Okay, so then how do you argue against those who want to reinstate slavery? If a radical neo-Nazi or KKK person believes slavery is legitimate, maybe that's just their cultural perspective? You could perhaps argue for the universality of human rights, but isn't that also just a cultural perspective? Who are you to impose your cultural values on racist Neo-Confederates?
This is a more sophisticated variant of an apocryphal story I once heard about a Rabbi's answer to this: he thwapped the speaker on the head and said "I didn't hit you."
IMHO this is exactly why a lot of modern liberals are forced to try to de-platform neo-fascists and the like: they are unable to argue against them. Liberals from a previous era would have made ground beef out of an intellectual weakling like Richard Spencer or (LOL) Alex Jones, but to argue a position requires a belief that there exists some objective standard against which a position may be tested.
When the ability to debate is removed, the only thing remaining is force.
Personally I will take the position that there does exist an objective standard, that human rights can be defended objectively, and that those who advocate slavery or institutionalized racism are simply wrong. They do not have a point and their position is not valid.
Edit: I also personally think that nobody actually believes this stuff. They only deploy it as a weapon against people they don't like. Nobody lives by this nonsense. You can't.
Edit #2, and then back to work: how do we know something objective exists? Try this: jump off a cliff. For the political version: move to North Korea. The question of how we know what that objective reality is is more difficult and is the realm of epistemology among other things, and that's a separate question.
> IMHO this is exactly why a lot of modern liberals are forced to try to de-platform neo-fascists and the like: they are unable to argue against them.
Fascists don't give a shit that you think you owned them in a debate. A fist doesn't care what sweet words come out of a mouth as it's crashing into teeth. This is exactly the blind spot of liberalism that many 20th century thinkers (some vaguely labeled as postmodernists) tried to shine a light on: Even if there were some objective standard by which you can say you have bested someone with reason in an argument, does it matter when power can simply ignore it?
> Liberals from a previous era would have made ground beef out of an intellectual weakling like Richard Spencer, but to argue a position requires a belief that positions may be argued as well as an ability to think coherently and organize one's own views.
Liberals mocked Hitler constantly until the day he seized power. How did you come to this belief that liberalism has any potency against fascism in spite of the historical evidence?
Go find some debates against far-right neo-fascists in the 60s and then listen to some debates with modern crypto-fascist intellectual lightweights like Jordan Peterson.
BTW I am on your side and I'm sick of the left intellectually handicapping itself with trendy bullshit.
Edit: replying on Peterson because I hit the thread limit:
All Peterson's interesting ideas are ripped off of Carl Jung and various 60s-era consciousness/psychedelic thinkers like Leary and Wilson (who were heavily influenced by Jung). There's a bit of Nietzsche in there too.
Peterson's original ideas are uninteresting confused rubbish. The central theme of his work is misogyny. Not sure if he's really fascist but his fan base is definitely fascist adjacent.
TL;DR: "nothing good about him is original, and nothing original about him is good."
If the idea of myths being a valid form of truth is appealing, read Jung. Jung is an infinitely better writer too. If you want an explicitly Christian version, read C.S. Lewis who is also an infinitely better writer.
If his "get your butt in gear" and "clean your room" thing is appealing, read some good military memoirs like Call Sign Chaos by Jim Mattis. The latter are great motivational works minus the overt misogyny and confused bullshit about "alpha males" and lobsters. (Don't have a clue what Mattis's politics are, but he keeps it mostly out of his writing and focuses on practical stuff.)
Anything good about Peterson can be found from better sources. It mystifies me that anyone took him seriously. Of course maybe Peterson wasn't the best example as he's actually one of the better alt-right or alt-right adjacent intellectuals (on a purely intellectual level). A better sample of the intellectual chops of the alt-right would be an artisanal fountain of bullshit like Stefan Molyneux or Richard Spencer.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
I know everyone hates tangents, and please excuse the off topic, but crypto-fascist and intellectual lightweight are not a set of attributes I've heard or intuited against Peterson. I'd love to hear more detail if you have some time. Articles, blogs, books, videos all accepted.
There's the contrapoints video that gets brought up a lot when discussing Peterson, and imo it does better than other sources, but its probably not formal enough / contains too much humor / silliness for the HN audience.
Yea, I took a peak. I can't sit through that (even though I did say "all accepted", My bad. ). It's a pile of pandering palp for a pretty rarefied cheer leading group. If there's valid points they should be available elsewhere in a more palatable and coherent form, no? Nobody's got a proprietary hold on truth.
So, taking this moment to do my own searching all I find are character assassinations, and misunderstandings of his background and goals. That's from discussions on /r/askphilosophy to that New York times article to the one on thebaffler and video interviews too, from Cathy Newman to Vice all seem driven to the same goal as those sad and incoherent student protests in 2016.
Sure, they're leaders in different disciplines which seem to overlap in the zeitgeist. I doubt Zizek would be able to match Peterson when discussing practical psychiatry.
IMHO, after a brief fascination I've found my enthusiasm for Zizek fading. He seems to know his quotes very well and spits them out like a rapper on speed, but as a career philosopher and author I haven't seen his work leading to positive change in people. Peterson on the other hand has a growing cohort of I regret to say 'followers' who are purportedly cleaning up their acts.
IMHO the group (and subsequently the ideology) is the wrong level of analysis to diagnose and then treat our contemporary woes. Groups cannot be addressed simultainously, cannot be held accountable, and most of all are never clearly delineated (what is 'race'?). The individual CAN be held accountable, that's how every law system on Earth is engineered. The individual can be addressed. That's how almost every communication system in the world works (except public PAs, radio, and the like). And most of all individuals are trivial to delineate. An individual human is unlike anything else in the universe except other humans and each has their own unique history.
"During an event at the Cambridge Union Society in November 2018, Žižek had called Peterson's work "pseudo-scientific", labeled him as his "enemy" and criticized Peterson's work on the idea of cultural Marxism. Peterson said he could meet "any time, any place" to debate and it was announced on February 28, 2019 that the debate was scheduled for April 19. The two professors before had argued against happiness as something one should pursue. Peterson had said people should seek meaning through personal responsibility and Žižek had said happiness is pointless and delusional."[1]
Debate itself[2][3]:
"...In a similar fashion, Žižek asked Peterson to name him personal names of "postmodern neo-Marxists" in Western academia and from where he got the statistical numbers because according to him the over-the-top political correctness is opposed to Marxism, on which Peterson did not mention any names, yet statistical percentage of those who declare as Marxists in the academia according to Jonathan Haidt's research and explained replacement of the Marxist idea of class struggle with identity politics by which one group is oppressing the other. Some view this exchange as evidence that cultural Marxism had been invented by Peterson and other members of the intellectual dark web without any evidence of its existence. In the end, they both agreed that happiness is rather a byproduct of life itself."
From all I've digested of Žižek it seems he quite often bathes in exaggeration for theatrics. So, I wouldn't take "pseudo-scientific" as a flat and sincere statement. Also given that Peterson actually IS a scientist (with a few well sited papers).
I tried to watch the talk, but there was so much audience hooting and hollering it was too difficult.
But still, I don't see any evidence of Peterson being a "crypto-fascist" or "intellectual lightweight" as a previous user accused.
I'll concede that Žižek has a flair for theatrics, but I agree with Žižek that Peterson's claims are "pseudo-scientific" because they are fundamentally not truth-claims that are falsifiable. It's simply not science to say the things he's saying. He may wish to use science to fortify his philosophical or sociological claims, but you can't do that without making statements that are fundamentally at odds with the scientific method.
(First, thank you for continuing this discussion. I feel I have to say that because often they fall apart.)
(edit: oops, this was to comment on the wikipedia article you posted)
So, it seems to me this critique of Peterson's Boogymen of cultural Post-structuralist Neo-Marxists (or something like that) comes down to "He didn't use the right words to describe what he's talking about." as opposed to "What he's describing doesn't exist" or what I seem to smell in the most muddy of critiques "He's a dangerous idiot".
"He then proceeded to stumble his way through Marxist philosophy with such a shallow assessment as to be laughably incorrect."
But then doesn't back it up with anything. And shallow doesn't mean incorrect.
So it seems to me that his detractors are grasping at straws.
Again, a hearty shrug from me.
Though, looking at the work from Andray Domise, the author of above, like his articles and his TED talk "TEDx Toronto: Colour Coded: race, gender, and representation in video games" He seems very very occupied with group identity.
I see your point about Peterson being inarticulate regarding his knowledge and understanding of Marxism. However I don’t even know what the strongest interpretation of his views even are. It’s hard to steelman when your interlocutor is incomprehensible. It’s even more baffling because Peterson is using his audiences own unfamiliarity with Marxism and Žižek's views which are not even Marxist to have plausible deniability to strawman Žižek’s views, in order to try to call on Žižek to defend views he doesn’t hold and statements Žižek doesn’t make.
That critics gloss over all this by only saying that Peterson is shallow and incorrect is a shame. He’s not even wrong because his argument is not even making normative statements that could be proved or disproved. To say that the critic judging him didn’t do a good job is fair. However it seems like missing the point. If you have a test and get partial credit for showing your work and your answer is wrong and the work you show is wrong, it is hard to see where an instructor could award any points for an attempt. Nor do I see it as a failure of the instructor to not show their work on this when grading. I think Hitchen’s razor works best here.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
Christopher Hitchens
>Fascists don't give a shit that you think you owned them in a debate.
The fascist may not, but what about the audience?
> Even if there were some objective standard by which you can say you have bested someone with reason in an argument, does it matter when power can simply ignore it?
In order to gain power, you have to persuade people to follow you. Brute force is a hilariously inefficient way of doing that. Heck, even the ancient Athenians (i.e. Pericles, Demosthenes, etc) realized that it was far easier to persuade people with words than with fists.
>Liberals mocked Hitler constantly until the day he seized power.
