Postmodernism for Rationalists

  • What is postmodernism?
    • Highly misinterpreted term
    • Postmodernism is a conglomeration of ideas that aren’t necessarily in agreement with each other
    • Collection of post-WW2 movements in art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and other humanities fields that were a reaction against the totatility of pre-existing aesthetic phenomena
  • Postmodernist architecture
    • Contrast Bauhaus and postmodern
    • Bauhaus
      • Functional
      • No ornamentation
      • Simple geometries
    • Postmodern
      • Return to ornament
      • Stylistic elements that have no functional purpose
      • Formal fluidity
      • Fusion of various styles
  • Postmodern art
    • Contrast Renaissance art with postmodern art
    • Renaissance art
      • Representational - art should represent real people and real events
      • Transcendental
        • Art should be “timeless”
        • People across history should be able to derive the same meaning from a piece of art
      • Form limited to painting and sculpture
      • Objective, fixed, determined meanings
    • Postmodern art
      • Temporal - not static; the piece itself changes over time
      • Arbitrary - not strictly representing real things or people
      • Transient - can mean different things to different people at different times
  • Postmodern literature & literary criticism
    • Postmodern literature
      • Breaks the tropes of classical and modern literature
      • Pits man against technology or reality
    • Postmodern literary criticism
      • “The author is dead”
      • Authorial intent can’t be experienced by the reader, because the reader is situated at a different point in history than the author
      • Meaning is the result of the interaction between the words on the page and the reader, not the author’s intent
  • What is the postmodern-era
    • Classified as from 1950s onward
    • After the “modern” era
    • Modern era is defined as the “era of grand narratives”
      • Progress in science and technology
      • Belief that society could be controlled and engineered
      • “If we just have the facts, we can fix the world”
      • Rationalism is a quintessentially modernist phenomenon
    • Postmodernism is a reaction to the negative effects of the modernist era
    • Postmodernism is defined by multiple, decentralized, competing narratives
    • Postmodernism asks questions to which the answers were “obvious” in earlier eras
      • “What are facts?”
      • “What is truth?”
      • “Who gets to write history?”
  • How did we get here?
    • Nietzsche - “god is dead”
    • What did he mean by that?
      • God is a functional meme
        • Community in-group lingua franca
        • Ethical norms
        • Genocide and oppression
      • Nietzsche noticed that the influence of religion, as a meme was in decline
      • The loss of religion meant the loss of many of the grand narratives that were driving society
      • Leads to nihilism, loss of community solidarity, loss of sense of self, and increased narcissism
    • If we don’t have religion, how do we determine a purpose for our own lives and how do we determine standards for our behavior?
      • Nietzsche says that we should do this on our own, through meditation and philosophical study
      • But this is difficult and time consuming
    • If god/religion is dead, something will fill that vacuum
      • Moloch?
      • What is the deity of postmodernity?
  • Capital is the deity of postmodernity
    • Big shift in marketing styles from modern to postmodern era
    • Modernist marketing is a list of features and a price
    • Postmodern marketing is defined by selling a narrative or a lifestyle
    • Capitalism has gone from selling goods to providing meaning - something that used to be the domain of religion
    • Without the grand narratives of the past, what common values do we have left?
      • Money
      • Capital
    • Thus, we proliferate capital for its own sake - “Greed is good”
  • For this new world, we need new philosophies
    • Focault
      • Genealogy - traces the history of ideas and their ancestors
      • What is power? What is history?
      • Concepts of epistme and discourse
    • Derrida
      • We’re haunted by egregores - high level memes like religion, politics, and capitalism affect us collectively in ways that are difficult to perceive individually
      • Deconstruction allows us to make these memes explicit and visible so that we can engage with them intellectually
      • Relates to Jung’s collective unconscious
    • Deleuze - “Heraclitus on LSD”
      • Knowledge is structured like a rhizome
      • Focus on process, not theory
    • Baudrillard
      • Our world is the Matrix, but taking the red pill doesn’t get you out of it, it just lets you know that you’re in the Matrix and prevents you from forgetting
      • History is reified images without the things they’re referring to
    • All of these philosophers can be thought of as children of Nietzche in some way
  • Are these new theories post-hoc rationalizations?
