I think, maybe, people mistake description for prescription — Moliere

Yes, it tends to happen.

I think we often tend to look to philosophers (and politicians, artists, etc.) for truth, for moral guidance, we tend to listen to them with the assumption that they are giving moral instruction or even moral orders (even when they don't specifically use the words "You should do such and such, you shouldn't do such and such").

I think we're often not even aware of this tendency; but it shows that it is there when we feel distinctly let down, confused after interacting with someone and not feeling any wiser afterwards.

My overall impression is that postmodernist philosophers want to shake off that role of teacher that is otherwise so often taken for granted when it comes to philosophers (and people of cultural importance). It seems that they're trying to make philosophy be about thinking, an exercise in thinking, in different modes, as opposed to being yet another form or source of ideology.

No worries. Perhaps even skip to the paragrpah on the 2nd page which begins: "A good place to begin...". It's a nice starting point, and the paper is relatively well written and hopefully clear.

Do postmodernists care? As long as they have tenure, they don't.
— baker

Ha! Yes, I think there are a lot of people who hold to this view. — Tom Storm

They do tend to come across as cold, aloof, uninterested, or at least what they say doesn't seem to have any real-world application. It's why we can readily understand memes like



Of course, the way we see the postmodernists also reveals what we expect(ed) of them. And this is something we can explore further, ask ourselves whether those expectations are justified or not wise or not.

Pomo shows us the ethical advantages of becoming explicitly aware of what is already implicitly involved in sense-making. — Joshs

Please explain this further.

How is such explicit awareness of what is already implicitly involved in sense-making an ethical advantage?

How is it an advantage at all??


(Personally, I think being more self-aware makes one a loser, a weakling. Unless, of course, one already has a massive ego.)

why should anyone care?
— Tom Storm

This is an excellent, devastating criticism of not just post modernism, but most of what attempts to pass for ethical thinking hereabouts. Ethics is at its core about how we interact with others, hence any claimed ethic that does not tell us what to do in our relations to others is void.

The account given by ↪Angelo Cannata starts with considerations of "history" - what I might call "background" or "being embedded" - but then slides into being "subjective", opening itself up to your critique. It has failed to follow through on the fact of our shared world, reverting to some form of solipsism, and as a result fails to deal with the problem of what we ought to do. — Banno

Ought we look to others for moral guidance?

Ok read it. Fuck, that's some pretty deep shit!

This crystallises it - sorry about the formatting.

Consequently, when I insist on the necessity of protection and
calculation, I am not advocating a ‘purely calculated hospitality’ or a
morality that insists on suspecting strangers (this being the two charges
Attridge makes against my position). Rather, I take into account that
the openness to the other is the source of every chance and every threat,
which is why openness may give rise to the most generous welcome as
well as the most paranoid suspicion and why there can be no such thing
as a purely calculated hospitality. The task of deconstructive analysis is
not to choose between calculation and the incalculable, but to articulate
their co-implication and the autoimmunity that follows from it. It is not
only that I cannot calculate what others will do to me; I cannot finally
calculate what my own decisions will do to me, since they bind me to a
future that exceeds my intentions, and in this sense I am affected by my
own decisions as by the decisions of an other.

This is the kind of approach I was imagining - an outline which helps me understand the thinking process by laying it all out. You must find some of this pretty exhilarating, right?

This is the kind of approach I was imagining - an outline which helps me understand the thinking process by laying it all out. You must find some of this pretty exhilarating, right? — Tom Storm

Yay, glad to hear it! And yes I think it's awesome :blush: I will just add that Derrida's approach is Derrida's alone: he does not stand for something called 'postmodernism' in general - his ethics is one among a great many, and if I mentioned it it's only because it was already brought up in conversation.

Ought we look to others for moral guidance? — baker

I look to others to enlarge my ideas and learn from their mistakes. And others may be way smarter/wiser than me, or so different from me that I get lost in their thought.