And how did Hitler seize and consolidate his power? It certainly wasn't with brute force. It was with rhetoric. Even without understanding a single word of German, I can feel the force of Hitler's personality when I see footage of the Nuremberg rallies.
> When the ability to debate is removed, the only thing remaining is force.
You seem to be conflating the ability to debate with the existance of objective ethical facts. That sounds like a bit of a false choice to me. What kind of ethical experiment would reveal an ethical truth in the same way in which jumping of a cliff reveals a physical truth?
It also strikes me that our belief that slavery is wrong is not really hostage to experiment in the same way in which my belief that gravity exists is. What kind of fact would you have to be confronted with to recognise that your belief ('slavery is wrong') is false?
>More explicitly, according to Rorty, the schemes and patterns regulating social relations do not derive from reason and its canonicity but rather from self-images created by the community on the basis of solidarity of its members. (7) In opposition to reason and its norms, solidarity does not need any justification or legitimation given that the social bond expressed by it is prior to any act of legitimizing claims to truth attempted by reason.
And this kind of idiotic thinking leads to a broken society where we are conditioned from childhood to pretend that all cultures are equal and that all differences are purely social constructions.
Except for the most pampered societies, cultural norms are at least partly a manifestation of successful survival strategies in different environments. They are emergent and based in the truths of reality that postmodernists delude themselves into believing do not exist. No patriarchy necessary.
The modern deconstructive movements that were spawned by postmodernism have effectively become rebellion for the sake of rebellion. Progress for the sake of progress. Anything we do differently from our ancestors is automatically superior - that's why these movements have such draw from young, vulnerable, naive, college aged children. The only truth in these movements is deliberate change - but thousands of years of development of civilization has infused our various cultures with a wealth of heuristics which postmodernists (and modern leftist movements which are postmodernist offspring) cannot acknowledge because their definition of truth is backwards and, frankly, unscientific.
> And this kind of idiotic thinking leads to a broken society where we are conditioned from childhood to pretend that all cultures are equal and that all differences are purely social constructions.
You don't read the thinkers you are calling idiots and you don't understand what you cited.
> Truth is in mathematics
Of all the human activities concerning truth, mathematics has the easiest time demonstrating its limitations, its inherent circularity, and the fact that in its absolute form it is ultimately out of reach for human beings. Your vulgar High Rationality is built on sand.
>You don't read the thinkers you are calling idiots and you don't understand what you cited.
I am not calling these philosophers idiots, I am saying that they encourage dangeous thinking.
The OP quotes:
>Patterns regulating social relations do not derive from reason.
And what I'm saying is that they partly do, as emergent adaptations to reality, except in pampered cultures where comforts erase impetus.
I deleted the part about mathematics because it was no longer applicable to what I ended up writing.
>Your vulgar High Rationality is built on sand
My high rationality is built on the observation that a large swath of people actually believe that there is little value in the cultural norms of old. I used to feel similarly. Then I grew up. My vulgarity is built on frustration with the modern state of the world and the headstrong ignorance of the young adult population in the US. Here's a case in point - ignorant young people would be less uppity if they were taught to show amount some respect to elders. Not blindly, but in the US we seem to have lost an appreciation for the experience that comes with age.
> My vulgarity is built on frustration with the modern state of the world and the headstrong ignorance of the young adult population in the US.
Wow young people who lack experience are often headstrong and ignorant. Brilliant, groundbreaking observation there. This surely has not been a thing since civilization began.
> Here's a case in point - ignorant young people would be less uppity if they were taught to show amount some respect to elders.
And what "respect" should that be. I'll extend a base level of respect and courtesy to everyone, until I have a reason not to. Not all ideas have merit just because they are traditional, just like new ideas are not inherently better than old ones
> young people would be less uppity if they were taught to show amount some respect to elders. Not blindly, but in the US we seem to have lost an appreciation for the experience that comes with age
To me it seems like the pendulum shifted from something of a mandate for blind respect of elders to the opposite end of blind disregard for experience and expertise.
Such cultural pendulums are not uncommon though, and we're probably due for this one to begin shifting its momentum back the other way over the next decade or so.
There are many, wonderful kinds of logics which no mind like Gödel's has yet starved to death. Gödel true to his philosophy starved to death rather than be poisoned. If this was a poem I would call it fiction, for its impossible perfection.
"Paraconsistent logic" by no means points out any particular logic: There are a lot of logics that are called paraconsistent because they have models refuting ex falso. But I've yet to see one that was useful for anything or illuminated anything about truth.
There are a lot of useless formal logics out there.
My own view on truth exists very far from but in the same space as logic. I don't think a formal truth can exist as a singleton, but that one must consider the set of all statements together with all possible truths. Maybe this is a matrix of statements times the transpose of statements but I'm not sure about that implementation. Anyway, you get an immensely sparse product where statements match up with everything that is true about those statements, along with everything that is false about those statements. You can then attempt to compress this data and that compression is the logic. The vast sparseness, meaning much more false evaluations than true ones, implies a lot of structure which can be exploited in compression.
I don't think anything but many-valued logic like this can be consistent.
You could offer more than just "you don't know, and you don't understand". You could offer some knowledge and understanding.
It's fine to complain that critics of postmodernism don't understand it. But to not then explain looks a lot like hiding from criticism. "You don't understand, but I'm right and you're wrong" is not a productive conversation. It's smug arrogance that assumes its own superiority but won't actually engage with critics.
Please stop taking HN threads further into ideological and nationalistic flamewar. We already asked you this. It destroys what this site exists for, so we ban accounts that do it.
Hi dang,
Let me preface this by thanking you for the effort you've put into building this unique and invaluable community.
I'm sorry to occasionally make your life difficult, as you mention this isn't the first time I've been disciplined.
I recognize the pressures that lead you to censor certain accounts - however given the amount of soft power that you wield, I would kindly ask you to keep in mind that consistently and primarily suppressing only one set of views, which are potentially held by 25-50% of the population, breeds extremism.
The fact that these rational views are effectively banned from every major platform only forces the polarization that we are witnessing in our society.
I don't actually know what your views are, but wherever they land, I can guarantee you a long list of commenters complaining that "suppression" on HN goes exactly the other way.
Is there anyway to generate a list of flagged posts to perform a more rigorous statistical analysis?
I understand what you're saying, and I viewed the collection of contradicting examples, but it is unlikely that there isn't a predominant set of viewpoints on HN. Without choosing a side, there's no question that user flagging and mod moderation is likely to fall somewhere on the ideological spectrum and I'd love a chance to determine where.
This piece of writing assumes a very well read background on the authors it is discussing and I don't think it does anything but bait the hackernews middlebrow dismissal of postmodern thinkers.
I keep seeing this retort but I never see anyone explain where those who criticize postmodernism are wrong nor do I see a clearer explanation of postmodernist ideas. I just see content-free dismissals like "middle-brow" and re-iterations of similar word salad to the link posted here.
Tell me on what basis a postmodernist would argue against a Klansman.
IMHO pomo is the humanities' analog to what string theory is in physics or cryptocurrency hype is in tech: a trendy cancer that hijacked the minds of a generation and doesn't deliver anything.
It doesn't even deliver progress in the area of social justice. All the progress in social justice was made by previous generations of civil rights leaders and movements who were absolutely not postmodernists, cultural relativists, or believers in any strong form of identity politics. Social justice started to retreat culturally precisely when pomo and hard identity politics (a closely related ideology) took over academia: the 70s.
I mean liberals and other modern intellectuals have been asleep at the switch so long that monarchism is making a comeback. That's analogous to seeing measles outbreaks among anti-vaxxers.
Postmodernism is not a coherent philosophy so much as a reaction to the failures of positivism (i.e. everything can be scientifically justified). That's part of the reason you don't see clear explanations of postmodernism, because it's a vague nebulous cloud of things that are roughly related, rather than a singular school of thought. In that same vein, it doesn't make sense to talk about how a hypothetical "postmodernist" would respond to a klansman. Many different people would have radically different responses, ranging from complete condemnation, to contextual condemnation, to (rare) equanimity.
I don't intend this dismissively, but so much of your post suggests fundamental misunderstandings of what postmodernism is that it's difficult to have a discussion. Personally I found it easier to engage with understanding PM from the anthropology side, where they don't get as much into the ridiculous language used by the philosophy and the lit. people. Here's a simple introduction that goes over most of your questions in understandable terms without being insultingly simplified: https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/postmodernism-and-its-cri...
I'd say I disagree with almost all of: "(1) an elevation of text and language as the fundamental phenomena of existence, (2) the application of literary analysis to all phenomena, (3) a questioning of reality and representation, (4) a critique of metanarratives, (5) an argument against method and evaluation, (6) a focus upon power relations and hegemony, and (7) a general critique of Western institutions and knowledge (Kuznar 2008:78)".
I would say:
(1) That's "flat Earth" silly.
(2) Also very silly and oddly chauvinist.
(3) Not sure how to interpret this. If the claim is that there is metaphysically no objective reality, then all claims are false including the claim that all claims are false. If it's interpreted as an encouragement to question our model of reality, then it's a non-point since that's what all intellectuals and scientists do already.
(4) This has merit but is by no means unique to postmodern thought.
(5) This is silly. How then can you criticize Western culture? Doesn't that take a method and imply some kind of evaluation?
(6) I agree completely, but this is also not unique to postmodern thought. In fact I would argue that challenges to power as a rationale or argument for truth is a central feature of enlightenment thought, which is why virtually all modern progress in social justice was made prior to pomo coming into vogue. The only exception is gay rights, and that was on the inertia of the civil rights movement and using the same narratives and arguments.
(7) What were the enlightenment and the Protestant reformation if not major criticisms of central aspects of Western culture by members of that culture? From what I've seen most intellectuals in most cultures primarily criticize their own culture since that's what they know and is what is most relevant to them. If the point instead is to argue that only Western culture can be criticized, that insane.