    • Probably
    • But we need new models of interpretation to deal with the fact that we have multiple competing narratives instead of a single grand narrative
    • How does Hobbes explain Naziism?
  • Postmodernism is not a (single) philosophy
    • Postmodernist philosophers don’t necessarily agree with one another
    • We only use the same category for them, because they came of age during postmodernity
    • “Postmodern” is an extremely reductive term that doesn’t imply anything about the content of the philosophy
  • Postmodern epistemology
    • What is epistemology?
      • How can something be known?
      • What should our standard for “truth” be?
    • (Classical) rationalism - truth is mentally deducible from axioms
    • Empiricism - truth is observable and testable
    • “Woo” - truth is in the stars and astrological tables
    • Christianity - truth is God
    • Postmodernity - truth is whatever you want it to be; choose your own epistemic standards
      • Rather than making value judgements about which epistemic standards are “valid” and which are “invalid”, we should document the epistemic standards that are out there and let people choose
  • Postmodern meta-epistemology
    • Truth is dependent on context and frame of reference
    • Actions have consequences, but the moral value of actions and consequences are determined by us
    • Fake news and alternative facts are the result of people having different epistemological systems
  • What is deconstruction?
    • Uncover assumptions, presuppositions, and conditionals
    • Everything is a text - everything can be seen as a thing that has preconditions and multiple interpretations
    • Look at the environment of a fact to determine how that fact came to be
  • Deconstruction in action
    • Find exceptions to norms and generalized statements
    • Rationalists deconstruct all the time
    • Find the preconditions that allow a fact to be true
  • Hermeneutics
    • The philosophy of interpretation
    • How do we find meaning from texts?
    • Language is free play in mind-space - words only have meanings because we choose for them to have meanings
  • Why should we even bother?
    • Hermeneutics affects how we behave
    • Changing hermeneutics changes the world
  • Deconstruction now
    • Deconstruction is a revolutionary philosophy that has been weaponized
    • SJWs and alt-right weaponize deconstruction in the same way that politicians weaponize physics
    • The average SJW or alt-right member understands their philosophy about as well as the average politician understands atomic physics
    • It’s important to study postmodern philosophy because it gives you context for what these people are talking about
  • Why should rationalists be interested in philosophy
    • Truth is a core rationalist value
    • Truth is a core value in philosophy
    • Analytic philsophy - truth is logic
    • Continental tradition - truth is language
    • But logic is reducible to language and language can be turned into logic
    • Existence only has meaning in the presence of a human observer
  • A common thread in all postmodern philosophy is that everything exists in a context
  • Is any of this falsifiable?
    • Asking this question means that you’re “stuck” in empiricism in the same way that religious people are “stuck” with a epistemology that requires God
    • Is utilitarianism falsifiable?
    • Is HPMoR falsifiable?
    • Focusing too hard on falsifiability risks falling into the is-ought trap
    • Science asks about how the world is
    • Humanities ask about how the world ought to be (ethical questions)
  • Science is itself an epistemological frame
    • But just because it’s an epistemological frame doesn’t mean it’s bad, wrong, or somehow equal to other epistemological frames
    • Science has delivered numerous practical benefits that other epistemological frames have failed to deliver
    • But even science is subject to political influences
  • Politics is the practice of power
    • Looks more like /r/place than Congress’
  • Miller’s Law - imagine that what the other person saying is true, and try to see what it could be true of
  • Postmodernism at its best
    • Not dogmatic and ideological
    • Focuses on human values
    • Allows you to approach and understand other subjects and viewpoints
    • Acknowledges that the territory might require multiple maps
  • Postmodernism at its worst
    • Used to push shoddy political agendas
    • Cargo cult ideology
    • Used to rationalize and excuse asocial behavior
    • Results in existential loneliness
  • Is postmodernism rational?
    • It’s rational insofar as it helps you understand people and achieve your goals
  • “Dark” arts
    • Aren’t necessarily worse or less ethical
    • The fact that rhetoric engages both system 1 and system 2 doesn’t make it wrong
  • Readings:
    • Wittgenstein
    • Zhuangzi
    • Lakoff - Metaphors We Live By