(Personally, I think being more self-aware makes one a loser, a weakling. Unless, of course, one already has a massive ego.) — baker

Can you expand on this?

the openness to the other is the source of every chance and every threat,
which is why openness may give rise to the most generous welcome as
well as the most paranoid suspicion and why there can be no such thing
as a purely calculated hospitality.

Isn't part of the calculation our own pessimism or optimism?

The more deathly pessimistic a person is, the more they'll attribute evil to the path that has brought us here, to what's happening now, and what kind of ethics we need, specifically, they'll say we need an ethical outlook that rains hell and brimstone down on everyone and everything just for good measure.

The optimist would obviously see a different picture, but maybe we could just be open to not fully knowing.

but maybe we could just be open to not fully knowing. — Tate

But only for as long as we're relatively healthy and wealthy.

but maybe we could just be open to not fully knowing.
— Tate

But only for as long as we're relatively healthy and wealthy. — baker

What happens if we're not?

I'd say there are a few beliefs that will not remain after gaining clarity, such as Derrida is a relativist, or Lyotard created a post-modern philosophy. Neither of those two things are true, at least as I understand these words. — Moliere

I’m aware of Derrida’s quote concerning relativism, but
give me an example of what you see in his work that defies relativism as you understand the term. I think Derrida is right to correct those who accuse him
of an ‘anything goes’ philosophy in which any claim to truth is as valid as any other. But I believe he also makes the following points: what is true is relative to contingent cultural formations, such that moral or empirical
correctness can only be determined within such structures, and such structures change over time in ways that do not form a progress. Derrida was no a realist. He did not assert a real world existing independently of our interaction with it. The absence of a concept of scientific progress in his work, his rejection of correspondence theories of truth and realism , and his placement of truth within local conventions would seem to be consistent with what realism means for many people.

As far as Lyotard is concerned. his philosophy has been treated as postmodern by many writers who embrace postmodern philosophy.
For example, Shaun Gallagher’s Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics discusses Lyotard’s work in the context of postmodern ideas:

“One can immediately think of objections to introducing the notion of universality into postmodern contexts. The emphasis in postmodern hermeneutics is on the local, the particular. Postmodernism challenges universality wherever it finds it -- from metanarratives to categorical imperatives, from performativity principles to Enlightenment politics.”

“The conversation of mankind fails as a model of postmodern hermeneutics not only because it is a metadiscourse and worthy of our incredulity, but because it hides exclusionary rules beneath a rhetoric of inclusion. The overarching conversation of mankind aspires to resolve all differends. But by requiring what is genuinely incommensurable (i.e., incommensurable with the conversation itself) to be voiced within the conversation, it denies it expression and helps to constitute it as a differend at the same time that it disguises it as a litigation. The very attempt to include something which cannot be included makes the conversation of mankind a terrorist conversation.

This is one of the issues between Lyotard and Rorty in their own conversation in 1984. For Lyotard, the conversation of mankind forms part of the modern Enlightenment tradition.”

“ The postmodern idea is not that there is one overarching conversation, but that there is a plurality of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. It is still possible that fusions can happen between conversations, not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but in the sense of creating new and different conversations by linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but in the sense of a creation of new horizons.”

I’m aware of Derrida’s quote concerning relativism, but
give me an example of what you see in his work that defies relativism as you understand the term. — Joshs

Relativism, as I understand the term, is a boogeyman of either a cultural or philosophical variety. Almost anything counts as relativism, broadly construed, because knowledge deals in relations. What people mean by "relativism" isn't very specific -- it's usually coupled with some anxiety with respect to objective truth, or scientific truth, or some such.

Such notions, to my mind, are simply not what Derrida is talking about -- hence why I was trying to draw a distinction of postmodernism as a historical category -- where the topic of interest is in drawing inferences about the structure of various philosophers and trying to categorize them, draw out their similarities, and so forth -- from the cultural category.

