Postmodernism

Posted by John S Bolton on December 09, 2005, 04:22 AM | #

It is not man’s nature to fall into the DeMan-ic state; there is no reason to believe that we are programmed thus to degenerate. Therefore, corrupting power must be pushing the scholars down that far. Government schools were set up, and their funding expanded greatly, generation after generation. Each increment demanded that the brighter and the better educated, in proportion as they were thus distinguished, make up dishonest lines by which to excuse the increasing aggression upon the net taxpayer, in order that scholars could expand their guilds in comfort, and dream of absolute power. Loudly they echoed the call of despots for mass altruism; the scholars could only secure themselves from a dreaded servility to the selfish bourgeoisie, in this way. The greater their guild grew, the further was drawn away the professoriate, from what could be supported in freedom. At length comes a time when the professoriate is even tenfold larger than what can be supported freely, without aggression. At this point, how can there be any politics in academia but socialism, or an anarchism that serves leftist designs? How can there be any philosophy but one that says freedom is wrong for man, who knows nothing? If one person within the guild of scholars says we do better to greatly decrease the aggression on the net taxpayer, and privatize the government schools, that we owe them this loyalty, and that we can have loyalty to absolute truth and the good; the entire apparatus shakes alarmingly.

Posted by Guessedworker on December 09, 2005, 07:25 AM | #

JJR,

I enjoyed reading your linked essay on PM.  I do think your remark in the above post that, “... any philosophy that fails to give an account of mind, ethics, cause and self is quite simply failed philosophy” could be stronger.  PM is culture politics, not philosophy.

The philosophical principles of Power and Truth are rooted respectively in the human capacities of will and consciousness, or doing and seeing.  Genuine philosophies, secular or religious, must address both. There will be a degree of separation (in classical Sufism, for example, there is the path of Self-Perfectionment but also the path of Union with God).  But, essentially, they go as a pair.  Neither one can be successfully denied without denial of the other.

If one denies Truth one must view consciousness as productive only of illusion.  If one denies Power one takes from Man his will and renders him a machine.  Man can be viewed as mechanistic and his mind washed with illusions, including the illusion that he knows reality and can exercise free will.  Both denials taken together, there is intellectual consistency here.

But for PMists, as you have said, there is massive inconsistency (attended but not mitigated by their sheer gaul - surely the chief PM feature, given the left-bank circumstance).  Denying Truth and reifying Power as the sole principle working itself out in human life gives us a version of Man (necessarily not excluding the PMists themselves!) who is sunk in illusion yet can see to exercise free will - albeit to do egalitarian “good”.  Yet there can be no truth as to the good of egalitarianism, because we have been told that Truth does not exist. 

Such partiality renders the PMist already a politician.

Posted by James Bowery on December 09, 2005, 03:16 PM | #

Just before his “Final Remarks” in his book “Introduction to Phenomenology”, Robert Sokolowski has this to say about econstruction:

Deconstruction should also be mentioned in a survey of the phenomenological movement, albeit with some embarrassment, the way a family might be forced to speak about an eccentric uncle whose antics are known to everyone but whom one tries to avoid mentioning in polite society. Jaques Derrida’s first writings were translations and interpretations (highly questionable interpretations, to be sure) of short works by Husserl, but he soon abandoned Husserl and moved into wider philosophical fields. Deconstruction is more strongly influenced by figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Jaques Lacan, and in a deeper sense by Nietzsche and Freud. I would also claim that Husserl has a much more subtle treatment of absence and difference than Derrida gives him credit for, one that recognizes these phenomena but does not fall into the extremes of deconstruction. One of the most appropriate comments I have heard about deconstruction was made in a lecture by the Scottish literary theorist Alasdair Fowler; he observed that deconstruction in moderate sips provides a welcome correction to traditional literary theory, which might have become a bit too tidy and rationalist, but that in the United States it became absorbed into a political ideology and hence developed beyond all proportion.

Posted by Svigor on December 09, 2005, 03:25 PM | #

I agree with GW’s closer, that PMism is just an obfuscation.  PMists are essentially just a bunch of liars, the intellectual equivalent of the Bolsheviks.

If their “philosophy” was sincere, they’d essentially be intellectual hermits believing in nothing, but clearly that isn’t the case; instead their destructive energies are not only particular in their direction but also intended to clear the board to make way for their own agenda.

If they were sincere they’d have nothing to replace what they intend to destroy, which would make them simply fools.  Instead they have a common idea of what should come next which makes them not only fools, but liars and malfeasants as well.

