11 ms·

Education Without Truth in Postmodern Perspectivism

27 points by webdva 6y ago

api 6y ago
My favorite question to ask these people: 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.
- danharaj 6y ago
  > 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?
  - api 6y ago
    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.
    - danharaj 6y ago
      Ok, let's go back. “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.”
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > Personally I will take the position that there does exist an objective standard if such a thing even exists, how do you learn about it? I can't think of any way to prove or test it.
- scooble 6y ago
  > 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?
twomoretime 6y ago
>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.
- danharaj 6y ago
  > 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.
  - twomoretime 6y ago
    >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.
danharaj 6y ago
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.
- sebastianconcpt 6y ago
  Banal appeal to ignorance as an attempt to shout your mouth about the self-refuting pomo BS.
  - TomMckenny 6y ago
    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.
- api 6y ago
  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.
Der_Einzige 6y ago
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? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man 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.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  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".
  - Der_Einzige 6y ago
    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.
cousin_it 6y ago
> 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. Come on, this is self-parody. https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- scooble 6y ago
  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.
  - ganzuul 6y ago
    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.
  - azhu 6y ago
    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 > Strengthening of solidarity and conscesnsus
mahemm 6y ago
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.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c
  - mahemm 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
bonchicbongenre 6y ago
What tripe this is - all verbiage and no content, and with a poor thesis to boot. Certainly not worth a read

27 points by webdva 6y ago

api 6y ago

My favorite question to ask these people: 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.

danharaj 6y ago
> 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?
- api 6y ago
  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.
  - danharaj 6y ago
    Ok, let's go back. “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.”
leetcrew 6y ago
> Personally I will take the position that there does exist an objective standard if such a thing even exists, how do you learn about it? I can't think of any way to prove or test it.
scooble 6y ago
> 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?

twomoretime 6y ago

>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.

danharaj 6y ago
> 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.
- twomoretime 6y ago
  >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.

danharaj 6y ago

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.

sebastianconcpt 6y ago
Banal appeal to ignorance as an attempt to shout your mouth about the self-refuting pomo BS.
- TomMckenny 6y ago
  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.
api 6y ago
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.

Der_Einzige 6y ago

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? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man 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.

ineedasername 6y ago
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".
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  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.

cousin_it 6y ago

> 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. Come on, this is self-parody. https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html

deleted 6y ago
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scooble 6y ago
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.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  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.
- azhu 6y ago
  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 > Strengthening of solidarity and conscesnsus

mahemm 6y ago

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.

ganzuul 6y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c
- mahemm 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago

bonchicbongenre 6y ago

What tripe this is - all verbiage and no content, and with a poor thesis to boot. Certainly not worth a read