The Death of Postmodernism

[@Gabriel-pt3ci]

Thanks, @Philosophy Overdose! This was great. I cannot but concur with Stanley Fish. And I think this bears on the discussion about Quine, although here the issue is related to moral claims and there with an epistemological one. As Fish abides, one thing is to hold certain philosophical view about truth (moral or epistemic), and quite another to engage in the assessment of any practical matter. The former is by no means compromising or impelling the latter. I can be in principle (which I am not) a moral anti-realist and yet take part in moral judgements in my daily life. Being a moral anti-realist is not a justification for anything goes, morally speaking. It is a sophisticated philosophical view that dismisses any foundations to moral behavior apart from mere accidents. However, endorsing this view cannot drive me to behave in any particular way neither to justify any wrong doings of anyone. I cannot escape the accidents that got me here (in particular, those that relate to my biology, my cultural background, and the current place in human history I live in). My acts and judgements would follow certain normative standards (private or collective) even if they are constituted by a set of contingencies. Notice the response of Fish to Cohen's conditional statement about changing norms. I take he is saying something like this. Such conditionals seem counterintuitive because you are evaluating them from a normative background radically unlike the one proposed in the antecedent. I take that is precisely the same point that prompted the massive disapproval to Quine's reply in the comments to the other video. One of the possible readings of the question before Quine is not whether he believes or not that upon changing norms it may follow temporally a change in the status of a fallacy. You could interpret it as, whether he believes or not that if norms had evolved differently, the status of the fallacy may have not turned out to be the same. Posed in such a way, without the temporal succession between the event where norms are changed and the reassessment of the fallacy, I guess the issue is less preposterous. Note that the move from a timeline conditional to a counterfactual conditional about how things might have being is precisely what Fish asks from Cohen.

[@Philosophy_Overdose]

I think Stanley Fish makes a decent case here, but I'm not so sure I would completely agree. It's a bit hard to put my finger on what exactly it is, but I definitely have the sense that there's something strange at play here. It's true, of course, that one can be a relativist and simultaneously have moral commitments which are themselves thought to be merely relative to one's own cultural or societal code. But there seems to be something strange about being passionately committed to something which you yourself also don't believe is universally or objectively true, but only true "for you", "your society", etc. I guess that's part of the reason why Stanley Fish claimed that you can't actually live your life on the assumption of postmodernism and related beliefs. But perhaps that's part of the problem here. One's higher level beliefs (e.g. about the nature of truth) are in some sense pulling against one's first level beliefs (e.g. about which particular things are right or wrong). I was trying to think of a good analogy, and I think this might be one. Take the philosophical issue of free will. Everyone lives their life on the assumption of free will. In this sense, even the free will skeptic who believes it to be an illusion will live their life like everyone else, as if there was free will. Granted, there might not be a strict inconsistency, but the two levels of belief are pulling in opposite directions as it were Even the free will skeptic will act as if they have free will, and will address issues of choice and freedom the way we all ordinarily do, at a lower level (rather than at the higher philosophical level, where questions about things like determinism come up). So their practical commitments and actions are saying one thing (that their actions are free and only make sense given free will) which are completely different from their theoretical commitments (that they don't believe anyone can ever act freely because there is no such thing as free will). Maybe this isn't exactly a problem, but I think it is telling when one's theoretical or philosophical commitments are ones which it is impossible to live one's life in accordance with. The same goes for the theoretical relativist who is practically an anti-relativist in ordinary everyday action. I suppose this is actually a somewhat common concern that arises in philosophy and in regards to the relationship between the practical and theoretical. As for the connection with the video on Quine, I'm not so sure about that. I mean, there was certainly a mention there of contingency or change in norms, but my main issue with what Quine was endorsing there wasn't so much about the mere contingency of norms (although that was perhaps part of it), but about the naturalization and explanation of them in evolutionary terms. I know you responded to me there in a few comments, and I promise I'll eventually reply, but to reiterate what I said: I just don't think that evolution can ever give us norms, or that we can explain why we should value truth, say, or why the Gambler's fallacy is an incorrect form of reasoning, in any terms remotely like "because people who did such had less babies or had less happy lives". Granted, if you presuppose certain values, such as survival as being the ultimate value or goal, then given that, you will be able to use evolution to determine which things are valuable insofar as they lead to survival. But I don't see how you can get that ultimate intrinsic value of survival from evolution to begin with. Perhaps another way to put this is that you only will end up with instrumental values, or hypothetical conditionals regarding value. And unless those hypotheticals or conditional means are grounded in some intrinsic end, it is all just hanging in the air, without any basis. And that's part of why I think naturalized epistemology doesn't do well when it comes to that of normativity, which is essential to traditional epistemology (after all, notions like justification are normative notions). Without justification, you turn it into a mere chapter of psychology, which is exactly what Quine said and which is exactly the problem. So again, it's not so much the contingency per se, it's more the explanation in merely nautralistic terms (as if having more babies has anything to do with whether or not the Gambler's fallacy is a fallacy!). At best, evolution only seems to explain why we do value certain things, but not why we should or whether we should value certain things. And this goes for epistemic values too.