Posted by Andrew on December 09, 2005, 08:42 PM | #

Your philosophy and the base ball bat JJR is excellent, but I wonder if the co- horsts of the Ideological police will give me the benefit of the doubt? And could I argue the concept to my favor.
I did not hit him because he was not there, and that blood streak is not there ether;how could it exist if it does not exist, and nor did the base ball bat, and i’m not realy here, nor are you, so get stuffed: Sounds like a lefty talking.

Posted by JPM on February 12, 2006, 11:19 PM | #

What a breath of fresh air. Thanks for unmasking the Left fascism underneath of postmodernism.

.

Posted by Loulite on February 24, 2006, 04:22 PM | #

I am stunned at the bad faith and intellectual dishonesty going on here. Oversimplification is a tired ground for critique. Your politics are a lot clearer than your analytical capacities I must say.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 24, 2006, 06:44 PM | #

Here, Loulite, we do not have the luxury only of “undoing” just to make a show of our openness.  If we are to be confronted - or made open - to the dissolution of the West but obediently foreswear ourselves from discriminating for survival because Derrida tells us, for instance, that openness is a higher value, it is clear that dissolution will proceed anyway.  Doubtless, your own “analysis” does not recognise ultimate as well as merely proximate interests.  But the survival of Western Man is an ultimate interest for all European Caucasians.  What we are saying in this thread, then, is that Derrida discriminates for dissolution - which accords with his own anti-gentile ultimate interests and is, therefore, insincere philosophy but sincere racism.

The rest - the attempt to crawl away onto an intellectual ground strewn with flayed proximations - is not honesty, since you have used the word, but at best politics.  Or, to put it another way: if you are a leftist, you will disagree.

Posted by Andrew on February 24, 2006, 09:39 PM | #

You have read that book to GW. An Introductory Guide to: “Post-Structuralism and Post modernism” by Madan Sarup.
I can say at least: The Bloody French have a lot to answer for, as it seems that every conceivable Twilight zoned Ideology emanates from France and from the Neapolitan era.

Posted by rich on March 01, 2006, 03:14 PM | #

Um, well i think you’ve kind of missed the point. Post Moderns don’t necessarily deny that anything is real. Many would simply deny that we can prove them to be real. A post modern doesn’t necessarily have to prescribe anything, it can just be a meta-ethical standpoint; your “definition” for philosophy seems to only include modern (as in enlightenment modern) prescriptive ethics and religious philosophy. 
Your post is horribly narrow minded and bigoted, calling it “failed philosophy” seems to mean that because you disagree with it so vehemently then of course it can’t be right. Either that or you don’t really understand ideas such as the naturalistic fallacy and the hermeneutical gap that post modernism rests upon.

Posted by Loulite on March 02, 2006, 03:57 PM | #

Guessedworker,
Bottom line arguments if they are branded as such are fine. There is a difference though when an analytical framework is shred to pieces on terms that are not even part of said framework.
In the end it is less about “believing in nothing”, than it is about refusing the terms of the argument/discussion/politic, asking for definitions and basically asking “Western Man ” or whoever else makes their claim to existence the basis for a whole system of thought to justify themselves.
The days of taken for grantedness are over it seems…I know it is hard to let it go and move on.

Posted by Andrew on March 03, 2006, 02:38 AM | #

This is a big read “rich”, but best explains things in some perspective- Although this link is pertaining to Australia, it is a world wide atrocity; such is Post- modernism.
Illuminati extension to be concise in the interpretation of its cult mentality.
http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v5n2/andrews522_text.html

Posted by Guessedworker on March 03, 2006, 07:09 AM | #

Rich,

I am glad you point out the extreme limitations of post-modernist philosophy.  Certainly, intellectual constructions resting on other intellectual constructions - even those laying claim to a “meta-ethical standpoint” on the relationship of, say, genes to behaviour - are necessarily silent in the moment a black mugger asks you the time.  Denial of the “provable real” stops at the point of a knife, does it not?  Your meta-ethic is pure dilletantism for gentiles, but it is racism for Jews – an undisguised machete-swipe at the foundations of cohesive Western society.  All leftist philosophy of a broadly culturally marxist nature is from from the same template.

In a spirit of contrition, then, you might consider the degree to which Nature, not ethics, is the prescriptive element in Man.  In other words, the “prescription” that you condemn here as false is, in fact, reality.  From this reality we do not reason that a man is a mugger therefore he is black.  We observe that otherness is unloved.

Ethics are absent from the inate – from what is naturally done, what is naturally loved - and arise only later, in the moral clothing of the human form.  This limit to ethics is where you and all PM’ists are confused - and are, essentially, still held in thrall to the fraudulent Boasian denial of Nature in Man.

Do try to understand the political right.  We are not long-armed inarticulates and you are not morally or intellectually superior.  You misunderstand us in toto and, I may say, seemingly wilfully and not without egotistical arrogance.

