2017-10-09 RRG Notes
- Disclaimers
- Just scratching the surface
- A lot of generalizations
- Inform us about the spirit of the phenomenon
- Postmodernism
- Misinterpreted term
- Lots of baggage
- Conglomeration of ideas
- Collection of post-WW2 movements in art, architecture, philosophy, literature, and other aesthetic fields that was a reaction against the totality of pre-existing aesthetic phenomena
- Postmodernist architecture
- Contrast Bauhaus and postmodern
- Bauhaus: very functional; no ornament, simple geometries, clean angles
- Postmodern: return to ornament; stylistic fusion, formal fluidity
- Postmodern art
- Compare to renaissance art
- Renaissance
- Representational
- Transcendental - art that goes beyond that yourself - art should be "timeless"
- Painting and sculpture, mostly
- Objective, fixed, determined meanings
- Postmodern art
- Temporal
- Arbitrary
- Transient
- Form can be whatever you want it to be
- Marcel Duchamp - urinal - forced a reconsideration of what constituted art
- Rauschenberg - changing mold formations
- Warhol - contingent
- Postmodern art's m
- Postmodern Literature
- Classical literature
- Man vs nature
- Man vs Man
- Man vs God
- Modern litrature
- Man vs Society
- Man vs Self
- Man vs No-god
- Orwell
- Postmodern literature
- Man vs technology
- Man vs reality
- Man vs Author
- David Foster Wallace
- Pynchon
- Break the tropes of modernist and classical literature
- Postmodern literary criticism - "the author is dead"
- Authorial intent is a fiction, because it's situated in history
- You can't experience what Cervantes intended with Don Quixote because you live in a different part of history
- Meaning is constructed by the reader, not the author
- Meaning is dictated by the interaction between the words on the page and the reader
- Postmodern Era
- Classified as 1950 onward
- After "modern" era
- Modernity is defined as the "era of grand narratives" - widespread belief in the progress of man
- Decline in religiosity
- Progress is sciences and engineering
- The problem with modernity is that advances in understanding the physical sciences didn't translate to advances in the social realm
- "If we just have the facts, we can fix the world"
- Donald Trump is arguably the first postmodern president
- Rationalist is a quintessentially modernist phenomenon
- We live in a world of competing narratives
- No "big beliefs" that capture the mainstream
- Postmodernism is decentralized
- The big questions
- What are facts
- What is truth
- Who gets to write history?
- How did we get here
- Nietzsche
- What did Nietzsche mean when he said god is dead
- What is god?
- By the late enlightenment theologians had long since abandoned literalism
- Nietzsche noticed that religiosity was declining
- God is a functional meme whose effects have included
- Community in-group lingua franca
- Ethical norms
- Genocide and oppression
- Possible to adopt Christian ethics without beliefs in god
- The loss of religion also meant the loss of these grand narratives
- Every person has their own conception of what God is
- God is dead?
- When western religiosity declines
- Nihilism
- Loss of community solidarity - atomized society
- Lack of sense of self - schizophrenic
- Narcissism - seek identity via other means (other memes)
- Corporate identities
- Ersatz values
- If we don't have God, how do we determine a purpose for our own lives; how should we behave?
- If religion/god is dead, then something has to fill that vacuum
- Moloch?
- What is the deity of postmodernity?
- Moloch and God are the same in epistemelogical terms
- Capital is the deity of postmodernity
- Big shift in marketing paradigms from modernity and postmodernity
- Postmodernity - sell a "lifestyle"
- Focus on creating desire, rather than fulfilling desires
- Capitalism determines our desires
- Fear, frustration and anger are the most viral emotions - drive the most shares, clicks, etc
- Why is Capitalism the egregore of postmodernism
- Postmodernity is defined by the lack of grand narratives
- No solidarity
- John F. Kennedy was the symbol late-modernity - assassination was a
- What common values do we have left?