[@boiwvlf]

@@Philosophy_Overdose I am passionately committed to life, but I know that I will die Thought cannot be a standing in a void. We can commit as much to untrue statements as much as those to true ones, that of theater and belief. We therefore act as we have free will, an overdetermination. We can ask "how can a series of relations in a environment be normalized" through the evolutionary coercive - the infinite repetition of the reproducible, leading to the precondition of being and thought.

[@Philosophy_Overdose]

@eden I really don't like that example you gave of simultaneously being passionately committed to life while knowing that you will die. One reason I don't think it is a good example is because I think it is almost the exact opposite which is the case. That is, rather than depriving life of its meaning or value, death is actually a necessary condition for life not being utterly trivial and meaningless. After all, if life never ended, but was something we got an infinite amount of, would that not swallow up the value or meaning of what we do and the life we live? It is precisely the finitiude of life which is why it has any meaning or value to begin with (or at least why it has as much value as it does). Life is something precious and limited, like a scarce resource, rather than something you can simply squander without consequence or be completely indifferent to, because you get an unlimited amount of it. Incidentally, this is partly why immortality wouldn't be a blessing, but a curse! In short, not only is death not in tension with life and its value, but it is actually a necessary feature of life having value at all (or as much value as it does). Would you not agree? If not, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, even if it is admittedly getting a bit off the original topic.

[@boiwvlf]

@@Philosophy_Overdose Life loves abundance, does it not? Whenever you find an abundance, life arises easily. How can we say then that holding the scarcity of life would lead to it's abundance? In the singular case, my life is not merely it's own, the scarcity of my life should not threaten my belief in the value of abundance of life. Should I fear, should I belay for the finiteness and mortality of my body, to keep the fragile meanings I cultivate within it? To be an animal trapped in a corner? If the ability to create meaning is able to overcome the fear of death, shouldn't it also be able to overcome it's negation - the fear of truly living?

[@Ignirium]

​@@boiwvlf You sound confused.

[@TheWeedmonkey123]

So the big eye-opening moment that destroyed postmodern moral relativism was 9/11, not, let's say, the Rwandan genocide or Srebrenica massacre that happened just seven years prior. Or those were fine and people can have different perspective on those crimes against humanity? Another thing that seems strange to me is unwillingness to understand the fact that from terrorist point of view they have an obligation in face of God to defend the true religion, and they consider their victims to be sinners, not innocent people. So it wasn't a huge morale dilemma for them.

[@alanwhite1128]

@Jacob B If you could Open up your position or be more direct, maybe i could be enlightened from your perspective 4:18 seconds into this and i seem to agree with P

[@macw.7686]

It is incredible how people can turn off their brains just from the word "postmodernism." The caller who just rants about his book is a perfect example. It is suspicious whenever anyone chooses to argue against a loose philosophical category (postmodernism, neoliberalism) rather than engaging with any specific arguments or authors.

[@Luciano3415]

Arguing that philosophical/epistemological beliefs on things can be fully separated from one's practical activities is a foolish argument on Fish's part especially in the context of the condemnation of 9.11. The question that they asked him is whether one can condemn the actions of innocent killing using the postmodern outlook and he consistently evaded the question with a slight of hand of saying that one indeed can do so, but only by separating the postmodernism from the condemnation. He is, thus, making a twofold error; firstly, that the condemnation as an action is different from philosophical outlooks (like postmodernism) which it isn't - there is no reason to assume that you can coherently hold the positions that justice is, in theory, tied to your cultural context AND that 9.11 was objectively unjust because both of those views are theoretical outlooks. Even more, the latter theoretical outlook is arguably presupposed by the former as the philosophical beliefs are, in a way, the ground on which we base all of our other beliefs. Secondly, he is wrong as he assumes that 'condemnation' as such is possible without abstract reasoning; if I condemn someone solely from the context of my culture, I am not truly condemning him as he could do the exact same thing to me from his context. We are, thus, implicitly debating whose cultural context is better - NOT if their action is wrong (i.e., condemned) from the universal - which, again, we simply cannot do if we hold postmodern outlook in out theoretical base because there is no objective hierarchy between cultures. In summary, neither can we separate phil. theory from practice (i.e., postmodernism from condemning 9.11) as we don't have a handle to do so, nor can we, consequently, condemn anything once the inseparable postmodernism is present, for obvious reasons which he understood and probably due to them evaded the question.