So … let us be clear.  For the intellectual right, it is NOT about conveniently imputing qualities upon Nature and then carrying back sheaths of “provably realities” by which to substantiate other ethical constructions.  It is about the deep intrusion of Nature into the life of Man.  When you have a grasp of this latter (and if your leftism survives - which it probably won’t if you are a gentile) you may better comprehend the disdain in which we hold postmodernist philosophy.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 03, 2006, 07:38 AM | #

Loulite,

I make the same request to you as I made of Rich – to understand that your leftism is found out by Nature.  The insubstantial “grantededness” you think you see is as solid as a tree-trunk.  Against this, sadly for you, killing solidity you offer us your sad refrain to bravely “let go” - just another way of saying “be not limited in your will, oh Man, but be open to all newness that you may freely choose”.  It is advice simply not founded on sociobiological reality, nor on the rather startling limitations of ordinary human consciousness and will.

At bottom this is a debate about three freedoms:  the freedom of the peoples of the West to live as they wish sovereign in their own homelands; that absolute individual freedom which gentile right- and left-liberal intellectuals imagine to be the due estate of Man; and the freedom of a Chosen people to fulfil their “revealed” racio-historical purpose.

We adhere to the first because it is the sap of that tree I mentioned.  Which of the other two do you adhere to?

Posted by Ed on March 21, 2006, 06:12 PM | #

I don’t think that you quite understand post-modernism fully, although I do agree with you that most of them write in unnecessarily abstract language.  Have a look at Richard Rorty or Donald Davidson for people who write more clearly.

Basically, it all comes down to language.  For a long time, analytic philosophers thought that problems [including some scientific ones] could be solved through logical analysis of concepts.  A few problems were soon noted:

1 Quine noted how what a word means is itself something that you learn empirically

2 Kuhn compiled an impressive history of how we understand the world, including the development of science.  With each new mode of understanding, the language used changes.  Ancient languages cannot be properly translated into modern ones, because language served such a different purpose then.

3 Davidson noted how you can only explain a belief by reference to another belief - just like how dictionaries only define words by presuming that you know other words.  If you’re looking for the ultimate grounds for a belief, you can’t get it as we can only ever stay inside our thoughts, but can never get out into any “reality”.  You just have to go round in a circle of words.

Rorty, by his own admission, did not have any new ideas, but merged them all together and realised that “truth” is something that is a function of language and not something out there beyond language.  As language changes, truth changes.  What was called “truth” before is now mocked.  What is called “truth” now will almost certainly be mocked in the future.  As language is just something that serves our purpose at any one time, truth is not quite the eternal source of stability that we hoped for.

Politically, these doctrines don’t really suggest anything, apart from moral relativism.  The fact that most post-modernists are left-wing seems to be a coincidence, although the American ones are generally just Democrats, rather than Communists.  The only constant definition of “truth” that they might uphold is coherence and the Bible could still be said to be incoherent and thus false, I suppose.  However, getting beyond that, they tend to favour subjectivist ethics.  Rorty thinks that literature has a better chance of inspiring unity amongst people than philosophy has.  It may seem a bit of an odd idea, but I think that there is something to it; society gets more altered by good films or books than by whatever philosophy professors are going on about!

Posted by Guessedworker on March 21, 2006, 07:08 PM | #

Ed,

The great difficulty with debating this issue lies not in the worth of the concepts involved but in the liberal belief that Man is changed in significant ways through the external agency of these or any other concepts.

The Conservative approaches Man from the viewpoint that nothing very substantial in him changes, beyond issues of psychological superfice (or, if you prefer, acquired personality).  These he discounts as an unworthy theatre of intellectual engagement.  To the liberal they are everything!

In other words, all manner of liberalism, left and right, strives after an objective insignificance and needs must deny solidity in Man.  PMism is a sublime statement of this state of mind.

But liberalism is not without psychological traction.  If my fellow Man is not capable of, for example, complete self-direction - as liberalism insists he must be - certainly he is capable of exhibiting extraordinary suggestibility.  In consequence of this inate tendency the poor chap can and is persuaded to behave maladaptively from the viewpoint of his (eternal) ethnic genetic interests.  For example, he invites aliens to take over his house, or his wife edits books instead of producing children.

Nature, genetic interests and adaptive behaviour are principal foundations which Conservatism reprocesses as stability and self-interest.  How is it possible, then, for a Conservative philosophy (note Conservative does not mean economic libertarian) to connect with the shifting ground of PMism, or any other liberal political or philosophical vehicle?

Our call, in fact, is to PMists to think outside the box they think they have deconstructed.  The box is liberalism and the only outside quarter as far as the West is concerned is Conservatism.

