At least with shows like arrested development, it's always sunny and seinfeld, the void is recognizable as a form of experience. With the 'sincere' ones you mentioned, the soft irony and self-referentiality, are techniques used to draw the viewer towards a false sincerity which, in the end, just covers up the emptiness of our lives in world conditioned by total connectivity and total isolation. — Aubrey Grant from YouTube comments
Watched the video (mistook you to be describing a video of DFW talking about simpsons, seinfeld, office etc.) & yeah definitely very close to what I was talking about (& the youtube comment you posted is right : re-pasting the old sitcom/ morality-tale narrative beats over ironic deconstruction of tropes is probably a little too quick and easy.) — csalisbury
At least with shows like arrested development, it's always sunny and seinfeld, the void is recognizable as a form of experience. With the 'sincere' ones you mentioned, the soft irony and self-referentiality, are techniques used to draw the viewer towards a false sincerity which, in the end, just covers up the emptiness of our lives in world conditioned by total connectivity and total isolation. — Aubrey Grant from YouTube comments
But -- I take your point, which I think is essentially drawing attention to an archetypal progression:
1)Whole->(2)Rupture
(or: [eden->exile])
From (2) Rupture there are a lot of options. For example:
(A)Return
(B)Reconstruct
(C)Toil & Curse
(D)Seek Vengeance
(E)Go Forward
(F) Toil & Joke
etc etc — csalisbury
I would say that there are many 'authentic' ways to move in the 1-2-X progression and think it just plum isn't true that 1-2-C is the only one (any of these can be either 'authentic' or 'inauthentic' including C.) — csalisbury
Irrespective of what it's for, if it adds no understanding to moral behaviour, i.e. if morality is equally explicable without it, objective morality is at best redundant. — Kenosha Kid
What makes statement 2 objective, in that it states anything other than the personally held value of the speaker? Does statement 2 become objective because it has the word 'all' in it, or is there something else going on here? — Adam's Off Ox
For example, are both statements, "Killing humans is always wrong," and, "Killing is permissible by some class of humans," morally objective but incompatible? — Adam's Off Ox
their manner of expression may be more holistic than analytic. Which would make it less understandable by left-brain macho males. Hence, the anti-PM animosity expressed in sharp words by the male posters on this thread. :cool: — Gnomon
It’s perfectly analogous to the difference between “I see a lake” and “everyone ought to agree that there is a lake there” (which is a weird way of saying “there is really a lake there”). The latter is a claim of objectivity just because it’s not couched in any particular perspective. It may or may not be correct, depending on whether it really does pan out in every perspective or not. — Pfhorrest
This is basically the post-truth movement in a nutshell, a systematic lapse in any kind of logic that itself privileges one binary value over another. Postmodernism is (1) by itself. Post-truth adds (2). — Kenosha Kid
Alan Sokal famously exposed postmodernism as deeply flawed in 1996 by successfully publishing nonsense in a postmodern journal.[10] Since then, postmodernism has largely been considered a laughingstock among all but the most liberal academics. — Wheatley
So is the claim, "Everyone ought to agree that there is a lake there," also an objective moral claim, since it includes an ought (and you have already established you believe it is an objective claim). — Adam's Off Ox
I'm wondering how you propose we verify the correctness of an objective moral claim. — Adam's Off Ox
We can never fully account for all of that, in either descriptive or prescriptive matters, but that gives us the direction to move toward more objectivity. — Pfhorrest
If you were a Marxist (or left historicist philosopher) in the 60's and 70's you were living in the wake of a failed international project of overthrowing capitalism. A project that believed intimately in the feedback of theory and practice. They liked that intersection very much, "the most advanced Marxist science" (a trope in MLM) was a guarantor that "the revolutionary class" was adapted to the local conditions of the dialectic of capitalism.
It all failed. Catastrophically or with outstanding banality depending on where you live. Bang or whimper. — fdrake
To contextualise it philosophically, there's a quote from Sartre (in his Maoist phase) directed at Foucault; "Foucault is the last barricade the bourgeoise can erect against Marx". That poststructuralist stuff was not popular with the Marxist left. — fdrake
On the whole, Russia has fared less well as a capitalist democracy than it did as a theocracy or communist hellhole. I suspect the poor stayed poor throughout. — Kenosha Kid
Ideology does not suffer relativism, pluralism, or criticism at all. — Kenosha Kid
This could be a useful/productive heuristic and analysis of the post-modern idea (i.e. Whole -> Rupture/ Eden -> Exile). However, what are you applying the terms Whole/Eden and Rupture/Exile to? Is it grand narrative/ previous "given" truth ---> to individual perspectives and then one's reaction to the grand narrative once one's grand narrative is deconstructed and neutered of its grandiosity (e.g. Ahab's life previous to the encounter with the whale..Ahab seeing his previous picture of life disrupted by the tragic loss of his leg..Ahab no longer caring about anything but revenge on the whale)? — schopenhauer1
]Seinfeld is the ultimate post-modern sitcom. In a way we are living in a post-Seinfeld world. How does one take any social situation seriously really? I find it interesting with any form of satire or social criticism, that even after seeing the humor, when people go back to "living their lives" they don't actually take the lessons with them, and go back to living as if their life is not that super set of absurd circumstances as well, but a "real serious and dignified" narrative. A less obvious version of this are people who romantically think that things like "travel", "mountain climbing", "camping", and "sky diving" or (insert any modern form of trying to signal getting back to nature, going "extreme", or being an "travelling explorer") are truly some edifying thing. — schopenhauer1
but I think that's more a function of the human-mind imposing a particular narrative structure on history (as it always does) than a reflection of an absolute shift. — csalisbury
Oh, I was just saying that this: — csalisbury
seemed to be an example of a whole->rupture->[x?] frame.
