy or lack thereof is a frequent point made, however, not even anarchists want it eliminated in its totality, they just want hierarchies made by force (like that state, private property as is currently defined and maintained by law) to be done away with, almost all other non-anarchists socialists just want it directly accountable in all cases. The socialist theory of legitimate property that I described earlier is a far more universal differentiation from the rightism than opposition to hierarchy.

Also, not all rightists do oppose equality, there are many right libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who support a completely free market precisely because they believe it will result in a spontaneous emergence of great (or at least comparatively greater) material equality than has existed in the past or present.

Easy: nowadays politics, at least in the usa, is all about identity politics. It has devolved from people with actual beliefs to simply two teams duking it out and trying to score as many points as possible while fuck all gets actually done.

Politics in the 90's "Well I believe that abortion isn't wrong cause my beliefs state-"
Politics in 2017 in the USA "Are you ready for the thunderdome! This Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Two teams enter the cage match only one team comes out!"

My guess for the next ten years of politics in the USA: fucking nothing important gets done.

I agree. But why are they "duking it out?" It all goes back to philosophy. Back around 1930 in the US the debates over what is real crossed over a line and entered the realm of "how do you know?" In the end philosophers came to the conclusion that "nothing can be known with certainty" popularly adopted as "nothing can be known." Since nothing can be known what's left? "Your right is your right, and my right is mine" Or, more commonly, "What's true for you is true for you, what's true for me is true for me"

Against this movement some people tried to argue for traditional avenues of reasoning, what came to be called logocentric rhetoric -- The idea that traditional avenues of persuasion relying upon verifiable evidence and reasoning could clear up any disputes we might have (and Enlightenment idea, btw). Of course, once the attempt was made and as it was being made, modernism gave way to post-modernism which argued that even logocentric rhetoric was a tool of the oppressor and suspect. Argument, in the process, got replaced by narrative and persuasion was lost as a goal to be replaced by empowerment. Every argument was a story told to empower some group and all a person had to do was "deconstruct" your story to show how it empowered you or your group (of course the problem was that just because it empowered you and your group didn't mean it wasn't also a "true" story often escaped the post-structuralist critic).

So, in the end, since there is no truth to be had, but only stories, people, it is argued, gravitate toward the story serving their needs best. And like all economic competitions, the more encompassing the story the larger it gets and the larger it gets the more people are gathered under it's umbrella.

So, since logocentric rhetoric is out what replaced it? In keeping with the movement away from objective truth to narrative we need only ask what makes a compelling narrative to find out. A compelling narrative has drama…the more the better. Drama is emotion and emotion is what you get when you reveal injustices within a group, especially if you can put some pictures and real suffering people on the camera. So, beginning in about 1950 with the rise of television, the left moved their rhetoric from linear logocentric rhetoric to imagistic memes and their speakers began the transition from "aristocratic statesman" to "just one of you." I call this rhetoric "eithotic" after the Aristotelian concept of the speaker identifying with his or her audience and using that identification as a source of persuasion. Kenneth Burke, in "A Rhetoric of Motive" discusses the central role identification plays in eithotic rhetoric, though of course he doesn't call it that.

In any case, the move from logocentric to eithotic rhetoric was made by the left and is evidenced greatly by the 1964 presidential campaign were Lyndon Johnson overwhelmed Barry Goldwater with mushroom clouds of images. Goldwater never figured out that his clearly reasoned and measured address were not going to work because society had left the idea of truth far, far, behind. By 1980 Ronald Regan and the right have made the same transition.

So now you have two parties telling stories and neither is listening to the other because their just stories designed to rally the troops, not persuade. This is why social media is so effective in our post-modern (or even post-post-modern) age. Social media uses memes and short linear slogans - mantras- to rally the troops rather than "walls of text" (like this one) to make arguments.

So persuasion is not the goal, rallying the troops and getting them to (metaphorically at least, and often literally) shake their angry fist and threaten (real or voter) violence.

Politics of today is about who's telling my story and to h* with any story that doesn't empower me or my group.

"And now you know….the rest of the story"

AJ

@Smith
And that is why philosophy is a bullshit field.

"Opinions make reality" -Philosophy
"You're a twat" -Scientists

there are tons of bullshit fields.
but it makes cash so…

anyway, on topic, it's a looooooooooooooooooong talk, to be TL;DR into: Left and Right are people that want to control things based on their agenda.

it's a nice way to start a war.

There are types of philosophy that are not BS and types that are. Unfortunately, what philosophers do, often results in real world changes in attitudes and actions. Rene' Descartes, the author of "I think, therefore, I am" applied strict reasoning on the premise that unless it was something he was compelled to believe, he wouldn't believe it, no matter how strong the evidence. This radical skepticism, over time, became ingrained in the fabric of society, first by other academics, then the arts, followed by politics and the general public coming around last. The fact that he made a mistake in his understanding of what it means to know something never occurred to most people and so we live in a world where everything must be "proved," especially if it's contrary to our own sense of things. By placing knowledge within the individual Descarte made each of us the sole arbiter of what is true and what is not. "What's true for you is true for you, what's true for me is true for me" denies objective knowledge and leads directly to the undermining of traditional reasoning and evidence based modes of persuasion, since they can be dismissed as "mere propaganda". In the end, the world divides into camps where "what's true for us is true for us, and what's true for you is bs."

Academic philosophy may be BS but often the BS sticks and thing smell bad as a result.

AJ

The people who think philosophy is bullshit are usually the kind of people who either don't understand it beyond an undergrad education (if that) or otherwise scientistic pseuds incapable of understanding what science actually is as a philosophical concept, or it's very real limitations as a means of acquiring (more accurately approximating) knowledge of reality.

I feel like you're off hand rejecting what postmodern philosophy has to say and ignoring how they came to their conclusions. There are good points they made about the limits of traditional means of acquiring knowledge and the influence subjective experience has over our interpretation thereof. The irony is that postmodernism has been made a misused term and boogeyman used by a certain group of people for personal ideological reasons, all the while they hypocritically and seemingly unwittingly use the same concepts and methodology of postmodernism in their philosophy and behavior (I'm looking at you Jordan Peterson).

What I'm seeing in this thread is a gross oversimplification of postmodern philosophy as well as the ignorant assumption that it's the norm in modern academic philosophy. I take particular issue with your equating of the use of ethos and logos as connected to traditional philosophy and postmodern philosophy, which contradicts your previous statements about postmodern philosophy.

There are sub-sub-fields of philosophy that are highly questionable but there are remarkably few of those.

I agree that there are sub-sub fields. And I agree that simplification is present in discussing just about anything. As for my take of postmodernism, I suspect maybe my reading of Foucault, Derrida, and the rest in graduate school may have shaded my understanding in directions of which I am unaware. And naturally, unless we want to produce a pretty much unending analysis, we needs do some "simplification."

Postmodernism, as I use the term refers not so much to a bunch of people as an attitude, directly and easily traced back to at least the Enlightenment. The basic attitude displayed by all postmoderns (the affirmative and skeptical both), that knowledge is singular and resides in the individual knower. Thus, knowledge is not social, but individually "constructed" AND that the construction of such knowledge is almost controlled entirely by one's social (i.e. power) commitments. A hallmark of what I've observed, is a rabid skepticism about any "objective" interpretation and a deconstruction of any attempt to "pull" structures of meaning out of a text, be it they are from "intent of the author", "semi-biographical," "reader response" or any other thing. In other words, post-structuralism (in my opinion) is the direct descendant and inheritor of radical skepticism, a radical skepticism going back at least to Descartes (through Hume, Spinoza, Voltaire, etc…).

As for my breaking down avenues of persuasion to ethos, logos and pathos, if you know Aristotle's Rhetoric you know that's the source. Kenneth Burke speaks of eithos in terms of "identification" -- meaning you persuade not with reason and logic, but by making the people attending believe you are one of them. In other words, instead of building trust on evidence and reasoning you build it on the personal relationship you have with the audience by identifying with them in as many ways as you can.

You are right that there is and was some confusion about postmodern philosophy and communication. But my point is that postmodern communication has, logically speaking, backed itself into the corner and cannot help but turn to what I call eithotic rhetoric. There are three reasons for this:

First, if you start with the idea, as postmoderns do, that nothing about reality can be presented without being influenced by questions of power and position, then any statement you make, in fact any perception you have, of what is real is distorted to some degree. You can't see the distortion of your own thought of course, because you are within your own distortion field. It's like a man who, leaning left 3 degrees, in a forest where all the trees lean 3% to the left. He wouldn't know it to be so by experience. But of course, once once he arrives at the conclusion that everybody is leaning one way or the other, he knows he too is probably leaning in some way and so logically distrusts whatever statements of "truth" he presents, even to himself. So knowledge is not knowable in any secure way.

Second, if you begin with the idea that linear thought, upon which the process of logic is based, is only one way of thinking, and turn to a less time bound, intuitive, thought process, whatever that linear thought process concludes is suspect exactly because traditional reliance upon "forward" temporal thinking. Susan Handelman's "Slayers of Moses" is one example of a work foregrounding the immediate and non-linear approach to textual understanding. In the end what counts, is not what is derived from linear reasoning (i.e. logic, loosely conceived), but what is experienced and expressed in the immediacy.

Third, in the process of deconstructing statements of "truth" by revealing the inherent, underlying, contradictions and subtleties you undermine the course of reason by showing the motivations of the text (well, there you go, something "outside" the text, darn!), or at least the unspoken assumptions upon which to text rests, to be at the service of something other than the text. In other words, a post structural critique assumes there is not "pure" text and while there is "nothing but the the text" there is, by it's existence, "something not the text." Both, being present in the text can only be seen by jettisoning a logocentric analysis which relies upon what is in the text and focus on the absence. If the text says it's about whales, it's also about everything not whales and a post structuralist approach, by necessity, must foreground the not whales without regard to the "information" the text might contain about, well, whales. This, of course is only done when the text is not supportive of the critic's sociopolitical and academic commitments…LOL.

The result of the denial of logical process as the final arbiter of reality, the foregrounding of non-time bound modes of understanding (as against the logic of cause leads to effect), and the emphasis on deconstructing texts to reveal what they are saying within the silence at their margins, is that you deconstruct the very nature of traditional accepted modes of persuasion.

So in the end a society which is postmodern asks three things of the speaker: that the speaker tell them something supporting their sociopolitical motives; that the speaker give them an experience of the immediate; and that the speaker reveal to them what has been hidden in the "texts" of their enemies. The audience does not want to be persuaded of truth because truth is dead. The audience wants to experience a relationship with the speaker that re-enforces their beliefs and re-assures them.

Postmodernism's critique of traditional reasoning and argument cannot help to fall into eithotic rhetoric because that's the only road left to power.

As for rejecting postmodernism, I am only offering a critique of it. If the three things I just noted of it are not true, then of course, my conclusions are off base. However I think you will find the three things are pretty consistent in both the affirmative and skeptical branches of postmodernism.

Finally, as to self-contradiction, I'm not too surprised if you find it. But isn't consistency of thought itself a value foisted upon us by academia and thus suspect as a enactment of power over the oppressed? LOL!

AJ