Posted by Ed on March 22, 2006, 05:04 PM | #

One thing to add from yesterday.  Rorty also often speaks very fondly of Michael Oakeshott, who was a self-described Conservative thinker in Britain.  He was, however, before the time of Thatcher and would probably be in the Labour Party today.  I notice that you don’t define “conservative” as economic libertarian, so he can be included as an example of how post-modernism and conservatism cancome together.

I’m not sure if I’m understanding you on this liberal-conservative distinction.  Post-modernism tends to play down the rational side of man.  When you say “liberalism, whether left or right”, I don’t follow you.  Would you see Thatcher as right liberalism and Rawls as left liberalism? 

The problem with conservatism is that, if people hadn’t thought progressively in the first place, the traditions would have never been set up.  It is true that most people don’t spend their lives thinking about the boundaries of freedom or what is the common good, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t want anything to change ever.  I think that post-modernism makes you realise that whatever is the status quo today will probably be looked back on, in the future, the way that we now look back on the era of insitutionalised Christianity.  By recognising the contingency of our community, we feel less aversion to reform.

At the same time, post-modernism avoids theories like Marxism and libertarianism that try to reform everything to a certain ideal.  This is because theories like these are based on a notion of a timeless human nature and this, of course, goes against all of post-modernism’s views on truth.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 22, 2006, 06:57 PM | #

Ed,

Thanks for the reply.

Conservatism has no connection to progressive thought of any kind.  It arises from local, genetically-embedded behaviours ... from sociobiology.  That is the psychological basis for a stable social unit.  Conservatism with a small “c” is the practise of stability within the unit, and with a large “C” as the exercise of power towards the same end and, therefrom, to encourage men to be free.

I have written several posts previously here about the historical cleavage between Conservatism (capital “c” to distinguish it from the mere conservative impulse or preference) and liberalism.  Actually, another of our bloggers, Martin Hutchinson, is the author of Great Conservatives, and a far better retailer than I of the travails of Conservatism in Britain post-1832.  Still, it is my settled view that the beast, which had been a complete political milieu within which both Tories and Whigs operated, did indeed die by degrees, and the killers were a rising working class and OMOV democracy.

Into the resultant, uncertain void slipped a victorious Whiggism hurriedly attended by notions of the therapeutic Hobbesian state, the Lockean definition of Man, working class selfhelp and cooperativism etc.  They were “interesting times”.  Disraeli’s literary reworking of Conservative history introduced to the pot a Conservatism that was a political preference, and no longer a milieu in its own right, of course (since, obviously, there can only be one at a time).  Operating within the triumphant, perpetually leftward-migrating liberal milieu it has pursued relavance unto the ends of the earth, sans principal, sans dignity.  David Cameron is a logical link in the chain.

So ... when one comes to place Thatcher historically within the migration it is unhelpful to view her, which the left unfailingly does, as any kind of Conservative in an absolute sense ... a “right-winger” ... an extreme case.  She is only relatively Conservative, that is a social conservative and economic liberal and a “politician”.  She never got beyond anti-communism, never comprehended the cultural and racial Death of the West.  She would stand, by my reading, right of right-liberalism because of her partial belief in social stability.

Rawls is probably less easy to place with precision.  His writing career demonstrates the migratory nature of liberalism.  Of his two principal works, one is influenced by classical Marxism in the guise of LBJ’s redistributive Great Society and the other, some 25 or 30 years later, is influenced by the Marxian fashion for political culturalisation.  To be honest, I’m not quite sure where he really stands, because he moved.

From a Conservative standpoint this very characteristic shift is informative.  If cultural politics were unrequired to secure “freedom” from 1924 to the 1980’s or thereabouts, what justifies the blitzkrieg now?  What happened to “freedom” that the bourgoisie enemy had to transmogrify into the white heterosexual male enemy?  There is something screamingly wrong here that liberals never seem to worry about.

PMism may only be, as you seem to suggest, a way of maintaining some intellectual integrity while gazing upon the migratory zeitgeist.  It is ineffably light, and I can’t quite take it seriously.

At bottom, either one believes freedom flows gently from social stability and is, anyway, not real human freedom at all ... or one believes that freedom flows from the smashing of social stability, and Man the tabula rasa upon which a self-author writes is both possible and desirable.

To believe nothing seems to me to be cowardice in the face of Nature.

Posted by Tom on March 25, 2006, 09:25 PM | #

I came to this site by way of Wikipedia.  I don’t know if you’re aware, but this entry is quoted on the Postmodernism article there, under the “How postmodernism has been described” section.  You might’ve done this, I don’t know, but I thought I should mention it.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 26, 2006, 03:14 PM | #

No, Tom, we are not responsible for that.  Thanks for letting us know.