Bah Humbug

A Finer World | Clarissa's Blog



I read the article you linked to.



The thing with the po-mos, is that they basically get their notions indirectly from Nietzsche, but they don't really understand his criticisms.  For Nietzsche, shoots of Enlightenment start a historical march toward The Truth, which in turn lead us to the recognition of the Death of God.  Thus it leads humanity to an existential crisis, in having to face what one does about one's knowledge of reality when Truth starts to take on more and more of a negative stark quality, for instance by pointing to our mortality.   The sacrifice of the fanciful illusions entailed in religiosity, at the altar of The Truth, seems pointless from a perspective that already admits God is Dead.  So one has this quandary as to what to do about Truth, from an atheistic perspective.  It's a philosophical issue, bringing up issues of historical progress and aesthetics and what it means to live the good life, and what it means to be ethical.   It is not wise, for instance, to be compulsively, brutally honest.  Nietzsche eschewed such absolute dictates of behavior.



For Nietzsche, the advancement of Enlightenment thinking was inevitable, but it was also very important that one had to handle this inevitability in such a way that finer feelings and aesthetics and so on, that were part of the religious tradition, were not tossed out along the way.



But anyway, the French bring in their critique of instrumental reason in the 20th century, and it ties in quite well with Nietzsche's modulated stance toward the Enlightenment.   But the French do to philosophy what they do to a model on the catwalk, which is to dress [her] up in excessively exaggerated and sometimes shocking ways.  It's a cultural trope and I think it does not translate well into Anglo-Saxon culture, which takes everything too literally.



Anglo-Saxon postmodernists are idiots in my view.  They are sophists who do not even know they are sophists.  Above all, they are the victims of their own unclear thinking about issues.



Literary postmodernism is neither here nor there, but 'philosophical' postmodernism is a piece of nonsense, except in the case that you are French.  Then you really ARE ironic and irony is your bread and butter.



And if you really fear progress, you need to look at it more closely to notice what it is you feel you fear.   If I am too 'enlightened' it may not be that I start to kill people, but that I have to start acting more like an adult.



It really isn't adult to insist, for instance, that we cannot comment on what happens in some very patriarchal societies because for all we know a woman being stoned to death for some sexual misdemeanor might actually enjoy her full cultural participation in that way and who are we to insist she shouldn't.  That is what I would call a childish lack of engagement of the imagination.



Overall, I don't think sophistry is clever, not unless the people doing it have a much better idea of what they're doing and their aims in going about it as they do.  You can't just rest assured that it is the right thing to do because you are combating the capital T in Truth.