Anyone else here besides myself who just rejects postmodernism wholesale?
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Yes, pretty much.
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Redefining science to make this sort of fit seems like an even worse idea to me.
Depends on how it is defined. Because no I not going with the redneck response that classifies anything I don’t like as communist or post-modern equating them to all things evil. I go by definitions SAME with Christianity. I don’t equate Christianity with some redneck deep south rejection of all things democrat and scientific but go according to the definition decided upon by the ecumenical council of Nicea 325 AD.
According to the link Kendel posted, with the divide given between pre-modern, modern, and post-modern, I came out as 0% post-modern.
But according to the definition posted by markd I came out as 50% post-modern.
I thought it was helpful considering Nietzsche’s claim that there are no facts but only interpretations. That might be valid for some things but not for all things. I go with the divide between the objective and subjective made by Kierkegaard. And according to this the claims of Nietzsche and post-modernism fits with the subjective but not the objective. And one of the things in the subjective category is the metaphysical consideration of the nature of reality – because this simply isn’t something that the objective evidence is able to determine. And no I will not consider the declarations of some religion to be equal with the objective evidence of science – that way lies creationism and theocracy. NO THANK YOU!
But of course there is the other extreme of naturalism equating objective evidence and science to the limit of knowledge and reality and on that front post-modernism seems to be our friend.
Seems to me that the crux of the problem is this impulse to oversimplify and put all things in the same bin. That is why I am having problems with Mervin’s suggestions.
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I have some disagreement with your comment, but I still liked it.
Who’s redefining science? Theology should be big enough to include any science or concept of science you could or have ever come up with.
Added … don’t pay too much attention to the relative sizes of the circles - this was hastily cobbled together.
“We then proceed to make sense of who we are, where we are, and how we are to act on that basis. The trouble is, in our current situation we possess only simulacra of coherent, rival traditions; the language(s) we use and the practices in which we engage are all jumbled together and missing important pieces”
This touched on a subject I wrote about in school.
It’s one thing if there is no meaning for a human being. And it’s another if we recognize how difficult it is to determine this individually.
I like how Smith gives me a sense that he foresees the existence of divergent beliefs in a post-secular culture. The fragmentation we experience now is not necessarily definitive for the future. I hope that we would value meaning minimally as a place holder, and by respecting each person or group’s pursuit of meaning in relation to one another.
Sounds good and all but could you explain how this applies to actual issues? Let’s say these are the topics:
- the age of the earth
- The ethics of chattel slavery.
I am old fashioned. The earth is 4.5 odd billion years old regardless of what anyone thinks. I tend to think there is some sort of abstract truth that exists externally and independent of what someone might think.
I think we all agree chattel slavery is immoral without question. It would seem that most of the world throughout history disagreed (as long as they were the slavers and not the slaves!). So maybe this is a good area to see how the terms modernism and postmodernism would apply.
Can you or anyone else help me understand how their approaches would be different or maybe highlight another issue explaining it? I can’t shake the thought that there is an objective reality–whether or not I can figure it out is a different matter. I can see how some rules are cultural and situational but that doesn’t require a new “ism” to me.
I like philosophy but if its not grounded in concrete examples for me I really don’t get it. I guess my concern is how is post-modernism different from relativism?
Vinnie
I think pretty much everyone agrees on this - and my impression is that it is only a hostile caricature of postmodernism that has it denying this. What Penner writes is along these lines too I think.
Aye! And there’s the rub - and where postmodernism leaves unreflective modernism behind. Pure modernism would have us believe that our senses and rationalities can (with care) achieve some neutral, entirely objective, appraisal of said reality.
PoMo responds: “No you didn’t, and No, you can’t.”
Note that this isn’t denying reality is there. It’s only denying our pretensions to have some non-perspective-bound access to it. Or to put it another way: PoMo forces on us the epistemic humility that we may or may not have had much of while in the throes of modernism.
So it is basically saying we are products of our culture, worldview and experiences and they filter our thought processes in innumerable ways? I get all that. Still not understanding what this might mean “Reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually.” Very vague. I need concrete examples. What issue might a modernists and a post modernist disagree on?
Also, I am late to the party but I will start reading this in a few days as I will be on the beach for a week with my better half soon. I have a pdf of it if anyone needs it. PM is probably best for that.
Vinnie
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Hey - if you have the pdf, could you share that with me? I’m been using the link Kendel provided (thanks, Kendel) which is useful, but only accessible on my computer for me. Your pdf might be more device friendly.
That one sentence by itself would be a bit confusing to me too. But having read a bit around that, I think what he’s saying is that as real and objective as reality itself may be, we have no access to any of that except through our senses and as filtered by our experience and life context, etc. Which is a fairly “common sense” (if you can pardon my expression there) way of looking at it I think. In other words, I don’t think it’s a very fantastic claim being made, and one almost marvels that “mere moderns” wouldn’t have been more on top of this early on. Perhaps it’s the extent to which this significance is supposed to permeate: the PoMos insist it permeates all the way down, whereas the moderns, while they may have allowed that some things are subjective, there was still a world of facthood entirely and objectively accessible to us while we’re careful making measurements, and thinking scientifically and objectively.
Your example: The cosmos is between 13 and 14 billion years old. Does the PoMo disagree? I don’t think they necessarily do. They may just be more focused on “what does it mean that we all agree about this” more than on the alleged “naked fact” itself. In fact, I think Post Modernists would say there is no such thing as the “naked fact”. I can tell you that 2+2=4, but why would I bring that particular statement up just now? For what purpose? In other words, not only is my attempted factoid well adorned, but it comes with an entire entourage – all the rest of this post, and the life experiences of the person who decided to bring it up here and now in this context. The modernist wants to insist it is a contextless, bare and lonely fact pure and simple. The PoMo just laughs and sees what utter nonsense that pretension is. He (the PoMo) isn’t denying that 2+2=4, mind you. Only that its expression by a human is never bereft of significance and context.
Butler’s introduction paints a more complex picture:
“It is worth asking, then, how far a postmodernist ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is justified. There is in any case a crippling contradiction at the heart of the analysis – if anyone says that everything is ‘really’ just constituted by a deceiving image, and not by reality, how does he or she know? They presuppose the very distinctions they attack. At best, such critics are making a banal and condescending series of remarks about other people’s (self-)deceit…”
One other comment from Butler at the close of his book. It’s especially perceptive and yet maybe a little too presumptive about the future:
“For the battles around postmodernism (quite unlike the battles around modernism) have had the distinctive feature that, thanks to the ‘rise of theory’, they raise perennial philosophical questions. It is this underlying deep dialectic – between reason and scepticism, reality and the image, the political powers of inclusion and exclusion – which is central to postmodernist thought, and it is a dialectic that will continue to engage us for some time to come.”
How do we know indeed? The modernist craves certainty. The postmodernist informs him there’s none to be had — or at least not in the objective sense that the modernist is craving it.
So perhaps I should have qualified my original statement: the postmodernist might accept that there is a reality, but it is the objective qualifier that brings the denial. None of us has entirely objective access to any reality. Which, to me, is still a little [whole lot!] different than saying “there is no such thing as objective reality.” The latter makes it an absolute statement (presumably a ruling on reality itself - that it doesn’t exist.) The former is entirely a denial of “the objectivity of the knower”, not necessarily any denial of the object claimed as known.
To bring back a point I made in a previous thread, and while apparently banal, it is still impossible for a person to truthfully claim
the marital status of being a married bachelor.
It violates the law of non-contradiction. That A cannot be non-A at the same time and in the same relationship.
I don’t believe any of this proves God as classical apologists maintain, but it does count for something.
I don’t think it is that simple.
There is a world context which makes a difference. When the world is evil enough, sometimes things which look immoral in today’s context can look very different in those circumstances. Remember the example of Oskar Schindler. Those Jews were bought and sold to work in his factories. Likewise in a world where there are empires conquering the world, the choice for dealing with prisoners of war was often between slavery or genocide. Of course American slavery was different. That wasn’t a matter of social circumstances. It was a business and I don’t see any way in which it could be justified. I think human trafficking is a better label for that and what is immoral without question.
Better… but perfect? I am not absolutely sure that there is no world in which even human trafficking might be a better choice among the possible alternatives. Not sure either way. Human trafficking as business is too opportunistic. Seems like there would always be a better choice than that.
Is the above sort of thinking post-modern? An application of situational ethics perhaps? What do you think.
I am no utilitarian. I go with virtue ethics – that what matters most is what you see when you look at yourself in the mirror. It is all about deciding who you are and what kind person you are. But personally, I think getting too self-righteous about refusing to have anything to do with slavery when it can actually help people doesn’t work with my virtue ethics.
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Can you point to objective reality at the quantum or relativity levels or anywhere in between? Is light a wave or a particle, you know, even in high school slit experiments?
The moment I point, it is no longer objective. Because … It is me doing the pointing.
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Maybe another thing that would be helpful in all this is to acknowledge multiple levels for what we mean by ‘objective’. There is such a thing as making a bar or qualifier threshold so high, that it moves the qualifier far beyond any useful liguistic territory. Such as if we define “law-abiding citizen” as somebody who has never even so much as broken the speed limit, and never clicked on the “I’ve read and understood the terms of this agreement” when in fact they hadn’t, etc … the category of “law-abiding” ends up excluding everyone and thus becomes a useless term.
I think postmodernists might be doing this very thing with the word “objective”. So it may remove some of the indignance we all feel over this if we acknowledge that there is such a thing as being “more objective” or “less objective” in our day-to-day dealings. Nobody doubts that different degrees of bias, corruption, and practical objectivity do exist. And we should allow for that shorthand of distingushing one action from another, as being “objective” or not. I suppose thoroughgoing postmodernists, though, would take me to task for even going there since … to attempt observations of comparative objectivity implies we have access to a standard that could inform us of this - some sort of “perfect ideal” at least in our minds against which we measure. But here’s the thing: can we accept that they’re actually right about that - and yet still carry on with our comparative evaluations? “Okay - so my so-called objectivity is doomed by your ‘po-mo’ standard, but I’m gonna do it anyway, because … life …” And maybe the po-mo is fine or even satisfied with that show of requisite epistemic humility, and after our obligatory expression of it, we carry on being more, or less objective as we see fit.
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Furthermore, if it was a recording telescope or scanning tunnelling electron microscope pointing, with no you, the effect would be the same. There is no such thing as objective reality. Not even in the eye of God.
What even is “the eye of God”? Is God a being with at least one eye ball that “He” can use to stare down a microscope barrel with me?
I think all this modern / postmodern territory we’re covering is commentary enough just limited to humanity (and in much dispute even there). So it’s hard to see how definitive conclusion about God could come out of this, given all our labor just to sort through it with others of creaturely status accessible to us. (and with whom we have at least some hope of being able to identify with.)
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