So, in terms of history, Derrida is a post-modernist -- but this is not a philosophy, but a category of description of the rough place to put him in relation to other thinkers. He is opposed to certain modes of philospohy, by all means -- but all the baggage that comes along with "postmodernism", I think, just serves to confuse. I'd say he really is his own beast, and that's usually how I prefer to look at any philosopher -- to take them on their own terms, and leave that to be different from the act of historicizing philosophy.

But in terms a philosophy, my assertion is there is no such thing. It's more of a boogeyman, politically, or a philosophical antagonist, philosophically -- but a cultural phenomena, rather than a particular philosophy. So I'd say that one could take any of his works and you wouldn't find the cultural or philosophical antagonist that people seem to have in mind.

Or would you disagree there?

How would one go about approaching a particular ethical problem through the various potential lenses of postmodern — Tom Storm

Cool. Now, I think, I'm ready to introduce Benjamin, with the understanding of how broadly we're construing post-modernism... will get to it tonight.

Relativism, as I understand the term, is a boogeyman of either a cultural or philosophical variety. Almost anything counts as relativism, broadly construed, because knowledge deals in relations. What people mean by "relativism" isn't very specific -- it's usually coupled with some anxiety with respect to objective truth, or scientific truth, or some such — Moliere

Fear of relativism is connected with anxiety over the lack of firm grounds for truth. As you say, there are many varieties and degrees of relativism. Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of scientific progress and coherence theories of truth offer a sort of moderate relativism, while still maintaining a ground for objectivity.
By contrast , the ‘radical’ relativisms of Derrida, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault , Lyotard and others are read as producing an infinite regress of relations with no ultimate foundation, nothing to justify science as progress or ethics as binding.

But in terms a philosophy, my assertion is there is no such thing. It's more of a boogeyman, politically, or a philosophical antagonist, philosophically -- but a cultural phenomena, rather than a particular philosophy. So I'd say that one could take any of his works and you wouldn't find the cultural or philosophical antagonist that people seem to have in mind.

Or would you disagree there? — Moliere

I think it depends on which intellectual community you are involved with. In psychology and continental philosophy, the postmodern means something other or more than a mere historical dividing line. There are distinctions made between modernist and postmodernist constructivism, hermeneutics, psychotherapy and cognitive science. The publications in these areas are filled with such references , because the readers of the journals understand what theoretical differences these distinctions are referring to.

The irony in some of this discussion is that one of the upshots of Derrida's critique is that things cannot be reduced to context, and no fine-graining of 'context' would ever serve to explain or justify any phenomenon. This sets him irreducibly apart from any empirical discourse like anthropology, history, law, and so on. And this, insofar as he is committed to resisting the reduction to a skeptical empiricism that would not be able to hold fast to truth in the philosophical sense - or any notion of responsibility, for that matter. Différance disrupts all closure, including "context". — Streetlight

Things cannot be reduced to context for Derrida in the sense that context is not a centered structure. It is instead movement and differentiation. ‘There is nothing outside the text’ means that context IS this temporal movement. Skeptical empiricism cannot ‘hold fast to truth’ in that it alienates the formal conditions of possibility of truth from its object. Derrida’s project is not a skepticism because it does not see truth as something to hold fast to’.

"The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ('there is nothing outside the text') means nothing else: there is nothing outside context" “…one cannot refer to this 'real' except in an interpretive experience." (Derrida, 1972, p.148).

I think it depends on which intellectual community you are involved with — Joshs

I agree. In this case, I'd say the community is TPF -- so not specialized, by necessity, but open to those so specialized and -- at least as far as I'm concerned -- even encouraging people to use their specialization to add to the conversation or engage in the works to help us all learn a little more.

So I think there is certainly a chance that we could reach a semblance of an understanding given our little internet community here.

Did you ever read Susan Haack's takedown of Rorty? There's the essay Pining Away in the Midst of Plenty. The Irony of Rorty’s Either/Or Philosophy. It's pretty funny. — Tom Storm

Oh yes! :clap: :smirk:

Thanks. I gave up on Hägglund's book about a third of the way through some years ago. I might give Attridge's a go.

