Philosophy 213: Postmodernism [under deconstruction]

Contents

Introduction

Section n: The eras of Western thought and their orientations
Section n: (G1a) The rejection of meaning
Section n: (G1b) The rejection of self
Section n: (G2) The rejection of reason
Section n: (G3) The rejection morality
Section n: Why you should reject postmodernism
Section n: How to recognize a postmodernist

Introduction

The new skepticism

Section n: The eras of Western thought and their orientations

This section offers an extremely potted history of Western thought according to the chronic and metaphysical orientations of each era.

The pre-Socratic era

Chronic orientation: the present
Metaphysical orientation: this-worldly

The pre-Socratic philosophers were concerned with answering the question of how their physical world was constituted. They hypothesized such various constitutive principles as water (Thales), a proto-element (Anaximander), air (Anaximines), number (Pythagoras), fire (Heraclitus), a static plenum (Parmenides and Zeno), the four traditional elements plus attraction and repulsion (Empedocles), an omni-element (Anaxagorus), and atoms (Leucippus and Democritus).

The classical era

Chronic orientation: the past
Metaphysical orientation: both this-worldly and other-worldly

Socrates and Plato decisively turned the attention of philosophy to the past (the doctrine that present knowlege is recollection of past knowlege) and to a non-physical world (the doctrine that certain knowlege is knowlege of other-worldly Forms).

Aristotle turned thought to the past in a different way, by always beginning his treatises with a gathering of the truths (and errors) of past thinkers. This orientation would persist until the modern era, and the past authority cited (and eventually debunked) came to be almost exclusively Aristotle himself. However, in contrast with Socrates and Plato, Aristotle kept one eye on the physical world, and wrote as many scientific works as he did philosophical.

Both the pre-Socratic and classical Greeks were obssessed with a fundamentally dichotomous philosophical outlook. They saw everything in terms of pairs of cooperating and/or competing concepts.

The Christian era

Chronic orientation: the future
Metaphysical orientation: other-worldly

Christianity offers to believers future salvation in another world. The Bible describes the evolution of God from a quick-to-anger tribal god, jealous of competitors (and concerned to address the problem of evil), to a loving, universally embracing and embracable potential saviour, vindicated and secure in His Heaven (having taken human form and suffered the greatest human evil Himself).

The philosophy of this era was concerned to adapt past thinkers to the Christian outlook. The religion absorbed Plato, largely through the writings of Augustine of Hippo, and Aristotle through the writings of Thomas Aquinas. This was not orientation to the past, because it was done with an eye on future salvation.

Given Chritianity's dichotomous obsession with good and evil, it was natural that the philosophy of the Christian era took completely for granted the dichotomous outlook of the Greeks.

The modern (scientific / technological / commercial) era

Chronic orientation: the future
Metaphysical orientation: this-worldly

Science, technology and commerce are utterly this-wordly. But they are future-oriented to three different extents. Scientific thinking transcends the individual's life, and is equally at home in the present, distant past and distant future. Science's practical aspect, technology, however, is fundamentally future-oriented.

Commerce, and it's ideology, market economics, are inevitably oriented to the future of the individual. But it is not the individual as immortal soul, nor as reasoning person; it is the individual as locus of satisfiable desires, as calculating marketer and customer.

The philosophy of this era began with the debunking of the past (Thomas Hobbes, for example, is scathing in his criticism of Aristotle), but with the very notable exception of the tradition of skepticism. At the outset, Descartes both failed spectacularly to debunk skepticism and established the modern concept of the individual mind, which flourished naturally, given its empirical necessity, and yet amazingly, given its rational indefensiblity, driving wedges between philosophy and science and religion. Both Descartes' failures and his successes gave rise to the still-flourishing 'epistemological turn' of modern philosophy. Into the bargain, Descartes discovered algebraic geometry, which led directly to Newton's discovery of the calculus, without which his physics would not have gotten off the ground.

Descartes' career also had the effect of re-emphasizing the Greek and Christian fetish for dichotomous thinking.

The postmodern 'era'

Chronic orientation: the present
Metaphysical orientation: disoriented (any-worldly or none)

Section n: (G1a) The rejection of meaning

Precursors:

Wittgenstein's rejection of theory
Quine's apparent rejection of meaning

Official postmodernists:

Section n: (G1b) The rejection of self

Precursors:

Hume's rejection of self
Ryle's rejection of self

Official postmodernists:

Section n: (G2) The rejection of reason

Precursors:

Vico's rejection of the Law of Non-Contradiction
Feyerabend's rejection of scientific rationality

Official postmodernists:

Section n: (G3) The rejection of morality

Precursors:

Nietzsche's rejection of morality
MacIntyre's rejection of impartiality

Official postmodernists:

Section n: Why you should reject postmodernism

The nature of self-refutation
The nature of violence
Blaming the victim
The agenda of agenda-rejection

Section n: How to recognise a postmodernist

The smiling assassin
Stop making sense!
Pseudo-profundity