There are two possibilities here: either this is as asinine as it appears, or there are good ideas but they are being communicated very poorly to the point that they are incomprehensible. Both are failure modes for any school of thought.
Furthermore I would add that if you follow these sorts of ideas to their logical endpoint you end up a reactionary, not a progressive. The primary argument of the reactionaries is and always has been the futility of human knowledge and reason. It's so obvious that I've even wondered if Derrida et. al. weren't crypto-reactionaries attempting to Trojan horse academia with reactionary metaphysical premises, though this verges dangerously close to oddball conspiracy theory territory. It's more likely that they were either crackpots or were misunderstood by essentially everyone. Maybe something was totally botched in the French-English translation of their ideas and the badly translated version stuck.
It's a student guide written for other undergrad anthropology students, so we should read it in that light and make affordances for imprecise language and a lack of generality.
In that light, what is it describing postmodernism for? Simply put, it's a [set of] frameworks through which to analyze the kinds of things anthropologists work with. This an important because many of the issues you're seeing are the direct result of trying to extrapolate beyond this academic heritage.
So from an academic anthropology standpoint:
1. Is definitely not flat earth silly. To give some context, prior to PM in the 70s, anthropologists were doing silly things like measuring the amount of food on the table every day and how many knives were in the cupboard. That's nice quantitative data, but it doesn't really tell you much about culture or human behavior. Thinking of language and text as fundamental aspects of culture and behavior is much better, though I personally have some quibbles with that focus.
2. Specific to anthropology and a bit of academic vogue here.
3. Remember that this is an academic framework for analyzing academic things. In anthropology, sometimes people all see the same physically impossible thing, or see different things despite observing bthe same physical events, etc. To deal with this, sometimes it's useful just to view things as if people are in different realities and observing different things. It's not a claim on the real underlying epistemology.
4. Virtually everything academic from the last 40-50 years has been influenced in some way by post modernism. Bit of a Seinfeld effect here.
5. They have a section later about methodologies of postmodernism. Yes, it's a bit ironic.
6. Same as 4, but you're right that it's not unique. Doesn't have to be.
7. This is specific to academia, which was (and largely still is) made up of very much Western derived institutions. Specifically, this is about things like "maybe the structure of our institutions leads us to certain types of research design and valuing certain types of information over others" and "maybe other ways of organizing academia / research / knowledge might also lead to useful results". It's not to suggest the only target for criticism should be Western institutions, merely that they're not the only way to do things and might be improved.
As for whether the ideas of PM are being miscommunicated, sure, I'm open to the idea. But there are also millions of people in academia who do get it. Since we all know academics can be remarkably stupid, it's not an intelligence gap. Maybe it's just something that doesn't make sense without practical experience in the kinds of problems it's designed to help?
Okay, yours is the first answer that made any sense. It's also the first time I've ever seen anyone claim that postmodernism is specifically speaking to anthropologists about how to approach anthropology. In that context it's at least not absurd, especially if counting cutlery was what it was addressing. All the statements I listed make quite a lot more sense if given that context.
The reason I'm a bit peeved in these replies is that I do have a powerful sense that the humanities in academia have lost their relevance by going down a path that is increasingly insular, alienating, and unproductive, and that this has had a role in ceding the cultural ground to reactionaries, fascists, and other kinds of actively destructive irrationalists. That's why elsewhere I make the analogy to string theory, a fad that seems as if it's been fruitless and has derailed physics.
In short I've blamed pomo for why there is a resurgence of racism, reactionary ideology, and stuff like the anti-vaxx movement. Not only does this stuff result in an intellectual class that speaks gibberish that nobody but them understands, it also at least superficially sounds as if it's legitimizing the idea that "all opinions are of equal merit." That means if I don't want to vaccinate my kids because Alex Jones said so, my opinion is equal to that of an epidemiologist because cultural relativism.
Edit: I realized there's a more pointed way of saying what I said above: I am not sure you can try to argue that all cultures are equivalent and equal without implicitly asserting the same about all ideas within one's own culture. This is because cultures and boundaries between them are fluid. So if it isn't possible to criticize cultures, it's also not possible to say that Richard Spencer's ideas are worse than Martin Luther King's or that Alex Jones' opinion on vaccination should not be equal to that of an epidemiologist. Nothing is true and everything is permitted.
My observation has been that the left prototypes nonsense and then the right deploys it at scale. So the left first pioneered relativism and critiques of reason and evidence, but it's the right that has run with these ideas and used them to re-legitimize racism and lead a renaissance of interest in traditionalist monarchy. Maybe the left should stop prototyping nonsense to begin with if for no other reason than to stop giving weapons to those who ought not have them. It's the same reason you don't give plutonium to ISIS. I truly do not believe that dullards like Richard Spencer or Pat Buchanan have the capacity to originate a cultural zeitgeist any more than ISIS can build an enrichment centrifuge, but they sure can use the final product if it's handed to them.
I'm not going to say you're wrong. A number of very loud voices have argued essentially that about broader academia. However, I think it's an argument essentially captured in the term "ivory tower", which began being used for academics in the 1800s. It's a pretty old argument.
Personally, I think it's exactly the opposite issue. Academia became too involved in social conflicts and found itself in the crosshairs. Think about what else was happening in the 70s-80s? Lots of social unrest, especially involving young students advocating radical ideas. What easier thing to attack than their radical schools, teaching them that reality doesn't even exist?
But more to the point, let's assume your argument is true. Academics can't really go back to the positivist position. Many of those results were trash. We don't want to stay with postmodernism either. It's not total garbage, but math is way easier to verify than some dude's stupid interpretation of some other dude's random babbling. Plus, you can make computers do math really fast. You can't make a computer analyze text in a postmodernist framework (yet). So, over the past 30ish years what you'd probably want to see is what's been happening: Academics finding a bunch of middle ground between the two where they can still be productive, without losing the human side of PM.
I am willing to entertain the idea that postmodernism has been misunderstood, but I still consider that a bit of an indictment. If a few people misunderstand you, it's their failure. If everyone misunderstands you, it's your failure. Even worse the misunderstanding here is extremely destructive. It's a misunderstanding that enables the worst of the worst of the intellectual landscape.
I feel like some people wear "nobody understands me" as a badge of distinction. This is wrong. If nobody understands you, you're a poor communicator.
> I think it's an argument essentially captured in the term "ivory tower", which began being used for academics in the 1800s. It's a pretty old argument.
I suppose it is an old argument, but I don't think that invalidates it. I think it's always been true and what we're seeing is the gradual unfolding of the consequences. Of course I still do believe that the ivory tower has become more tower-like in recent years, especially in the humanities. Why is Jordan Peterson so popular? Where are the public intellectuals who are not crackpots or misogynists to answer the deep life questions of all these disenchanted people who otherwise flock to people like him?
Science and engineering papers are impenetrable too, but those at least yield end products that have results in the world outside academia. At the most base level academia can always petition for their continued existence on the grounds that they are necessary to maintain military superiority. That's a narrow rationale, but if all else fails it's not wrong and it at least grounds academia in society somehow.
I think academia has to either come down from the ivory tower or the tower will fall when the masses inspired by a tweet by the first American Emperor lynch them all for promoting vaccination.
I agree that we can't go back to the positivist position, but it's also not clear to me that positivism is wholly wrong. It seems to work really well in certain domains. What we need is to examine the domains where it doesn't work and decide if we need to refine it, expand upon it, or realize that its domain is in fact limited and come up with new methods for other domains. "Anti-method" is not a method, so that's not an answer. That's giving up on the question.
That list of "Rosenau’s Guidelines for Deconstruction Analysis", though... I get that Rosenau is a critic, but wow, does he ever make deconstruction sound like bad-faith, deliberately obscure, intending to impede actual understanding, and a complete waste of everyone's time in the name of trying to grab attention for one's self. And, I suspect, in many cases the criticism is very much on point.
I have a much less nuanced view of "postmodernists" [1]; without fail, every single person I know who's really leaned into any form of "postmodernism" and would describe themselves as such is depressed, nihilistic, and functionally not very useful. They typically don't participate in things I think are fundamentally necessary for society (namely food production and distribution, construction, medicine, and law), and many are also anti-natalist. On the whole I find that their social circles are filled with self-aggrandizing narcissists. (Not unique to philosophy, of course.)
I realize that criticizing a theory based on its adherents is puerile, but I can't help but notice that on the whole I find everything that comes from "postmodernists" to be distasteful and damaging to the "uneducated" person's mental well-being. Their architecture is bleak and divisive; their music is grating and non-melodic; their art is challenging and uncomfortable, and their philosophy is bleak and depressing.
[1] = I have put "postmodernists" and "postmodernism" in quotes because it seems pretty difficult to actually define what it is and who believes in it.
> I realize that criticizing a theory based on its adherents is puerile
I disagree that it's puerile. I think looking at the makeup of the adherents of an ideology and the result it seems to have when played out is very important and meaningful. Ideas have consequences, and observing them tells you a lot about the ideas. Anything can sound good in isolation and if presented in the right way.
A major reason that I reject the pomo line of thinking is looking at its outcome: a broad retreat of enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought and liberalism ever since it came into vogue, and the corresponding resurgence of reactionary and totalitarian ideologies in that same time period. It's clear to me that it's either pure nonsense or if there is some good idea in there it is being communicated so poorly it is having no beneficial effect.
Personally I think part of the reactionary resurgence is that in comparison to pomo word salad reactionary ideology sounds sane, reasonable, and relevant. They've set the bar really low, especially when it comes to relevance. I have never read any pomo tract that could possibly have any relevance to anyone who isn't a cloistered academic with a desire to write and echo similar tracts.
Can you name some musicians, artists, architects, philosophers? What are you talking about? This post is hilarious, you’re acting like studying French philosophy is doing fentanyl or something.
Certainly. A classic example of a "postmodern" composer is John Adams, whose magnum opus could be considered the piece "El Nino", which modern critics have compared to Handel's "Messiah". I encourage you to listen to the "El Nino" front-to-back. During Handel's "Messiah", many audiences developed a tradition of standing during the Hallelujah chorus and singing along in four-part harmony; the piece, even at the time recognized as a triumphant achievement of one of the best living composers, could be easily participated in by the everyman, as long as they could carry a tune.
Is the El Nino as approachable? Does it marry the general non-studied audience with the music of the most-trained (in that case Handel, in this case John Adams)? Even looking at some of the farther out-there modernist composers, who came before the postmodernists (Charles Ives, Schoenberg, Cage, Shostakovich), you can see that they're writing bizarre, anti-melodic rejections of music that audiences have traditionally liked (read: music that audiences can hum after they're done listening). Charles Ives's father taught him to sing in one key and play in another, and said that children in the future would be whistling tunes in semi-tones.
And who have they inspired? People like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Listen to Four Organs and let me know if you think that we should reject the melodies of the past as the antiquated drivel of delusional Euro-supremacist royalists in favor of what the modernists, postmodernists, and the "post-post-modernists" have to offer us. If you think I'm exaggerating, you don't know enough academic musicians. (I do, however, freely admit that there are plenty left who appreciate both the old and the new; not every modern musician claims that we should cease playing Beethoven altogether. I myself like bits and pieces of each of the composers I've just named; the attitude I am criticizing is not that their music should exist at all, but more the attitude of the people I know who claim that their music should replace the earlier composers.)
I have many friends who have professionally studied music, and the more obtuse and obsessed with "new sounds" they get, the more insufferable and critical of historically popular music they become. It's as if they're deliberately driving a wedge between the musically non-educated and the musically educated. This wouldn't be too much of an issue if it hadn't started to spread into other fields that the public has no control over, like architecture, on which I could write another comment of equal length, although with somewhat less authority because I only personally know a few architects, whereas I've been studying music as an amateur and interacting with professional musicians for 20 years.
What I find most ironic is that these stalwart critics of western tradition, architecture, philosophy, and music, are the first to embrace the traditions of other cultures. Some of my acquaintances will spend an entire visit to Chicago complaining about the reductive and inequitable American architectural tradition, or criticize the cathedrals and castles of Europe, and then turn on a time and talk about how beautiful the palaces, mosques, and temples of the Middle and Far East are. It's maddening.
The pomo people telling the anti-pomo they just haven't the understanding is reminiscent of religious apologists/theologians telling atheist debaters they just haven't ground to stand on because they haven't adequately digested a sufficient body of obscure tomes to dismiss X religion. Or "You just haven't read the Koran in classical Arabic! Understanding Islam is beyond you."
No man, the texts are available, go read them. It takes time, effort and respect towards the perspectives of others to actually understand how complex things work, such as theories about human mind and social order.
Would you encourage someone with no experience in chemistry to start mixing chemicals without understanding potentially dangerous effects? Would you encourage someone who is not an engineer to construct a bridge without adequate preparation and planning? Experts can be authoritative because their experience grants them the ability to know better than non-experts in their respective fields.
John Searle makes sense when wiriting on the mind. Jacques Derrida, who I have read, does not. The post-modernists are obscurantist charlatans who en masse form an institution that demands attention rather than the quick dismissal like one would give a rambling bum on the street. Similar to religious apologists they have created an enormous enterprise of bullshit. You are confusing its nebulousness for profundity.
> The post-modernists are obscurantist charlatans who en masse form an institution that demands attention rather than the quick dismissal like one would give a rambling bum on the street.
Yes, like any legitimate discipline of proper research.
> You are confusing its nebulousness for profundity.
Where you see a nebulous blob, experts see an ordered set of ideas. Similar to when an engineer sees a bridge as a series of forces and structures designed to mitigate them, or as when a chemist understands complex chemical formulas while a layperson may see a somewhat disordered series of letters and numbers.
Something isn't wrong just because you don't understand it.
The article is an absurdly over the top straw-man and its target audience falls for it because they don't know that.
I could make an equally broad claim that Mormons believe absurd things. And when someone says I misunderstand Mormonism, I could claim that's just an appeal to ignorance.
People who don't believe in religious or cultural tolerance frequently float this conspicuously straw-man representation of those who believe in wider cultural tolerance. Typically using the ill-defined term "post modern". It's usually the same group that distrusts higher education and social criticism so a chance to attack them in an obfuscated way like this is doubly attractive.
Nietzsche would never have been a fan of post-modernism and it is a great historical irony that post-modern authors cite him so prolifically. I'm convinced that most of the French totally misunderstood the Germans (looking at you, Foucault and Deleuze...)
Nietzsche's crusade against schopenhauerian pessimism and critique of "the last man" (opposite of the ubermensch) looks suspiciously like what his critique of post-modernism might have looked like if he lived long enough...
From the Wikipedia article on "the last man"
"The lives of the last men are pacifist and comfortable. There is no longer a distinction between ruler and ruled, strong over weak or supreme over the mediocre. Social conflict and challenges are minimized. Every individual lives equally and in "superficial" harmony. There are no original or flourishing social trends and ideas"
Hmm, sounds kind of like what the hard left post-modernists want, doesn't it?
Edit: How about the people of HN explain why this take is wrong instead of greying it as they seem to do with every other post that has anything to do with post-modernism. I'd sincerly like to hear why this post isn't a good interpretation of Nietzsche.
It's especially suspicious because it fluctuates from not grey to grey rapidly - indicating that there may be a significant amount of brigading going on.
You were mostly okay up until you made it blatantly political. It was both a superficial dismissal of a complex set of political ideas at the same time that it conflates "political left" with "post modernist".
That's because the post-modernist authors that this article critiques have a long history of being extremely far left.
Foucault was an actual communist. Sartre was (for a time) an actual communist. Deleuze and Guattari were both far left and actual communists. Lyotard was a hard leftist. Baudrillard was a hard leftist and for a time an actual communist. Derrida is far left. Rorty is a leftist. Camus (not really pomo) was for a time, an actual communist. Explain to me why it's a mischaracterization to claim that the french post-modernists are generally leftists.
I'm not critiquing the "political left" I'm identifying that the goals of the post-modernist left are very similar to what Nietzsche is critiquing.
Also, I'm not "superficially' dismissing post-modernism. The OP article does a good job of that already with its satirical abstract. I'm making a connection. I personally would strongly prefer the life of "The Last Man" over the Übermensch
To reply to the post under this, because the brigades have me temporarily muzzled:
I think you're projecting what you want me to say on top of what I'm actually saying.
The overwhelming majority of self-styled post-modernist philosophers also just happen to be leftists. As such, they follow an intellectual tradition which usually moves towards fighting hierarchies. I do not know how you construed this to be me claiming that "all leftists are post-modernists" or anything of that sort. I didn't say that and it's not true. Many leftists are the opposite of post-modernist.
At no point do I bring up a single liberal author. I specifically cite french post-modernists and a few other french authors who flirted with leftism and are adjacent to the post-modernist movement. I gave a highly incomplete list of the overlap between leftists and postmodernists. I cannot even fathom how you grew to think that I am conflating liberals and post-modernists.
Oh, and finally, the people who keep flagging posts about Post-Modernism are intellectually lazy and proving that the average HN flagger can't be trusted to talk about an even slightly controversial topic. The flaggers should be embarrassed.
You are saying post modernists were on the far left. Fine. I'm saying most of the far left are not any sort of self-styled post modernist. To use an analogy, you're saying "all squares are rectangles". I'm saying "Okay, but not all rectangles are squares".
You are equating post modernists with all of a segment of leftist politics. Perhaps this is unintentionally, but that is the implication I get from your comments. This gives me the impression that you are conflating post-modern philosophy with liberal political philosophy. They are distinct branches of thought.
I'm not up to date on an inventory of post-modern conservatives, to which I made no claim if they exist or not. Once again you have ignored my actual claim: I am saying that not all liberals, not even all liberals further to the left, are post-modernists. If you want an example of that, I can give you one: John Rawls, one of the most famous political philosophers of our time, and a very liberal one at that. He was decidedly not a post-modernist, never writing a single paper on post-modernism as an epistemic philosophy he supported. If anything, his work evinces a concrete reality. Certainly there are those who read some post-modern influence into his work. Equally, conservative influence can be read into it as well: For one, he believed in objective truth. For another, he had no illusions of nor advocacy for any type of radical equality. Finally, he was a strong advocate of individualism, though he denied utilitarian thinking as a useful method of expressing individualism.
So, once again, I am simply saying that everyone on the left is not an post-modernist.
You appear to dislike post-modernism. I'm not a huge fan of it either. However, your disdain for that field of thinking seems to have focused your efforts on your area of dislike, on the excesses of those with whom you disagree. It may be a focus that blinds you to the wider field of modern epistemic thought, political philosophy, and nuance within the political spectrum that defies easy liberal-conservative dichotomies.
You cannot read the source works and/or criticisms of post-modernism, the source works and/or criticisms of libertarian/utilitation/objectivism and come away with an accurate picture of modern epistemic or political philosophy.
What specifically about this post is "tedious ideological boilerplate"? That's an extremely insulting way to characterize the work I've done to substantiate my argument. Moreover, I am very curious about what people disagree with in my post. I ask people in my OP to post specific reasons why they disagree with me. That's the definition of curious conversation
And bringing up Nietzsche is extremely relevant since the abstract of the OP specifically cites his reasoning as the source of post-modernism. I'm claiming that had he lived long enough to see what post-modernism was, he would have tried to disavow his work from it. Apparently that's "tedious ideological boilerplate" to you.
At what point am I claiming something which is untrue? If making a connection between the left and french post-modernism is something that you label as "tedious ideological boilerplate" than you're simply mistaken.
At worst, my final addendum about HN flaggers may not be within your guidelines. Outside of that, this post is high quality and something that HN users should aspire to. Compare the work I did to nearly all the other posts in this thread. They are on average far more quippy, far less substantiated, and more ideological than my own.
Your complaint about this post implies that this platform is bankrupt and defunct for talking about anything except a subset of computer related topics.
Ironically, Nietzsche is considered (by some) to be one of the fathers of postmodern thought. His criticism of the objectivity of science in "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", his deconstruction of the Western concept of self in "The Anti-Christ", and to some extents his criticism of 19th-century historiography in “On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life” and other books are touchstones which presage a lot of postmodern discussion of these topics.
> I argue that post-modern perspectivism and the individualistic or collectivistic logic which nurtures its scope can be transcended through construction of hyperperspectivistic prisms based on alogic of interrelation animated by the interdisciplinarian spirit prevailing in the field of modern science. This latter serves as the leading thread for the foundation of a new canonicity which, without losing its historical and cultural character, can make claims to truth and validity of general acceptance. The hyperspectivistic canonicity deriving from such an interrelational logic is in a position to animate a new educational model capable of overcoming both idealistic and romantic versions of Bildung.
It doesn't strike me as obviously so. As I (probably mis-)understand it, the author is saying that if we take seriously the idea that people can have incompatible perspectives on the world then we can lose a notion of 'truth' that applies across perspectives - and this undermines ideas like education and learning. However, (it is claimed) science is special in that it can transcend perspectives and, if so, form a foundation for us to make sense of notions like education and learning while still taking perspectivism seriously.
I suspect it is a bit of a reach, but if the author wants to take perspectivism seriously without accepting the intuitive conclusions about education and learning, then this could be a promising approach to take.
There seems to be an awful lot of convergence (critical phenomena, maybe) happening in information processes (e.g. NNs). That must be what the author means by transcending perspectives.
Agreed. What I get out of that is that we can get more useful info out of perspectivism if we look beyond just the individualism-collectivism way of framing perspective and consider how the fact that some scientists favor holding interdisciplinary perspectives so that they basically have more ingredients for their guts to cook up new hypotheses with implies that there exists an area of study where you examine the relationship between holding one or many perspectives and the conclusions that follow, which could serve as a less subjectively constrained way of thinking about thinking.
I also agree that this is borderline self parody because it's much too thick with itself to be an enjoyably stimulating read, at least for anyone who isn't well versed in the vernacular already. It also has a ton of typos given the level of language it's trying to use.
> This turn has been facilitated by the lack of technical kwoledge
Lots of people ITT seem to have an incorrect understanding of the term postmodernism. It basically boils down to the observation that history and human experience don't really move towards a single goal, but instead consists of lots of independent narratives going nowhere in particular.
These observations invalidate Modernist ideas that held that human historical development lead toward specific outcomes or followed observable patterns. For instance, postmodernist thought argues Marx was wrong in thinking that history followed a dialectical pattern, and instead holds that history follows no pattern.
I think that from mankind's innate curiosity and propensity to teach our young it is impossible to conclude that culture is without pattern. Like so, all of that seems invalidated.
I think that the mistake that postmodernism made was analogous to painting itself into a corner, where people fully studied culture from the outside without immersing themselves in it. They built abstractions until they no longer corresponded to observation and then concluded that there were contradictions in the subject of their study when there was none.
It rocked my world when out of the blue Regular Car-guy about-faced from a youtube hyuckster into a sleeper intellectual in relating the PT Cruiser with the modern world in the context of postmodernism. Zeitgeist, dumbed down to a car analogy without missing any of the salient points. It is some kind of perfection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c
A postmodern critique of this argument might start with your identification of a single "culture" that has a pattern. Who decides what this culture is and who its adherents are? What if there are exemplars of the culture that do not fit this pattern; are they inherently excluded from the culture by the fact that they do not fit the pattern? If so, it may be the case that we are fitting a pattern we would like to see onto a culture that is in fact varied and diverse, and which does not in fact have a particular direction.
I didn't mean to imply 'a' culture. I meant culture, like water.
Cultures don't have a name. Cultures are people. People sharing a history probably disagree in subtle ways about what their culture is as it is a matter of individual experience.
This doesn't validate postmodernism since there was no dichotomy to begin with and nothing to deny. Our history isn't human history. 'We' go back 3.5 billion years because we experience influence from then as a matter of evolution. The pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. Life is not anthropocentric.
The ideas that "culture is a matter of individual experience" and that "there was no dichotomy to begin with and nothing to deny" seem to affirm the postmodern idea from my POV. That's basically what they argue.
By contrast, many Modernist philosophers believed that human history moved inexorably towards more-just society or that human knowledge moved towards perfect understanding of all phenomena.
Edit: not sure I understand what you mean when you say "The pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. "; the project of postmodernism is in part to show that there is no pattern.
I won't argue that Modernism is right. My position is that Modernism was moving in the right direction, that I don't know where to go next, but postmodernism definitely is not the right direction.
I think it is right to say that postmodernism was born out of the nuclear shadow. I think it a degenerate expression of nihilism as I believe I recognize certain philosophical missteps. Summa summarum one must adopt a constructivist approach to logic and be very weary of double negation. "No dichotomy and nothing to deny" is a double negation and certain conclusions can not be made from it. We can in particular not conclude that all information is of equal value from the equality of information channels. We currently do not have the means to conclude that the medium is the whole of the message, but postmodernism seems to claim we do.
Edit: That probably came off as a bit arbitrary. I'm not very good at communicating this stuff outside of dialogue so please only see this as something to frame a perspective with a fair bit of thought behind it, and not as a convincing argument.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadOkay, so then how do you argue against those who want to reinstate slavery? If a radical neo-Nazi or KKK person believes slavery is legitimate, maybe that's just their cultural perspective? You could perhaps argue for the universality of human rights, but isn't that also just a cultural perspective? Who are you to impose your cultural values on racist Neo-Confederates?
This is a more sophisticated variant of an apocryphal story I once heard about a Rabbi's answer to this: he thwapped the speaker on the head and said "I didn't hit you."
IMHO this is exactly why a lot of modern liberals are forced to try to de-platform neo-fascists and the like: they are unable to argue against them. Liberals from a previous era would have made ground beef out of an intellectual weakling like Richard Spencer or (LOL) Alex Jones, but to argue a position requires a belief that there exists some objective standard against which a position may be tested.
When the ability to debate is removed, the only thing remaining is force.
Personally I will take the position that there does exist an objective standard, that human rights can be defended objectively, and that those who advocate slavery or institutionalized racism are simply wrong. They do not have a point and their position is not valid.
Edit: I also personally think that nobody actually believes this stuff. They only deploy it as a weapon against people they don't like. Nobody lives by this nonsense. You can't.
Edit #2, and then back to work: how do we know something objective exists? Try this: jump off a cliff. For the political version: move to North Korea. The question of how we know what that objective reality is is more difficult and is the realm of epistemology among other things, and that's a separate question.
Fascists don't give a shit that you think you owned them in a debate. A fist doesn't care what sweet words come out of a mouth as it's crashing into teeth. This is exactly the blind spot of liberalism that many 20th century thinkers (some vaguely labeled as postmodernists) tried to shine a light on: Even if there were some objective standard by which you can say you have bested someone with reason in an argument, does it matter when power can simply ignore it?
> Liberals from a previous era would have made ground beef out of an intellectual weakling like Richard Spencer, but to argue a position requires a belief that positions may be argued as well as an ability to think coherently and organize one's own views.
Liberals mocked Hitler constantly until the day he seized power. How did you come to this belief that liberalism has any potency against fascism in spite of the historical evidence?
BTW I am on your side and I'm sick of the left intellectually handicapping itself with trendy bullshit.
Edit: replying on Peterson because I hit the thread limit:
All Peterson's interesting ideas are ripped off of Carl Jung and various 60s-era consciousness/psychedelic thinkers like Leary and Wilson (who were heavily influenced by Jung). There's a bit of Nietzsche in there too.
Peterson's original ideas are uninteresting confused rubbish. The central theme of his work is misogyny. Not sure if he's really fascist but his fan base is definitely fascist adjacent.
TL;DR: "nothing good about him is original, and nothing original about him is good."
If the idea of myths being a valid form of truth is appealing, read Jung. Jung is an infinitely better writer too. If you want an explicitly Christian version, read C.S. Lewis who is also an infinitely better writer.
If his "get your butt in gear" and "clean your room" thing is appealing, read some good military memoirs like Call Sign Chaos by Jim Mattis. The latter are great motivational works minus the overt misogyny and confused bullshit about "alpha males" and lobsters. (Don't have a clue what Mattis's politics are, but he keeps it mostly out of his writing and focuses on practical stuff.)
Anything good about Peterson can be found from better sources. It mystifies me that anyone took him seriously. Of course maybe Peterson wasn't the best example as he's actually one of the better alt-right or alt-right adjacent intellectuals (on a purely intellectual level). A better sample of the intellectual chops of the alt-right would be an artisanal fountain of bullshit like Stefan Molyneux or Richard Spencer.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
So, taking this moment to do my own searching all I find are character assassinations, and misunderstandings of his background and goals. That's from discussions on /r/askphilosophy to that New York times article to the one on thebaffler and video interviews too, from Cathy Newman to Vice all seem driven to the same goal as those sad and incoherent student protests in 2016.
Shrug.
IMHO, after a brief fascination I've found my enthusiasm for Zizek fading. He seems to know his quotes very well and spits them out like a rapper on speed, but as a career philosopher and author I haven't seen his work leading to positive change in people. Peterson on the other hand has a growing cohort of I regret to say 'followers' who are purportedly cleaning up their acts.
IMHO the group (and subsequently the ideology) is the wrong level of analysis to diagnose and then treat our contemporary woes. Groups cannot be addressed simultainously, cannot be held accountable, and most of all are never clearly delineated (what is 'race'?). The individual CAN be held accountable, that's how every law system on Earth is engineered. The individual can be addressed. That's how almost every communication system in the world works (except public PAs, radio, and the like). And most of all individuals are trivial to delineate. An individual human is unlike anything else in the universe except other humans and each has their own unique history.
"During an event at the Cambridge Union Society in November 2018, Žižek had called Peterson's work "pseudo-scientific", labeled him as his "enemy" and criticized Peterson's work on the idea of cultural Marxism. Peterson said he could meet "any time, any place" to debate and it was announced on February 28, 2019 that the debate was scheduled for April 19. The two professors before had argued against happiness as something one should pursue. Peterson had said people should seek meaning through personal responsibility and Žižek had said happiness is pointless and delusional."[1]
Debate itself[2][3]:
"...In a similar fashion, Žižek asked Peterson to name him personal names of "postmodern neo-Marxists" in Western academia and from where he got the statistical numbers because according to him the over-the-top political correctness is opposed to Marxism, on which Peterson did not mention any names, yet statistical percentage of those who declare as Marxists in the academia according to Jonathan Haidt's research and explained replacement of the Marxist idea of class struggle with identity politics by which one group is oppressing the other. Some view this exchange as evidence that cultural Marxism had been invented by Peterson and other members of the intellectual dark web without any evidence of its existence. In the end, they both agreed that happiness is rather a byproduct of life itself."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterson%E2%80%93%C5%BDi%C5%BE...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterson%E2%80%93%C5%BDi%C5%BE...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterson%E2%80%93%C5%BDi%C5%BE...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsWndfzuOc4
From all I've digested of Žižek it seems he quite often bathes in exaggeration for theatrics. So, I wouldn't take "pseudo-scientific" as a flat and sincere statement. Also given that Peterson actually IS a scientist (with a few well sited papers).
I tried to watch the talk, but there was so much audience hooting and hollering it was too difficult.
But still, I don't see any evidence of Peterson being a "crypto-fascist" or "intellectual lightweight" as a previous user accused.
The search continues.
Edit:
live commentary: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/live-commentary-on-th...
a decently even-handed critique of both participants: https://medium.com/discourse/the-hidden-argument-in-the-zize...
an unedited transcipt I found: https://truefalsehoods.com/2019/04/23/transcript-of-zizek-vs...
(edit: oops, this was to comment on the wikipedia article you posted)
So, it seems to me this critique of Peterson's Boogymen of cultural Post-structuralist Neo-Marxists (or something like that) comes down to "He didn't use the right words to describe what he's talking about." as opposed to "What he's describing doesn't exist" or what I seem to smell in the most muddy of critiques "He's a dangerous idiot".
In addition, looking at this article:
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-jordan-peterson-slavoj-z...
The author says:
"He then proceeded to stumble his way through Marxist philosophy with such a shallow assessment as to be laughably incorrect."
But then doesn't back it up with anything. And shallow doesn't mean incorrect.
So it seems to me that his detractors are grasping at straws.
Again, a hearty shrug from me.
Though, looking at the work from Andray Domise, the author of above, like his articles and his TED talk "TEDx Toronto: Colour Coded: race, gender, and representation in video games" He seems very very occupied with group identity.
That critics gloss over all this by only saying that Peterson is shallow and incorrect is a shame. He’s not even wrong because his argument is not even making normative statements that could be proved or disproved. To say that the critic judging him didn’t do a good job is fair. However it seems like missing the point. If you have a test and get partial credit for showing your work and your answer is wrong and the work you show is wrong, it is hard to see where an instructor could award any points for an attempt. Nor do I see it as a failure of the instructor to not show their work on this when grading. I think Hitchen’s razor works best here.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
Edit: punctuation
The fascist may not, but what about the audience?
> Even if there were some objective standard by which you can say you have bested someone with reason in an argument, does it matter when power can simply ignore it?
In order to gain power, you have to persuade people to follow you. Brute force is a hilariously inefficient way of doing that. Heck, even the ancient Athenians (i.e. Pericles, Demosthenes, etc) realized that it was far easier to persuade people with words than with fists.
>Liberals mocked Hitler constantly until the day he seized power.
And how did Hitler seize and consolidate his power? It certainly wasn't with brute force. It was with rhetoric. Even without understanding a single word of German, I can feel the force of Hitler's personality when I see footage of the Nuremberg rallies.
if such a thing even exists, how do you learn about it? I can't think of any way to prove or test it.
You seem to be conflating the ability to debate with the existance of objective ethical facts. That sounds like a bit of a false choice to me. What kind of ethical experiment would reveal an ethical truth in the same way in which jumping of a cliff reveals a physical truth?
It also strikes me that our belief that slavery is wrong is not really hostage to experiment in the same way in which my belief that gravity exists is. What kind of fact would you have to be confronted with to recognise that your belief ('slavery is wrong') is false?
And this kind of idiotic thinking leads to a broken society where we are conditioned from childhood to pretend that all cultures are equal and that all differences are purely social constructions.
Except for the most pampered societies, cultural norms are at least partly a manifestation of successful survival strategies in different environments. They are emergent and based in the truths of reality that postmodernists delude themselves into believing do not exist. No patriarchy necessary.
The modern deconstructive movements that were spawned by postmodernism have effectively become rebellion for the sake of rebellion. Progress for the sake of progress. Anything we do differently from our ancestors is automatically superior - that's why these movements have such draw from young, vulnerable, naive, college aged children. The only truth in these movements is deliberate change - but thousands of years of development of civilization has infused our various cultures with a wealth of heuristics which postmodernists (and modern leftist movements which are postmodernist offspring) cannot acknowledge because their definition of truth is backwards and, frankly, unscientific.
You don't read the thinkers you are calling idiots and you don't understand what you cited.
> Truth is in mathematics
Of all the human activities concerning truth, mathematics has the easiest time demonstrating its limitations, its inherent circularity, and the fact that in its absolute form it is ultimately out of reach for human beings. Your vulgar High Rationality is built on sand.
I am not calling these philosophers idiots, I am saying that they encourage dangeous thinking.
The OP quotes:
>Patterns regulating social relations do not derive from reason.
And what I'm saying is that they partly do, as emergent adaptations to reality, except in pampered cultures where comforts erase impetus.
I deleted the part about mathematics because it was no longer applicable to what I ended up writing.
>Your vulgar High Rationality is built on sand
My high rationality is built on the observation that a large swath of people actually believe that there is little value in the cultural norms of old. I used to feel similarly. Then I grew up. My vulgarity is built on frustration with the modern state of the world and the headstrong ignorance of the young adult population in the US. Here's a case in point - ignorant young people would be less uppity if they were taught to show amount some respect to elders. Not blindly, but in the US we seem to have lost an appreciation for the experience that comes with age.
I'm in my late 20s. Not a boomer, just on the spectrum.
Wow young people who lack experience are often headstrong and ignorant. Brilliant, groundbreaking observation there. This surely has not been a thing since civilization began.
> Here's a case in point - ignorant young people would be less uppity if they were taught to show amount some respect to elders.
And what "respect" should that be. I'll extend a base level of respect and courtesy to everyone, until I have a reason not to. Not all ideas have merit just because they are traditional, just like new ideas are not inherently better than old ones
To me it seems like the pendulum shifted from something of a mandate for blind respect of elders to the opposite end of blind disregard for experience and expertise.
Such cultural pendulums are not uncommon though, and we're probably due for this one to begin shifting its momentum back the other way over the next decade or so.
For example?
There are a lot of useless formal logics out there.
https://github.com/TeamSPoon/logicmoo_workspace/issues/22
My own view on truth exists very far from but in the same space as logic. I don't think a formal truth can exist as a singleton, but that one must consider the set of all statements together with all possible truths. Maybe this is a matrix of statements times the transpose of statements but I'm not sure about that implementation. Anyway, you get an immensely sparse product where statements match up with everything that is true about those statements, along with everything that is false about those statements. You can then attempt to compress this data and that compression is the logic. The vast sparseness, meaning much more false evaluations than true ones, implies a lot of structure which can be exploited in compression.
I don't think anything but many-valued logic like this can be consistent.
It's fine to complain that critics of postmodernism don't understand it. But to not then explain looks a lot like hiding from criticism. "You don't understand, but I'm right and you're wrong" is not a productive conversation. It's smug arrogance that assumes its own superiority but won't actually engage with critics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm sorry to occasionally make your life difficult, as you mention this isn't the first time I've been disciplined.
I recognize the pressures that lead you to censor certain accounts - however given the amount of soft power that you wield, I would kindly ask you to keep in mind that consistently and primarily suppressing only one set of views, which are potentially held by 25-50% of the population, breeds extremism.
The fact that these rational views are effectively banned from every major platform only forces the polarization that we are witnessing in our society.
> consistently and primarily suppressing only one set of views
That's nothing like how HN is moderated. You may be falling prey to the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I don't actually know what your views are, but wherever they land, I can guarantee you a long list of commenters complaining that "suppression" on HN goes exactly the other way.
I understand what you're saying, and I viewed the collection of contradicting examples, but it is unlikely that there isn't a predominant set of viewpoints on HN. Without choosing a side, there's no question that user flagging and mod moderation is likely to fall somewhere on the ideological spectrum and I'd love a chance to determine where.
Tell me on what basis a postmodernist would argue against a Klansman.
IMHO pomo is the humanities' analog to what string theory is in physics or cryptocurrency hype is in tech: a trendy cancer that hijacked the minds of a generation and doesn't deliver anything.
It doesn't even deliver progress in the area of social justice. All the progress in social justice was made by previous generations of civil rights leaders and movements who were absolutely not postmodernists, cultural relativists, or believers in any strong form of identity politics. Social justice started to retreat culturally precisely when pomo and hard identity politics (a closely related ideology) took over academia: the 70s.