Did you ever read Susan Haack's takedown of Rorty? There's the essay Pining Away in the Midst of Plenty. The Irony of Rorty’s Either/Or Philosophy. It's pretty funny.
— Tom Storm
Oh yes! :clap: :smirk: — 180 Proof

Not much of a takedown. Haack wants to hold onto the ‘reality’ of the natural , so of course she will be opposed to Rorty’s anti-realism.

Rorty had jumped on the p0m0 bandwagon by the time I'd first read him and attended a lecture of his in the mid-'80s. My intellectual bias against "anti-realism" & "epistemic relativism" was no doubt reinforced by my undergrad studies in engineering and physics so I didn't take Rorty et al philosophically serious, and I still don't. At least an anti-foundationalist (IMO, "epistemic pluralist") like Feyerabend was philosophically as well as scientifically & culturally interesting and occasionally hilarious. Btw, Ms. Haack got it right (I'm a big fan!)

Consequently, when I insist on the necessity of protection and
calculation, I am not advocating a ‘purely calculated hospitality’ or a
morality that insists on suspecting strangers (this being the two charges
Attridge makes against my position). Rather, I take into account that
the openness to the other is the source of every chance and every threat,
which is why openness may give rise to the most generous welcome as
well as the most paranoid suspicion and why there can be no such thing
as a purely calculated hospitality. The task of deconstructive analysis is
not to choose between calculation and the incalculable, but to articulate
their co-implication and the autoimmunity that follows from it. It is not
only that I cannot calculate what others will do to me; I cannot finally
calculate what my own decisions will do to me, since they bind me to a
future that exceeds my intentions, and in this sense I am affected by my
own decisions as by the decisions of an other.

Saving for later

My intellectual bias against "anti-realism" & "epistemic relativism" was no doubt reinforced by my undergrad studies in engineering and physics so I didn't take Rorty et al philosophically serious, and I still don't. At least an anti-foundationalist (IMO, "epistemic pluralist") like Feyerabend was philosophically as well as scientifically & culturally interesting and occasionally hilarious. Btw, Ms. Haack got it right (I'm a big fan!) — 180 Proof

Your stance against anti-realism forces you into a choice between two thriving movements within cognitive science. The first is inspired by Peirceian semiotics and Friston’s free energy neurological model. The second is anti-realist and embraces enactivist and autopoietic systems approaches inspired by phenomenology and pragmatists like James and Dewey. Haack is bound to the first group obviously ( I doubt very much she would be a fan of Feyerabend),and Rorty to the second. One of the founders of enactivism and among its most prolific and talented theorists is Shaun Gallagher, who has contributed to important work on autism, schizophrenia , empathy and perceptual body schemas. It is revealing that he has critiqued Rorty for not being relativist enough.

This shows that Haack and Peirce are a fair distance away from what I consider to be the most promising work in psychology today.

Back from work now, but getting hung up on the idea that Benjamin was an influence more than a named suspect so far...

So I'm afraid I keep coming back to the question of postmodernism, as I've been doing throughout, and finding myself back where I started. We can pick someone, but then I'd call them by their name -- and there are various parts that I'd highlight if I'd want to include them, and parts I'd highlight if I didn't want to include them (for instance, Benjamin was a Marxist, and that could very easily be interpreted within the Modernist framework, given that Marx is not post-modern, at least as I see him. Too pro-structures to be counted, really)

Which I suppose, for me, is just to say that the question is ill-formed, because philosophers speak for themselves -- its the historians and scholars after the fact that make these generalizations and categories. And while they can be academically interesting -- I definitely have an interest in the history of philosophy! -- I don't think there is a moral to be derived from the category of post-modernists. Each one of them deals with anti-foundationalism in their own way, it seems to me. There are themes and concerns that tie these people together, but that's from the perspective of the reader and interpreter -- as I've been saying.

