tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11007618.post114801897178443777..comments2023-10-30T06:04:42.144-05:00Comments on EL: Postmodernismelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05090954532029675275noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11007618.post-1149089480540222012006-05-31T10:31:00.000-05:002006-05-31T10:31:00.000-05:00it is fairly typical that people gravely misunders...it is fairly typical that people gravely misunderstand the meaning of subjectivity. To say something is subjective is not to dismiss is as unimportant. It's descriptive. Everything is located and every point of view has a historical trajectory. That's as opposed to it being "natural" or self-evidently "true." I don't think acknowledging subjectivity means doing away with truth. It simply means reconcpetualizing what constitutes truth and how truth becomes truth. That sort of thing.<BR/><BR/>but calling something subjective in this sense is not the same as saying "that's just an opinion."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11007618.post-1148470681156348742006-05-24T06:38:00.000-05:002006-05-24T06:38:00.000-05:00I think the problem with labels like that is that ...I think the problem with labels like that is that they try to generalize too much and just end up confusing people as to their exact meaning. The truth is, they're pretty worthless as an effort to categorize.Jayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13158409505328990008noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11007618.post-1148086649273217362006-05-19T19:57:00.000-05:002006-05-19T19:57:00.000-05:00El, I first encountered the concept of “post moder...El, I first encountered the concept of “post modern” when I was in seminary, probably around the time you were born. To me, it primarily refers to a distinction and statement that the “modern” era —a terminology developed in the late 19th Century to distinguish those times beginning in the mid-18th Century from “Antiquity” (pre-Enlightenment) are over. I understand the “modern era” as having begun with the European Enlightenment and ended about the time of the Second World War ended.<BR/><BR/>The Enlightenment—and thus Modernity—centered on humanism. People could control their own fate and were not dependent upon the capacious nature of gods. Science and rational thinking replaced mythos with logos. The modern paradigm was used to justify and explain virtually all of our social structures and institutions, including democracy, law, science, ethics, and aesthetics and was essentially about order about creating order out of chaos<BR/><BR/>Following the chaos of the second great militaristic catastrophe of the 20th Century—World War II and the development and use of nuclear weapons that seemed destined to destroy all humankind and the earth itself—philosophers began to question that Modern paradigm. Modernity had not created order out of chaos, but rather a chaos more destructive and malevolence than the world had ever known before. For all of the great benefits of science, it had also created “weapons of mass destruction” that could lead to the end of human civilization. Democracy—"Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité"—had degraded itself into Facism. <BR/><BR/>For the paradigm of Modernity to work, there always had to be disorder/chaos to be transposed into order. In Western societies, this disorder was generally described as anything that was non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-hygienic, non-rational, etc. Thus, to again use the example of the Fascist movements, they were male, heterosexual, extremely hygienic, and very rational. <BR/><BR/>The stance of post-modernity has been that the elements of modernity have to be tempered by the elements of antiquity. This, the male must be tempered by the female, law must be tempered by justice, science must be tempered by story, etc. Primarily, post-modernity calls for mythos to balance logos. Scientific knowledge is not enough; we must also have narrative and story. So Jean-Francis Lyotard can argue that science/knowledge cannot be an end to itself; the must be mythos—the grand narrative—to guide the use of knowledge. Likewise, Fredric Jameson writes that "history is only accessible to us in narrative form.”<BR/><BR/>This means to me that where the Nazis used bad “science” to partly justify the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and other “inferior” peoples, and we Americans used “science” (the superiority of Western culture) to justify the genocide of Native Americans, if that science had been tempered by an understanding of the story/mythos of these peoples, the malevolence would not have happened.<BR/><BR/>That’s enough! I have already written much more than I had intended. Still, I have enjoyed the process! Thanks for the opportunity to engage my brain!Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16939152657551690867noreply@blogger.com