1. Postmodernism is philosophical idealism, which maintains that changing concepts changes reality. Intellectual shamanism holds that concepts obscure reality and that one must, for periods at a time, get rid of concepts altogether, in order to see to what degree we live altogether too narrowly, on the basis of conceptualization of reality.
2. Postmodernism has a false epistemology -- or, more precisely, ideas about identity that are at best partially true and false. To presume you automatically understand the meaning of my words on face value, without plumbing any deeper, just because you know my gender and my country of origin and a little bit about its history gives you the same odds of being right as turning on the TV one night and immediately seeing a movie you desperately wanted to watch. By contrast, intellectual shamanism holds that only the individual alone can truly know herself, and that this kind of knowing is possible only at the point where they are extremely alienated from themselves as others view them. Then they see the limitations of their formally-recognized identity. Only via extreme alienation from oneself and others is the individual able to become free.
3. Postmodernism is an elitist academic discipline. Intellectual shamanism is embraced by outsiders to the system. If you were not an outsider when you set out on you intellectual voyage, you will be so by the end of it. "When I lay asleep, then did a sheep eat at the ivy-wreath on my head,—it ate, and said thereby: "Zarathustra is no longer a scholar."
It said this, and went away clumsily and proudly. A child told it to me.
I like to lie here where the children play, beside the ruined wall, among thistles and red poppies.
A scholar am I still to the children, and also to the thistles and red poppies. Innocent are they, even in their wickedness.
But to the sheep I am no longer a scholar: so willeth my lot-blessings upon it!
For this is the truth: I have departed from the house of the scholars, and the door have I also slammed behind me."--Nietzsche
4. Shamanism embraces emotional nihilism as a means to escaping the shackles of conformity. Postmodernism embraces a superficial notion of transgression, which is supposed to assist the hopeful individual to climb up the ladder of the academic hierarchy.
1 comment:
Sure, the issue is formalism. Intellectual shamanism deals with this issue in particular, by using the alienation that results from ideological formalism, to jettison the subject into novel modes of being and becoming.
This results in the subject becoming largely incalculable -- to some degree, they are outside of Hegel's constructs of historical determinism.
One crosses "the bridge" from conventionalism to self-actualisation "as spirit" -- that is, neither concretely, nor formally, but by means of an incalculable quotient of will.
Post a Comment