But for Derrida -- while his concerns are ethical, I don't think his concerns are specific to any individual choice. I don't think he's laying out a theory of goodness that we should conform to. If anything, I'd say he's trying to get people to question their received morality, that it is likely the result of the same patterns of thought that he sees in the history of philosophy -- that it likely sets up a binary so that one is good and the other is evil, (again, insofar as my understanding goes). But that's not what he says, so that's just an inference of sorts, an impression from what he does say -- he's certainly anti-foundationalist, though, so anyone who believes that foundations are necessary for goodness will of course think he's wrong.

Though I will say, from my own perspective, I rather liked the old addage that "everything is text" -- for myself, it opens the door to philosophy that isn't written (EDIT: Or, much the same, that writing isn't always in a book). And, as Marx said, philosophers have only managed to interpret the world, when the point is to change it.

That being said, I think we could forgo the usual suspects, too -- and merely assert what we think a post-modern philosophy is. And then that'd be something! Rather than just vague impressions of several thinkers from histories.

In that vein: While I don't think there's a positive ethical theory, in the sense of a utilitarianism or what-have-you, there are reflections on the possibility of ethics, and one primary anxiety that I see in Derrida is totality or totalization -- with fascism, and French colonialism, being real world examples of totalization. Totality is the pattern of thought at least aligned with fascism -- to see and understand and control. But that pattern is buried deep. So deeply, at least as I understand Derrida, that there is this sort of super-transcendental plenum upon which thought rests -- one pointed out by Heidegger (ironic, isn't it?).

To assert some ethic would be totalizing -- it would tell you who is good and who is bad. And that's the exact thing which fascism does. But in the world we live in, there are no such things. There is no total perspective which finally proclaims This is The Good, and Now we may Bow to The State as The State is us and we are The State.

Your stance against anti-realism forces you into a choice between two thriving movements within cognitive science. — Joshs

I don't think so. I don't find Feyerabend and Haack significantly incompatible or necessarily inconsistent with either enactivism and autopoiesis (neither of which I find "anti-realist"). Apparently your commitments and assumptions, Joshs, are quite different from – perhaps even incommensurate with – my own (e.g. actualism + irrealism (contra "anti-realism" & "realism")).

I don't find Feyerabend and Haack significantly incompatible or necessarily inconsistent with either enactivism and autopoiesis (neither of which I find "anti-realist") — 180 Proof

From my reading , the following are the core figures in enactivism. Most contribute to the same journals, attend the same conferences, co-author books on enactive cognition and phenomenology, and comprise a tight -knit community of scholars. I believe that I can extract quotes from every one of these writers indicating that they are anti-realists.

I think that Varela speaks for this group when he writes:

“…despite other differences, the varieties of cognitive realism share the conviction that cognition is grounded in the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven subject.”( The Embodied Mind)

Shaun Gallagher, Jan Slaby, Matthew Ratcliffe , Thomas Fuchs, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Hanne De Jaegher, Kym MacClaren, Michel Bitbol, Rick Furtak, Joel Krueger, John Protevi, Joseph Rouse, Dan Zahavi.

Other contributors to enactivism , like Anthony Chemero, have waffles on the issue:

“ Situated, embodied cognitive science is all the rage these days. Some (including the present author) have argued that situated, embodied cognitive science is incompatible with realism (metaphysical and scientific). In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: there is no reason one cannot be both a proponent of situated, embodied cognitive science and a realist.” (Chemero)

My overall impression is that postmodernist philosophers want to shake off that role of teacher that is otherwise so often taken for granted when it comes to philosophers (and people of cultural importance). It seems that they're trying to make philosophy be about thinking, an exercise in thinking, in different modes, as opposed to being yet another form or source of ideology. — baker

Good observation. Postmodernists' critical theory world view is the extreme form of skepticism of all things humans. I don't subscribe to it. It puts doubt on your own thinking of what's really driving cruelty, suffering, ignorance, absurdity, goodness, benevolence. They complicate issues, leaving you with confused state of mind and existence. It can be a bad prescription for hopelessness.

Sometimes I think of them as securing their lucrative posts in the academia and beyond by publishing books that won't ever give definitive answers to human issues.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant.