Post Modernism ate all the pies...

[Nearly Sane]

And ruined the 'West' while it was at it.

Some of this really isn't bad at all but it's set itself too high a goal on the basis of the headline which leads it to exclude other influences and, perhaps to ignore that post modernism suffered from the sane flaw in trying to live up to the headline. To an extent it reads like a version of ad_orientem's position on rationalism.



https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/

[Harrowby Hall]

Found on the same page as the source for NS's post on wi-fi denier.


http://acsh.org/news/2017/03/23/which-worse-postmodernism-or-anti-intellectualism-11040

[Nearly Sane]

Indeed! I had read that at the time I posted the WiFi blog. I think that it's more that there is a confluence of different approaches that result in a similar reaction to the flood of information we have. This links in with my post on intellectuall humility that the media we use seem to push to certainty and dichotomy. In a sense, post modernism was a form of intellectual humility but with a dark side of denying any form of reason to think anyone right.

[Harrowby Hall]

I know that this may be distorting concepts somewhat, but would you say that Donald Trump is a postmodernist?

[Nearly Sane]

Certainly not consciously, but that is essentially the argument in the essay in the OP. I think there is a melange of influences going on which had created a set of very strange bedfellows. There is post modernism, an extreme form of libertarianism , a religious/anti elitist suspicion of science, a far left suspicion of any 'establishment', and other threads. Combine this with a 24 hour news cycle, and our increased communication media which allow us at one and the sane time to create echo chambers, and hear only the worst of the other echo chambers, and you get the current situation.


Ad_o's anti rationalism is part of the idea, and I doubt he would think of himself as a post modernist, yet there is a now a linkage between pre and post modern.

[wigginhall]

Interesting article, but surely confuses symptoms with causes.   I don't see French intellectuals as a cause of various intellectual trends, but as part of a cycle.   You can cite for example Freud and Nietzsche as skeptics about various things, e.g. religion.   Freud has an interesting passage where he talks about the 'dethroning' of the human ego, via Copernicus, Darwin, and of course, himself.   

NS right about a melange, nice word, anyway.   You could trace postmodernism to the current of skepticism in philosophy, or I should say, various currents of skepticism.   How far do you trace this?   Francis Bacon?  Hume?  Pyrrhonism?  Dunno.

[Nearly Sane]

Interesting article, but surely confuses symptoms with causes.   I don't see French intellectuals as a cause of various intellectual trends, but as part of a cycle.   You can cite for example Freud and Nietzsche as skeptics about various things, e.g. religion.   Freud has an interesting passage where he talks about the 'dethroning' of the human ego, via Copernicus, Darwin, and of course, himself.   

NS right about a melange, nice word, anyway.   You could trace postmodernism to the current of skepticism in philosophy, or I should say, various currents of skepticism.   How far do you trace this?   Francis Bacon?  Hume?  Pyrrhonism?  Dunno.

Indeed one might say that the twin strands of doubt and certainty that are in the DNA of philosophy intersect in a constant ever unfolding thesis, antithesis, and when any synthesis is produced it restarts the process. The certainty of Plato v the pragmatism of Aristotle, Aquinas vs Occam, Kant vs Hume. To be fair, this is a Western perspective but it's one with Eastern roots, yin and yang etc.

We sometimes get excited about progression when it is just change within a narrow set of parameters. There is always a fear that the current circumstances are one of out intermittent cataclysmic clashes where the complexity becomes a false but seemingly very real dichotomy.