In terms of applying the scheme on a grander scale: I think modernism/postmodernism/post-postmodernism is often discussed according to that scheme, but I think that's more a function of the human-mind imposing a particular narrative structure on history (as it always does) than a reflection of an absolute shift. Simpsons-Seinfeld-Office, for example, is one through-line, but only if you're selecting certain shows, excluding others, in order to make it all fit. I think that through-line is true enough, a real expression of something, but it's one thread among many. — csalisbury
(1) The communists really did largely industrialise the country eventually.
(2) Resource distribution was very coupled to status in the political hierarchy and extremely coupled to where one lived. It tended to keep the poorest the poorest, but...
(3) It created a network of industrial specialists that flowed freely (with some symbolic protestation from the state) within the state.
(4) Because the Russian economy was still import and export dependent for basic functioning, the state still had to play global capitalist macro policy. It played the resource extraction/subjugation game with other countries in the bloc.
(5) When the Soviet bloc fell, the Russian economy was already prefigured for capital flow, and this created the authoritarian state + oligarchy we all know and love today. — fdrake
Bolshevism was ultimately another path from peasantry to capitalism.
I don't want to throw all the blame for the destitution on the communists, the trade sanctions had a huge impact. It's still worth considering a failure of communism for economic reasons as the eventual development was to capitalist oligarchy. It's even more worth considering a failure of communism for humanitarian ones (genocide, police state). — fdrake
At the risk of derailing the thread, I think it does now. To quote the Big Lebowski; That's Just Like Your Opinion Man and That's The Stress Talking. If we're going to recognize the failure of unifying narratives as a societal feature; we already live in a relativistic chaos of filter bubbles - political representation in its default form is opinion management, how we socialise and are exposed to information is managed by external interests. Unifying narratives don't hold much weight, positive visions of the future are dead. Everything that remains is critique and political negation of manifest injustice; and you don't need a systematic world vision for that, you just need to grasp how a localised injustice is (re)produced. — fdrake
Postmodernism (yay, back on topic!) has been roundly rejected, and fifty percent of the reason seems to me that it criticised everything: rationalism, science, Marxism, architecture, literature. Half of its counter-criticisms are "It undermines us!" We have some sacred cows left in the field. But fuck it, dude. Let's go bowling! — Kenosha Kid
Yes one thread among many is what I'm saying as well (at least how post-modernism characterizes almost everything). My major critique is that post-modernism might be about threads about people's reaction to modernism, but modernism cannot be escaped. By modernism I mean here the very "real" through-line of technology, science, and how it touches all aspects of life (creating the personal narratives that we try to critique, find absurdity in, etc.). You need that superstructure there since pretty much the Enlightenment for the various personal threads and narratives to play out. It is all in reaction to that inescapable reality. You can critique it, accept it, optimism of progress, pessimism of minutia-mongering, the optimism of "authentic" experiences of travel and mountain climbing, and the pessimism of angst of being an autonomous individual in a much wider, often impersonal system. However, you cannot escape the modernism of technology. You can deconstruct narratives all you want, technology, science, and the minutia needed to keep this going is here to stay. — schopenhauer1
However, you cannot escape the modernism of technology. You can deconstruct narratives all you want, technology, science, and the minutia needed to keep this going is here to stay. — schopenhauer1
That pluralism seems a difficult burden. There was I think it was an IPCC report a few years back containing various perspectives on climate change. One was journalistic, another was social science. Climate change study is fundamentally scientific and, naturally, the social scientists didn't have a great deal of success wrangling ice flow stats into their narrative, leading the usual arrays of right-wing nutjobs to sing their usual songs of hoaxes, inconsistencies, and controversies. Clearly that is a case of non-scientific knowledge being given too much weight in postmodern approaches to what amounts to scientific reporting for governments. — Kenosha Kid
On a broader tangent, I think a lot of conservative ideas are post-modern actually. Look at the defense of Trump. Many people well say, look "Bill Clinton and Joe Biden did x,y,z.. the system itself is already corrupted" thus Trump's very transparent narcissism and divisiveness is given a pass. — schopenhauer1
However, I am talking about technology and science en totale. That is to say.. You enjoy perhaps having air conditioning, electricity, refrigeration, running water, advanced medicine, engineering of all kinds, transportation and the like. That just can't be narrated away. — schopenhauer1
Yes. That's the point of my BothAnd philosophy. I'm open to more holistic thinking, which is partly why I was looking into the PoMo movement, to see if they knew something I needed to know. But I am mostly a left brain thinker. So, the PM writings that I've seen just make no sense to me. Maybe I need "Queer Eye for the Straight Philosopher". :joke:And so, another frontier was left to discover/uncover, which as you rightfully suggested, a more wholistic approach to both philosophy, logic (inductive reasoning/synthetic a priori knowledge, etc.), and psychology was embraced. It's not one over the other, as needed, both are good. — 3017amen
Yes one thread among many is what I'm saying as well (at least how post-modernism characterizes almost everything). My major critique is that post-modernism might be about threads about people's reaction to modernism, but modernism cannot be escaped. By modernism I mean here the very "real" through-line of technology, science, and how it touches all aspects of life (creating the personal narratives that we try to critique, find absurdity in, etc.). You need that superstructure there since pretty much the Enlightenment for the various personal threads and narratives to play out. It is all in reaction to that inescapable reality. You can critique it, accept it, optimism of progress, pessimism of minutia-mongering, the optimism of "authentic" experiences of travel and mountain climbing, and the pessimism of angst of being an autonomous individual in a much wider, often impersonal system. However, you cannot escape the modernism of technology. You can deconstruct narratives all you want, technology, science, and the minutia needed to keep this going is here to stay. — schopenhauer1
Just so stories are signposts. — fdrake
What he said! (I think we're largely in agreement, ourselves, schop; besides antinatalism, anyway) — csalisbury
But I am mostly a left brain thinker. So, the PM writings that I've seen just make no sense to me. Maybe I need "Queer Eye for the Straight Philosopher". :joke: — Gnomon
Royal and Imperial political & religious systems tend to adopt an autocratic stance of “my way or the highway”. Whereas, In more democratic and egalitarian systems, the marketplace of ideas will determine truths and values. — Gnomon
Ha! I suspect that some wives consider their clueless left-brain husbands to be mentally deficient when they give the wife a box of tampons for her birthday. That's a joke I recently heard. :joke:I suppose the irony would be that the left brain my-way-or-the-highway persona would be considered deficient and/ or not normal in their way of thinking — 3017amen
So do you take objectivity to be a scale as opposed to binary — in that a claim can be more or less objective than another claim? — Adam's Off Ox
Does it become more objective when more people share the experience? Are moral claims more-objective democratically? Then does that same democratic approach have any relationship to the true-ness of an objective moral claim? — Adam's Off Ox
I apologize if it seems like I am grilling you. I really do have an interest in establishing what would make an objective moral claim, or what would make a moral claim true. It's just that as I ran up against these same questions for myself, I did not arrive at a satisfying answer.
The reason I appeal to non-objective senses for sentences has come from hard lost battles with skepticism. Over time I have come to relate to a kind of skepticism which leans toward moral nihilism, not out of desire, but rather lack of certainty. — Adam's Off Ox
Schops never been too rah-rah about parturition, though to be fair I don’t know if that still holds. — csalisbury
Antinatalism?!? :scream: — Kenosha Kid
I’ve solved the problem. After decades training with the world’s foremost doulas, midwives and practitioners of Transcendental Meditation I’ve come up with a method (patent pending) of progeneration that actually decreases suffering and I’m almost ready to license it to expectant mothers for a modest fee. — csalisbury
Ironic as the child cannot by mere fact of its non-existence be asked consent, but it is assumed that it is ok to have it. Tsk.Tsk. As an ardent antinatalist, of course I think almost anything in this universe and its variations of actual and possible sufferings is not worth starting a life on someone else's behalf.
It's interesting that we use the non-identity argument for doing anything to someone else. Since that person is not here now it must be okay to do something which will affect someone (almost inevitabley negatively) in some future state, one which they indeed will exist. Of course the tune changes if we think of something, like on immediate birth into the world, the child will 99% likely to befall something terrible.. Now, be a bit more creative and extend that to a lifetime of known and unknown sufferings... Subtract romantic notions of how the "goods of life are just so worth it", "technology justifies life", "parent's pain of not getting to decide if someone else's life should be started", and "civilization needs to continue just because!" and other drivel.. and you see the argument clearly.
Oh and add in that we are so attached to the procedures and processes of a way of life, people simply want to "force convert" or force "missionize" people into the ideology of any given society's habits, norms, and institutions by way of birthing them, literally into it. — schopenhauer1
Objective reality/morality is the limit of a series of increasingly improved subjective opinions on what is real/moral. There being such a thing as "improvement" in subjective opinion is the only practical consequence of there being such a thing as objectively correct, since as it is a limit it can never actually be reached. There being something objective in principle just means that differing subjective opinions are commensurable: one can be less wrong than another, rather than all being equally (or at least incomparably) wrong. — Pfhorrest
The limit of the series of models come up with by the physical sciences done in such a way, as we take into account more and more empirical experiences (observations) by more different kinds of observers in more different contexts, just is what objective reality is. Likewise, the limit of the series of models come up with by comparable "ethical sciences" done in that analogous way, as we take into account more and more hedonic experiences by more different kinds of people in more different contexts, just is what objective morality is. — Pfhorrest
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