I mean liberals and other modern intellectuals have been asleep at the switch so long that monarchism is making a comeback. That's analogous to seeing measles outbreaks among anti-vaxxers.
I don't intend this dismissively, but so much of your post suggests fundamental misunderstandings of what postmodernism is that it's difficult to have a discussion. Personally I found it easier to engage with understanding PM from the anthropology side, where they don't get as much into the ridiculous language used by the philosophy and the lit. people. Here's a simple introduction that goes over most of your questions in understandable terms without being insultingly simplified: https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/postmodernism-and-its-cri...
I would say:
(1) That's "flat Earth" silly.
(2) Also very silly and oddly chauvinist.
(3) Not sure how to interpret this. If the claim is that there is metaphysically no objective reality, then all claims are false including the claim that all claims are false. If it's interpreted as an encouragement to question our model of reality, then it's a non-point since that's what all intellectuals and scientists do already.
(4) This has merit but is by no means unique to postmodern thought.
(5) This is silly. How then can you criticize Western culture? Doesn't that take a method and imply some kind of evaluation?
(6) I agree completely, but this is also not unique to postmodern thought. In fact I would argue that challenges to power as a rationale or argument for truth is a central feature of enlightenment thought, which is why virtually all modern progress in social justice was made prior to pomo coming into vogue. The only exception is gay rights, and that was on the inertia of the civil rights movement and using the same narratives and arguments.
(7) What were the enlightenment and the Protestant reformation if not major criticisms of central aspects of Western culture by members of that culture? From what I've seen most intellectuals in most cultures primarily criticize their own culture since that's what they know and is what is most relevant to them. If the point instead is to argue that only Western culture can be criticized, that insane.
There are two possibilities here: either this is as asinine as it appears, or there are good ideas but they are being communicated very poorly to the point that they are incomprehensible. Both are failure modes for any school of thought.
Furthermore I would add that if you follow these sorts of ideas to their logical endpoint you end up a reactionary, not a progressive. The primary argument of the reactionaries is and always has been the futility of human knowledge and reason. It's so obvious that I've even wondered if Derrida et. al. weren't crypto-reactionaries attempting to Trojan horse academia with reactionary metaphysical premises, though this verges dangerously close to oddball conspiracy theory territory. It's more likely that they were either crackpots or were misunderstood by essentially everyone. Maybe something was totally botched in the French-English translation of their ideas and the badly translated version stuck.
In that light, what is it describing postmodernism for? Simply put, it's a [set of] frameworks through which to analyze the kinds of things anthropologists work with. This an important because many of the issues you're seeing are the direct result of trying to extrapolate beyond this academic heritage.
So from an academic anthropology standpoint:
1. Is definitely not flat earth silly. To give some context, prior to PM in the 70s, anthropologists were doing silly things like measuring the amount of food on the table every day and how many knives were in the cupboard. That's nice quantitative data, but it doesn't really tell you much about culture or human behavior. Thinking of language and text as fundamental aspects of culture and behavior is much better, though I personally have some quibbles with that focus.
2. Specific to anthropology and a bit of academic vogue here.
3. Remember that this is an academic framework for analyzing academic things. In anthropology, sometimes people all see the same physically impossible thing, or see different things despite observing bthe same physical events, etc. To deal with this, sometimes it's useful just to view things as if people are in different realities and observing different things. It's not a claim on the real underlying epistemology.
4. Virtually everything academic from the last 40-50 years has been influenced in some way by post modernism. Bit of a Seinfeld effect here.
5. They have a section later about methodologies of postmodernism. Yes, it's a bit ironic.
6. Same as 4, but you're right that it's not unique. Doesn't have to be.
7. This is specific to academia, which was (and largely still is) made up of very much Western derived institutions. Specifically, this is about things like "maybe the structure of our institutions leads us to certain types of research design and valuing certain types of information over others" and "maybe other ways of organizing academia / research / knowledge might also lead to useful results". It's not to suggest the only target for criticism should be Western institutions, merely that they're not the only way to do things and might be improved.
As for whether the ideas of PM are being miscommunicated, sure, I'm open to the idea. But there are also millions of people in academia who do get it. Since we all know academics can be remarkably stupid, it's not an intelligence gap. Maybe it's just something that doesn't make sense without practical experience in the kinds of problems it's designed to help?
The reason I'm a bit peeved in these replies is that I do have a powerful sense that the humanities in academia have lost their relevance by going down a path that is increasingly insular, alienating, and unproductive, and that this has had a role in ceding the cultural ground to reactionaries, fascists, and other kinds of actively destructive irrationalists. That's why elsewhere I make the analogy to string theory, a fad that seems as if it's been fruitless and has derailed physics.
In short I've blamed pomo for why there is a resurgence of racism, reactionary ideology, and stuff like the anti-vaxx movement. Not only does this stuff result in an intellectual class that speaks gibberish that nobody but them understands, it also at least superficially sounds as if it's legitimizing the idea that "all opinions are of equal merit." That means if I don't want to vaccinate my kids because Alex Jones said so, my opinion is equal to that of an epidemiologist because cultural relativism.
Edit: I realized there's a more pointed way of saying what I said above: I am not sure you can try to argue that all cultures are equivalent and equal without implicitly asserting the same about all ideas within one's own culture. This is because cultures and boundaries between them are fluid. So if it isn't possible to criticize cultures, it's also not possible to say that Richard Spencer's ideas are worse than Martin Luther King's or that Alex Jones' opinion on vaccination should not be equal to that of an epidemiologist. Nothing is true and everything is permitted.
My observation has been that the left prototypes nonsense and then the right deploys it at scale. So the left first pioneered relativism and critiques of reason and evidence, but it's the right that has run with these ideas and used them to re-legitimize racism and lead a renaissance of interest in traditionalist monarchy. Maybe the left should stop prototyping nonsense to begin with if for no other reason than to stop giving weapons to those who ought not have them. It's the same reason you don't give plutonium to ISIS. I truly do not believe that dullards like Richard Spencer or Pat Buchanan have the capacity to originate a cultural zeitgeist any more than ISIS can build an enrichment centrifuge, but they sure can use the final product if it's handed to them.
Personally, I think it's exactly the opposite issue. Academia became too involved in social conflicts and found itself in the crosshairs. Think about what else was happening in the 70s-80s? Lots of social unrest, especially involving young students advocating radical ideas. What easier thing to attack than their radical schools, teaching them that reality doesn't even exist?
But more to the point, let's assume your argument is true. Academics can't really go back to the positivist position. Many of those results were trash. We don't want to stay with postmodernism either. It's not total garbage, but math is way easier to verify than some dude's stupid interpretation of some other dude's random babbling. Plus, you can make computers do math really fast. You can't make a computer analyze text in a postmodernist framework (yet). So, over the past 30ish years what you'd probably want to see is what's been happening: Academics finding a bunch of middle ground between the two where they can still be productive, without losing the human side of PM.
I feel like some people wear "nobody understands me" as a badge of distinction. This is wrong. If nobody understands you, you're a poor communicator.
> I think it's an argument essentially captured in the term "ivory tower", which began being used for academics in the 1800s. It's a pretty old argument.
I suppose it is an old argument, but I don't think that invalidates it. I think it's always been true and what we're seeing is the gradual unfolding of the consequences. Of course I still do believe that the ivory tower has become more tower-like in recent years, especially in the humanities. Why is Jordan Peterson so popular? Where are the public intellectuals who are not crackpots or misogynists to answer the deep life questions of all these disenchanted people who otherwise flock to people like him?
Science and engineering papers are impenetrable too, but those at least yield end products that have results in the world outside academia. At the most base level academia can always petition for their continued existence on the grounds that they are necessary to maintain military superiority. That's a narrow rationale, but if all else fails it's not wrong and it at least grounds academia in society somehow.
I think academia has to either come down from the ivory tower or the tower will fall when the masses inspired by a tweet by the first American Emperor lynch them all for promoting vaccination.
I agree that we can't go back to the positivist position, but it's also not clear to me that positivism is wholly wrong. It seems to work really well in certain domains. What we need is to examine the domains where it doesn't work and decide if we need to refine it, expand upon it, or realize that its domain is in fact limited and come up with new methods for other domains. "Anti-method" is not a method, so that's not an answer. That's giving up on the question.
That list of "Rosenau’s Guidelines for Deconstruction Analysis", though... I get that Rosenau is a critic, but wow, does he ever make deconstruction sound like bad-faith, deliberately obscure, intending to impede actual understanding, and a complete waste of everyone's time in the name of trying to grab attention for one's self. And, I suspect, in many cases the criticism is very much on point.
I realize that criticizing a theory based on its adherents is puerile, but I can't help but notice that on the whole I find everything that comes from "postmodernists" to be distasteful and damaging to the "uneducated" person's mental well-being. Their architecture is bleak and divisive; their music is grating and non-melodic; their art is challenging and uncomfortable, and their philosophy is bleak and depressing.
[1] = I have put "postmodernists" and "postmodernism" in quotes because it seems pretty difficult to actually define what it is and who believes in it.
I disagree that it's puerile. I think looking at the makeup of the adherents of an ideology and the result it seems to have when played out is very important and meaningful. Ideas have consequences, and observing them tells you a lot about the ideas. Anything can sound good in isolation and if presented in the right way.
A major reason that I reject the pomo line of thinking is looking at its outcome: a broad retreat of enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought and liberalism ever since it came into vogue, and the corresponding resurgence of reactionary and totalitarian ideologies in that same time period. It's clear to me that it's either pure nonsense or if there is some good idea in there it is being communicated so poorly it is having no beneficial effect.
Personally I think part of the reactionary resurgence is that in comparison to pomo word salad reactionary ideology sounds sane, reasonable, and relevant. They've set the bar really low, especially when it comes to relevance. I have never read any pomo tract that could possibly have any relevance to anyone who isn't a cloistered academic with a desire to write and echo similar tracts.