- Money
- Capital
- The proliferation of capital for its own sake - "Greed is good"
- We believe that more money == more happiness
- For this new world, we need new philosophies
- Foucault
- Geneaology - traces the genealogy of ideas
- What is power and what is its history
- Concepts of episteme and discourse
- Derrida
- We're haunted by egregores
- Deconstruction
- Relates to Jung's collective unconscious
- It is important to notice egregores in order to deal with them
- Deleuze - "Heraclitus on LSD"
- Go with the flow
- Knowledge is structured more like a rhizome
- Process, not theory
- Baudrillard
- Our world is the matrix, but taking the red pill doesn't get you out of it, just lets you know that you're in the matrix and prevents you from forgetting
- History is reified images without referents
- All French - "children of Nietzsche"
- Is "new theory" a post-hoc rationalization
- Maybe
- Probably
- But we need new models of interpretation is anachronistic
- How does Hobbes explain Naziism?
- Postmodernism is not a philosophy
- Postmodernist philosophers don't necessarily agree with each other
- Postmodernist philosophers hate being called postmodernists in the same way that rationalists hate being called a cult
- Postmodernism is an extremely reductive terms
- We call these philosophers "postmodern" because they came of age during postmodernity
- Postmodern doesn't necessarily imply anything about the content of the philosopy
- Postmodern epistemology
- How can something be known?
- what is our standard for "truth"
- Empricism - truth is observable and testable
- Rationalism - truth should be mentally deducible
- "Woo" - astrology and horoscopes
- Christianity - truth is God
- Postmodernism - truth is whatever you want it to be (with a lot of qualifiers)
- Postmodern meta-epistemology
- Truth is dependent on context and frame of reference
- Actions have consequences, but the moral value of actions and consequences is determined by us
- How is truth determined in post-modernity
- Fake news
- Alternative facts
- All of these are the result of people having different epistemologies
- Deconstruction in action
- Rationalists deconstruct all the time - find exceptions to norms and generalized statements
- "If I kill someone, I'll go to jail"
- Find all the preconditions for truth be determined
- What is Deconstruction
- Uncover assumptions, presuppositions, and conditionals
- Everything is a text - everything can be seen as a thing that has preconditions and interpretations
- Look at the environment of a fact to determine how that fact came to be
- Hermeneutics
- The philosophy of interpretation
- How we make meaning out of texts and events
- Language of ethics
- Virtue ethics, deontology, and Utilitarianism can be defined in terms of one another
- Language is free play in mind-space, not externally referent
- We can pretend that language refers to external entities, even though there is nothing forcing that reference
- So what?
- Why are we even bothering with this?
- Marxist critique
- Hermeneutics affect how we behave
- Thus changing hermeneutics changes the world
- Deconstruction now
- Revolutionary philosophy has been weaponized
- SJWs, alt-right weaponize pomo theory just like politicians weaponize physics
- The average SJW understands their philosophy about as well as the average politician understands physics
- It's important to study philosophy, because it gives you context
- Why are rationalists interested in philosophy
- Truth is a core rationalist value
- Truth is core value in philosophy
- Analytic philosophy - truth is logic
- Continental tradition - truth is language
- Logic is reducible to language and language is reducible to logic
- Existence is a human context
- Logic requires an observer
- Would aliens discover the same laws that we do?
- They would have to experience the world in much the same way that we do
- Everything exists in a context, and recognition of that is the core idea of postmodern philosophy
- Is any of this falsifiable
- Asking the question means that you're "stuck" in empiricism in the same way that religious people are stuck with God
- Is utilitarianism falsifiable
- Is HPMoR falsifiable?
- Is-ought fallacy
- Humanities ask about the ethical
- Sciences ask how the world is
- Science, itself is an epistemological frame
- However, science has a number of practical benefits
- But even science is subject to political influences
- Politics is the practice of power - looks more like /r/place than Congress
- Metaphors We Live By - Lakoff
- Miller's law - assume that what the other person is saying is true, and then try to imagine what it could be true of
- Postmodernism at its best
- Extrapolation of Nietzschean and perspectivism
- Not dogmatic and ideological
- Focuses on human values
- Radical understanding of other subjects
- Understand the limits of your worldview
- Territory requires multiple maps
- Postmodernism at its worst
- Used to push shoddy political agendas
- Cargo cult ideology
- Used to rationalize and excuse asocial behavior
- Neoliberal late-stage capitalism
- Radical existential loneliness
- Is postmodernism rational?
- Postmodernism is only rational insofar as it helps you achieve your goals
- Dark arts
- Aren't necessarily worse
- It is not for the rationalist to determine what is and is not "rational"
- Do what works - rhetorical techniques aren't ethical or unethical in and of themselves
- Just read Wittgenstein and Zhuangzi
