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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2934 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

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I’m having a body snatchers moment, ever since Dase jumped in angry in a ‘da juice’ discussion I was having with SS where I was just pointing out the imho postmodern trappings of his argument. I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?

That depends on what you mean by "postmodernism". Not trying to be cheeky. It's an incredibly vague term and most of the philosophers who get labeled as "postmodernist" never applied that label to themselves.

A lot of 20th century French and German philosophy - i.e. the guys who get called "postmodernist" - was essentially footnotes to Nietzsche. A lot of those later guys were socialists who disagreed sharply with Nietzsche's politics, but they inherited his basic outlook on the nature of language, subjectivity, and truth: that the particular way we divide up the world into objects and concepts is essentially arbitrary, that our ability to introspect about our own mental states (beliefs, desires, motivations) is not nearly as strong as is typically assumed, that there is a fundamentally affective dimension to all allegedly "rational" discourse, that our (political, philosophical) beliefs are first and foremost grounded in who we are as biological/economic/social creatures rather than in our ability to be responsive to rational argumentation. A lot of these points are already familiar to Rationalists - see for example Scott's classic "The Categories Were Made For Man" post.

Am I a postmodernist in this sense? I would give a weak and qualified "yes". It's a set of views that's worth taking very seriously, at any rate. If you were talking about some other sense of the word postmodernism, then you'll have to specify what it is.

Fine, everyone’s least favourite part: definitions .

Wiki (I’ll bold what I find objectionable in the theory):

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse[2] characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power.[3][4] Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism,[5] with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses.[4] The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism;[4] it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.[6][7]

Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism,[8][9][10] and has been observed across many disciplines.[11][12] Postmodernism is associated with the disciplines deconstruction and post-structuralism.[4] Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and scientific rigor, and as adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. (Amen)

I also gave examples of my various run-ins with it on the sub in my comment to rafa.

I don't know where to start. Should I explain the problem with those claims?

For example, if you dismiss objectivity , you have a license to be as partial and biased as you want.

Like I said, I really wasn't trying to be cheeky! I just wanted to know what you meant by the term, that's all. People use it in different ways.

"Epistemic certainty", "role of ideology in maintaining political power", "moral relativism", and "binary oppositions" are all topics that, individually, could eat up an entire career's worth of thought. We won't be able to address all of them comprehensively.

I think my other reply is relevant to "objectivity" though, we can continue the discussion there.

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