Is the El Nino as approachable? Does it marry the general non-studied audience with the music of the most-trained (in that case Handel, in this case John Adams)? Even looking at some of the farther out-there modernist composers, who came before the postmodernists (Charles Ives, Schoenberg, Cage, Shostakovich), you can see that they're writing bizarre, anti-melodic rejections of music that audiences have traditionally liked (read: music that audiences can hum after they're done listening). Charles Ives's father taught him to sing in one key and play in another, and said that children in the future would be whistling tunes in semi-tones.
And who have they inspired? People like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Listen to Four Organs and let me know if you think that we should reject the melodies of the past as the antiquated drivel of delusional Euro-supremacist royalists in favor of what the modernists, postmodernists, and the "post-post-modernists" have to offer us. If you think I'm exaggerating, you don't know enough academic musicians. (I do, however, freely admit that there are plenty left who appreciate both the old and the new; not every modern musician claims that we should cease playing Beethoven altogether. I myself like bits and pieces of each of the composers I've just named; the attitude I am criticizing is not that their music should exist at all, but more the attitude of the people I know who claim that their music should replace the earlier composers.)
I have many friends who have professionally studied music, and the more obtuse and obsessed with "new sounds" they get, the more insufferable and critical of historically popular music they become. It's as if they're deliberately driving a wedge between the musically non-educated and the musically educated. This wouldn't be too much of an issue if it hadn't started to spread into other fields that the public has no control over, like architecture, on which I could write another comment of equal length, although with somewhat less authority because I only personally know a few architects, whereas I've been studying music as an amateur and interacting with professional musicians for 20 years.
What I find most ironic is that these stalwart critics of western tradition, architecture, philosophy, and music, are the first to embrace the traditions of other cultures. Some of my acquaintances will spend an entire visit to Chicago complaining about the reductive and inequitable American architectural tradition, or criticize the cathedrals and castles of Europe, and then turn on a time and talk about how beautiful the palaces, mosques, and temples of the Middle and Far East are. It's maddening.
Would you encourage someone with no experience in chemistry to start mixing chemicals without understanding potentially dangerous effects? Would you encourage someone who is not an engineer to construct a bridge without adequate preparation and planning? Experts can be authoritative because their experience grants them the ability to know better than non-experts in their respective fields.
Yes, like any legitimate discipline of proper research.
> You are confusing its nebulousness for profundity.
Where you see a nebulous blob, experts see an ordered set of ideas. Similar to when an engineer sees a bridge as a series of forces and structures designed to mitigate them, or as when a chemist understands complex chemical formulas while a layperson may see a somewhat disordered series of letters and numbers.
Something isn't wrong just because you don't understand it.
How did the Bogdanoff affair happen?
The fact that bullshit is hard to separate from "the truth" is a very good starting point for postmodern investigation.
I could make an equally broad claim that Mormons believe absurd things. And when someone says I misunderstand Mormonism, I could claim that's just an appeal to ignorance.
People who don't believe in religious or cultural tolerance frequently float this conspicuously straw-man representation of those who believe in wider cultural tolerance. Typically using the ill-defined term "post modern". It's usually the same group that distrusts higher education and social criticism so a chance to attack them in an obfuscated way like this is doubly attractive.
Nietzsche's crusade against schopenhauerian pessimism and critique of "the last man" (opposite of the ubermensch) looks suspiciously like what his critique of post-modernism might have looked like if he lived long enough...
From the Wikipedia article on "the last man"
"The lives of the last men are pacifist and comfortable. There is no longer a distinction between ruler and ruled, strong over weak or supreme over the mediocre. Social conflict and challenges are minimized. Every individual lives equally and in "superficial" harmony. There are no original or flourishing social trends and ideas"
Hmm, sounds kind of like what the hard left post-modernists want, doesn't it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
Edit: How about the people of HN explain why this take is wrong instead of greying it as they seem to do with every other post that has anything to do with post-modernism. I'd sincerly like to hear why this post isn't a good interpretation of Nietzsche.
It's especially suspicious because it fluctuates from not grey to grey rapidly - indicating that there may be a significant amount of brigading going on.
Foucault was an actual communist. Sartre was (for a time) an actual communist. Deleuze and Guattari were both far left and actual communists. Lyotard was a hard leftist. Baudrillard was a hard leftist and for a time an actual communist. Derrida is far left. Rorty is a leftist. Camus (not really pomo) was for a time, an actual communist. Explain to me why it's a mischaracterization to claim that the french post-modernists are generally leftists.
I'm not critiquing the "political left" I'm identifying that the goals of the post-modernist left are very similar to what Nietzsche is critiquing.
Also, I'm not "superficially' dismissing post-modernism. The OP article does a good job of that already with its satirical abstract. I'm making a connection. I personally would strongly prefer the life of "The Last Man" over the Übermensch
To reply to the post under this, because the brigades have me temporarily muzzled:
I think you're projecting what you want me to say on top of what I'm actually saying.
The overwhelming majority of self-styled post-modernist philosophers also just happen to be leftists. As such, they follow an intellectual tradition which usually moves towards fighting hierarchies. I do not know how you construed this to be me claiming that "all leftists are post-modernists" or anything of that sort. I didn't say that and it's not true. Many leftists are the opposite of post-modernist.
At no point do I bring up a single liberal author. I specifically cite french post-modernists and a few other french authors who flirted with leftism and are adjacent to the post-modernist movement. I gave a highly incomplete list of the overlap between leftists and postmodernists. I cannot even fathom how you grew to think that I am conflating liberals and post-modernists.
Oh, and finally, the people who keep flagging posts about Post-Modernism are intellectually lazy and proving that the average HN flagger can't be trusted to talk about an even slightly controversial topic. The flaggers should be embarrassed.
You are equating post modernists with all of a segment of leftist politics. Perhaps this is unintentionally, but that is the implication I get from your comments. This gives me the impression that you are conflating post-modern philosophy with liberal political philosophy. They are distinct branches of thought.
So, once again, I am simply saying that everyone on the left is not an post-modernist.
You appear to dislike post-modernism. I'm not a huge fan of it either. However, your disdain for that field of thinking seems to have focused your efforts on your area of dislike, on the excesses of those with whom you disagree. It may be a focus that blinds you to the wider field of modern epistemic thought, political philosophy, and nuance within the political spectrum that defies easy liberal-conservative dichotomies.
You cannot read the source works and/or criticisms of post-modernism, the source works and/or criticisms of libertarian/utilitation/objectivism and come away with an accurate picture of modern epistemic or political philosophy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And bringing up Nietzsche is extremely relevant since the abstract of the OP specifically cites his reasoning as the source of post-modernism. I'm claiming that had he lived long enough to see what post-modernism was, he would have tried to disavow his work from it. Apparently that's "tedious ideological boilerplate" to you.
At what point am I claiming something which is untrue? If making a connection between the left and french post-modernism is something that you label as "tedious ideological boilerplate" than you're simply mistaken.
At worst, my final addendum about HN flaggers may not be within your guidelines. Outside of that, this post is high quality and something that HN users should aspire to. Compare the work I did to nearly all the other posts in this thread. They are on average far more quippy, far less substantiated, and more ideological than my own.
Your complaint about this post implies that this platform is bankrupt and defunct for talking about anything except a subset of computer related topics.
Check out https://muse.jhu.edu/article/27340 for the argument against though!
Come on, this is self-parody.
https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
I suspect it is a bit of a reach, but if the author wants to take perspectivism seriously without accepting the intuitive conclusions about education and learning, then this could be a promising approach to take.
I also agree that this is borderline self parody because it's much too thick with itself to be an enjoyably stimulating read, at least for anyone who isn't well versed in the vernacular already. It also has a ton of typos given the level of language it's trying to use.
> This turn has been facilitated by the lack of technical kwoledge
> Strengthening of solidarity and conscesnsus
These observations invalidate Modernist ideas that held that human historical development lead toward specific outcomes or followed observable patterns. For instance, postmodernist thought argues Marx was wrong in thinking that history followed a dialectical pattern, and instead holds that history follows no pattern.
I think that the mistake that postmodernism made was analogous to painting itself into a corner, where people fully studied culture from the outside without immersing themselves in it. They built abstractions until they no longer corresponded to observation and then concluded that there were contradictions in the subject of their study when there was none.
It rocked my world when out of the blue Regular Car-guy about-faced from a youtube hyuckster into a sleeper intellectual in relating the PT Cruiser with the modern world in the context of postmodernism. Zeitgeist, dumbed down to a car analogy without missing any of the salient points. It is some kind of perfection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c
Cultures don't have a name. Cultures are people. People sharing a history probably disagree in subtle ways about what their culture is as it is a matter of individual experience.
This doesn't validate postmodernism since there was no dichotomy to begin with and nothing to deny. Our history isn't human history. 'We' go back 3.5 billion years because we experience influence from then as a matter of evolution. The pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. Life is not anthropocentric.
By contrast, many Modernist philosophers believed that human history moved inexorably towards more-just society or that human knowledge moved towards perfect understanding of all phenomena.
Edit: not sure I understand what you mean when you say "The pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. "; the project of postmodernism is in part to show that there is no pattern.
I think it is right to say that postmodernism was born out of the nuclear shadow. I think it a degenerate expression of nihilism as I believe I recognize certain philosophical missteps. Summa summarum one must adopt a constructivist approach to logic and be very weary of double negation. "No dichotomy and nothing to deny" is a double negation and certain conclusions can not be made from it. We can in particular not conclude that all information is of equal value from the equality of information channels. We currently do not have the means to conclude that the medium is the whole of the message, but postmodernism seems to claim we do.
Edit: That probably came off as a bit arbitrary. I'm not very good at communicating this stuff outside of dialogue so please only see this as something to frame a perspective with a fair bit of thought behind it, and not as a convincing argument.