[@Khuno2]

I'm not defending postmodernism, but this seems a bit confused. You seem to be conflating value pluralism and meta-ethical relativism with postmodernism. (Also, you are conflating meta-ethical relativism with a substantive normative ethical outlook, which it is not and couldn't be insofar as the distinctions between meta-ethics, ethics, practical ethics, morality, etc are viable). This is not the case, for there are many postmodernists who are decidedly not value pluralists and not meta-ethical relativists. Postmodernists aren't a group of like minded thinkers, but occupy vastly diverse spaces along the political/ethical spectrum that include the far right (e.g., Michel Foucault may have started out on the political left, but he certainly didn't end up there! "Postmodern Marxism" is a contradiction in a way that postmodern fascism, otherwise known as fascism, is not). Specifically to your claim that a relativist can't make universal ethical judgments, from moral outlook A, x is wrong in all cases of x. Therefore, according to A, x is universally wrong. So if I were a relativist who happened to believe in A, I could make universal ethical judgments based on A. (Are they anemic universal judgments? Why?) I could also admit that if I WERE to subscribe to ethical outlook B, x would be morally permissible, and, according to B, universally so. That would be trivial along the lines of an atheist admitting that if she were a theist, she would believe in God. And I would ground these judgments with reference to and explanations of A and B, respectively. So much for the claim that a moral relativist can't make universal moral judgments. Value pluralism, or the rational claim that people and groups have vastly different, incompatible, and justifiable beliefs in what constitutes the Good, and that a governing arrangement should take into account and respect this reality to be just and effective, _is_ an ethical rather than meta-ethical, belief. (I've encountered arguments that try to identify it as some kind of meta-ethical, or a principle principle along the lines of relativism, but I'm unconvinced). Can one can be a value pluralist and also have a very specific notion of the Good that is incompatible with other notions, and make universal judgments based on that notion? That sounds like a book! But don't write it, because it's hard enough to read this far in a KZbin comment. All of this a long way of saying that postmodernism isn't ethical relativism or value pluralism, though postmodern thinkers can be both.

[@Luciano3415]

@@Khuno2 I agree with the first part of your answer - in fact, I applaud you for it since it delves deeper into the topic and thus, prompts me to be more precise. As for the second part, I understand your argument, just as I understood Fish's argument which is somewhat similar, but I disagree with calling that a "universal" ethical judgment. Claiming that "x is universally wrong from the moral outlook of A" is a contradiction in my estimation, as in the first part of the sentence you say that x is UNIVERSALLY wrong, but in the second part, you negate yourself by saying FROM THE OUTLOOK of A. X is either universally wrong or it is wrong from a particular outlook - the fact that A may argue that his judgment is universal has nothing to do with whether it is indeed such. (In other words, I view value pluralism as an important ingredient in the discussion of ethics because of its insistence on the complexity of the world of values, but I don't agree that one can make any universal value judgments if he has value pluralism as a foundational theory. That being said, I again agree that this is a topic for an essay rather than a youtube comment). Furthermore, my main point of divergence with Fish was his insistence on dividing philosophical outlooks (such as postmodernism) from ethical or epistemological practical arguments - in order to be consistent with oneself, his theoretical and meta-theoretical claims should reflect his decisions in practice - this being at least true for those dealing with philosophy - otherwise, he must rethink his theoretical claims (although this just may be the "practical" software engineer in me talking - I always thought that firmly segregating philosophy from practice makes a disservice to philosophy as a discipline). Finally and most importantly, I grant that postmodernism is not a single outlook, but a variety of them, but I would then like to hear (just as I did from Fish) in what way one can condemn 9.11 with postmodernism in the base of his thinking given my previous point of not dividing philosophy from practice and while remaining in the realm of postmodernism and its overarching insistence on rejecting grand narratives and skepticism that, arguably, inevitably leads to relativism. In fewer words, this can be asked as what remains to make one a postmodernist if he makes an objective condemnation of a certain action. Or, even in fewer words, how can one be a postmodernist while not being a relativist? (As you argued that one can, but didn't explain how)

[@Khuno2]

​@@Luciano3415 I appreciate the reply, and it's given me something to think about. I don’t quite see how the moral relativist is using universal quantification in a way that differs from the broader moral discourse, or in general. What would it mean for something to be universally wrong without reference to and completely independent of _any_ normative outlook? I suppose meta-ethical anti-realists and realists alike would struggle to answer that question, no? Whether outlook A’s universal prohibition of x is true is a separate affair entirely from the truth of the description of A as prohibiting x in all cases of x. That is, whether or not it’s true that A universally prohibits x is a separate matter from whether or not A’s prohibition of x is itself true (e.g., the predictions of the positions of planets and stars made by the Ptolemaic model differ from whether the model is the case). But the point was that relativism and value pluralism are separate from postmodernism (Peter Sloterdijk and Slovoj Zizek are not relativists and agree on very little if anything, but it could be argued that they're not postmodernists, either. A postmodernist would never identify as such, given that it's not a unified of school of thought) which I’ll try to further explain. As moral relativism is a variety of ethical realism, postmodernists would seemingly deny it to be consistent with their overall denial of truth (I was a bit too hasty! Though consistency doesn’t seem to be an overriding concern for some postmodernists). Not necessarily value pluralism, however, because that’s a substantive normative outlook that they can and sometimes do subscribe. The moral relativist goes beyond the description of outlook A’s universal prohibition of x to the claim that that is all that there is to the truth that x is universally wrong according to A, which we’ll refer to as C for brevity. C is what makes relativism a variety of moral realism, and is explicitly denied by other moral realists who ground the truth of A in non-relative moral properties. I don’t want to completely Colin Robinson this response any more than I already have, so I’ll try to address your questions. Perhaps the quintessential proto-postmodernist was Nietzsche. He wasn’t a relativist, but an ethical nihilist. That is, Nietzsche denied that ethical properties of goodness and badness exist like mass or spin (he’d deny C) but he would presumably agree with the relativist’s description of the world (i.e., that there are outlooks according to which this and that are right and wrong, etc). Thus, the difference between relativism and nihilism is semantic, not ontological. Semantic differences are not trivial, as they are differences in value, which are differences in behavior. (This synchs up with what you were saying about how practice and theory are to some extent inextricably intertwined and can’t be neatly bracketed. I agree). Nihilism is ethical anti-realism, so presumably postmodernists could avail themselves of antirealist metaethical theories to make sense of moral discourse. Non-cognitivism, fictionalism, quasi-realism, prescriptivism, etc. (Importantly, postermodernism is not to be confused with ethical antirealism, as there are plenty of antirealists who would be offended if you referred to them as postmodernists...) Given that we can make sense of moral discourse independently of truth value (yeah?), ethical anti-realists can believe that certain situations are universally wrong without also believing that those beliefs are literally true. That is, our postmodern nihilist could inhabit an ethical position and make universal judgments consistent with such a position without believing that those judgments have literal truth values. He could ground those judgments with his preferences, values, beliefs, etc instead of with any reference to the external world or any truthmaker. He could argue for that outlook like anyone else would: ethical reasoning. This isn’t moral relativism, and it does accommodate conventional moral discourse. These are different practices than those of moral realists.

[@Luciano3415]

​ @Khuno "What would it mean for something to be universally wrong without reference to and completely independent of any normative outlook?" - having a hierarchy (i.e., making value judgments) of normative outlooks; in that sense, a given person can argue that 9.11 isn't evil from his normative outlook - for example, the Taliban outlook would be that infidels should be murdered - but we can then enter what you call metaethical landscape and from it derive that this outlook (and by this I mean the argumentation for the ethical claim) which leads to the suffering of innocent people (i.e., to the ethical claim of the given person itself) is wrong. Now, I see the complexity in this as you could argue that my conclusion is also done from a particular normative outlook to which I would have to refer to something like an objective reality in order to avoid infinite regress of value judging normative outlooks _by_ normative outlooks. This would, however, potentially cause, along with the placement of myself into ethical realism, the blending of the world of facts and the world of values - a statement which Hume (and somewhat Nietzsche) already demolished. In any case, I will cease furthering this argument as it is much too complex to delve into it here. "That is, our postmodern nihilist could inhabit an ethical position and make universal judgments consistent with such a position without believing that those judgments have literal truth values. He could ground those judgments with his preferences, values, beliefs, etc instead of with any reference to the external world or any truthmaker." - again, perhaps this is the crucial part of our "disagreement" (or possibly my misunderstanding of your points). Namely, I still don't see how one can view his argumentation on a given (ethical) problem to be grounded in his _personal_ beliefs, preferences, etc., and still engage in a discussion on ethics because that would suggest, roughly speaking, that he is merely discussing personal taste. To this, I would then refer to the famous folk expression; De gustibus non est disputandum. In other words, to return to my original point, I can't see how one can condemn, or for that matter, even discuss, anything of value (such as ethics) while simultaneously not having (objective) truth as an ideal that guides both his own thinking and the discussion he is engaged in. If that ideal, however unattainable, isn't present in the mind that wants to analyze a given problem, the realization of the futility behind what it is doing must creep in and, thus, stop it from going further. I believe Karl Popper provided the best answer to this with his moderate position in between the rigid absolute Enlightenment/positivist epistemology (from which hard ethical absolutism is derived) and postmodernist "relativism" - I accept your differentiation of the terms of postmodernism and relativism along with the deep insight you provided, but it seems you did in fact return to my original point with the sentence that I quoted last. Therefore, I am using relativism for a lack of a better word as it seems we agree with what we mean by it in the postmodernist sense, but my knowledge tops out in trying to provide a different term. He did this by arguing that absolute truth is indeed both unattainable and non-existent in the objective world, BUT that we must keep it as a guiding light in our quest for the betterment of our arguments and knowledge. From this, each ethical reasoning should at least strive to be "universal" (perhaps, Kant's imperative could be helpful with this?) and not merely the description of one's own attitudes.

[@Khuno2]

​@@Luciano3415 This can get very confusing! But for the reasons that I outlined, there are moral relativists who aren’t postmodernists (and insofar as moral relativism is a realist meta-ethical theory that does posit the existence of ethical truths and assigns truth values to moral propositions, it can’t be _consistently_ ); ethical anti-realists who aren’t postmodernists (though seemingly not postmodernists who aren’t ethical anti-realists/nihilists); value pluralists who are and aren’t postmodernists, and so on. Some postmodernists explicitly reject relativism. How moral relativists account for ethical disagreement, the nature of universal ethical truths, etc., are idealized puzzles for relativism, not postmodernism. How ethical anti-realists distinguish matters of taste from those of ethics (e.g., a comprehensive analysis of the differences in how those attitudes and preferences are realized in moral and non-moral discourse, behavioral disparities, etc) are puzzles for anti-realists, not just postmodernists (or even them, as that’s not a burning issue…). As an aside, I think that the distinction between mere taste and ethics isn’t just a problem for anti-realists, but of moral language in general. Hence, how the realist and anti-realist would solve it need not differ. Overall, I think that postmodernists are largely disinterested in this kind of idealized problem solving that we’re engaged. I enjoy it very much, but I realize its limitations (e.g., not too many folks care about testing out solutions to the Frege-Geach problem. Boy are they missing out 😐). Postmodernists seem much more interested in analyzing existing moral/political/economic/historical/ technological/ ideological/cultural developments and understanding the logic of those "systems" (I use the term very loosely) as artefacts than in how a nihilist could account for this or that hypothetical, or solve this or that idealized problem. They blur the lines between academic disciplines like philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, and anthropology, for example. Many analytic philosophers blur those lines as well (e.g., Otto Neurath was a sociologist, and contemporary analytics rely heavily on the findings of scientific disciplines). You can be an analytic postmodernist, too (Rorty). This interview with Stanley Fish is a genre piece (that I nevertheless enjoyed it…). People have been predicting and commenting on the demise of postmodernism since the term was first coined. But who can deny that we live in a postmodern world? You’d have to be in a coma! The hyperreal supplanting the real such that the simulation of reality is the measure of reality itself; truth a matter of the exercise of political power (e.g., the derisive “reality based community” mask off moment that happened years after this interview); curated social media profiles representing a new type of identity in which the measure of one’s self worth is determined by the attention of strangers (technology determining the formation and expression of identities and information); presidents sold like hamburgers; ahistorical good guy vs bad guy narratives manufactured at will and sold to a stupefied public to sustain a trillion dollar a year military industrial complex. If this were a competition, the postmodernists “won” decades ago, and we live in the world that (some of them) they anticipated and describe. And it sucks. Unfortunately, it looks like such a world has only just begun to fully express itself.

[@joer4]

I think that the fact of the Trump administration showed that post-modernism is alive and well.