PHIL201 Exam 3: Sire Notes
General Notes on Reading:
The problem of definition
“How does one define the indefinite?”
Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism: “incredulity toward metanarratives”
“With postmodernism no story can have any more credibility than any other. All stories are equally valid, being so validated by the community that lives by them.”
Postmodernism “accepts the foundation at the heart of naturalism: Matter exists eternally; God does not exist.”
A worldview question about worldview questions
Postmodernism first tackles “how language functions to construct meaning” rather than finding first principles or how we know those first principles
Two major shifts in the past centuries: premodern → modern → postmodern
Premodern - Western world before 17th century
Justice based on revelation from a just God
Medieval hierarchy
A revealed determinate metanarrative
Human beings are dignified by being created in the image of God
Ethics based on a God who is good and has revealed His goodness to us
Modern - beginning with Descartes
Justice based on using universal reason as the guide
Enlightenment universal democracy
The autonomy of human reason with access to truth of correspondence
Human beings are a product of their DNA template
Universal human reason and experience and the human ability to discern objective right from wrong
Postmodern - began with Nietzsche
No universal standard for justice
Postmodern anarchy from individuals self-defining values
The “postmodern” notion that we create truth as we construct languages that serve our purposes
An insubstantial self constructed by the language it uses to describe itself
Morality is the multiplicity of languages used to distinguish right from wrong
“In philosophy, however, the move from being to knowing, from the primacy of God who creates and reveals to the primacy of the self that knows on its own, was fatal.”
Knowing was the focal point, which eventually evolved into “knowing how one knew”
Postmodernism does not allow for any sure knowledge
Conceptual relativism in all aspects of reality
Metanarratives are all just wishful thinking — “the language we use to tell our stories… is a mobile army of metaphors.”
We have an “urge for truth, but now to be truthful means using the customary metaphors.”
“According to postmodernism, nothing we think we know can be checked against reality as such.”
“All language is a human construct”
“Truth is whatever we can get our colleagues (our community) to agree to” -Richard Rorty
“The only kind of truth there is is a pragmatic truth. There is no truth of correspondence.”
The very languages that we create truth with deconstruct upon analysis
Postmodernists use language to communicate their truth (which they present as the absolute truth), which is self-defeating
“In postmodernism the self is indeed a slipper concept.”
“The good is whatever those who wield the power in society choose to make it.”
For Foucault, a postmodernist, “law = repression and decriminalization = freedom”
“Postmodernism can make no normative judgment about such a view. It can only observe and comment: so much the worse for those who find themselves oppressed by the majority.”
Positive Remarks:
“Postmodernism’s critique of optimistic naturalism is often on target. Too much confidence has been placed in human reason and the scientific method.”
Language is indeed often associated with power
However, if we adopt a radical suspicion of all language being power plays like Foucault did, we end up in a contradiction or anomaly
Ex) Take “All discourse is a masked power play” as true. If we say no, then we must examine where power is an undue factor. If we say yes, then that one sentence makes sense only if it is not seen as a power play, thus being self-refuting.
“Attention to the social conditions under which we understand the world can alert us to our limited perspective as finite human beings.”
Critiques:
“The rejection of all metanarratives is itself a metanarrative”
“The idea that there are no metanarratives is taken as a first principle, and there is no way to get around this except to ignore the self-contradiction.”
“The idea that we have no access to reality… and that we can only tell stories about it is self-referentially incoherent.”
You can’t state this as real if there is no reality that we can know
“Deconstructive postmodernism’s view of the indeterminacy of language… raises a question: How then are we to understand the deconstructionist’s own propositions?”
If language is unreliable and up for interpretation, how do we know the postmodernist argument is reliable and not up for interpretation?
“Postmodernism’s critique of the autonomy and sufficiency of human reason rests on the autonomy and sufficiency of human reason.”
Postmodernism deconstructs its own foundations
Quotes to pay attention to/know what they mean:
*Dr. Mason said “Pay attention to quotations from other sources that show up in the book (especially longer quotations)!” on the study guide
**I highly doubt all of these will be on the exam, but I put them all down so they’re all in the same place
“Whither is God,” he [the madman] cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and
I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up
the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? . . . Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? . . . Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? . . . I come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Madman”
God is dead and we have killed Him
When God dies, both the substance and value of everything else die as well
“I do not now admit anything which is not necessarily true: to speak accurately, I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing and really exist; what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks.” -Descartes
This is the foundation of Descartes’ argument — “Cogito ergo sum” / “I think; therefore, I am”
The essence of the modern is the autonomy of human reason
“No longer a coherent cogito [thinking thing], man now inhabits the interstices, ‘the vacant interstellar spaces,’ not as an object, still less as a subject; rather man is the structure, the generality of relationships among those words and ideas that we call the humanistic, as opposed to the pure, or natural sciences.” -Edward Said, literary theorist
If we begin with the seemingly knowing self and follow the implications, we are left first with a solitary self (solipsism) and then not even that
“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”
The language we use to tell our metanarratives is just wishful thinking
“The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. . . . Languages are made rather than found, and . . . truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences.” -Richard Rorty
Languages are just human constructs, so we cannot determine the “truthfulness” of language, but only the usefulness
Languages that have survived long enough to keep us alive all have the truth value necessary to keep us alive/from being hit by a bus
We use language to describe ourselves, and that becomes the truth
“For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural deposits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” -Philosopher Willard Quine
Compares the language of modern science to Homer’s stories of the gods
The only kind of truth there is, is pragmatic truth
There is NO truth of correspondence
“If we literary scholars can summon the courage and humility to do so, the potential benefits will reverberate far beyond our field. We can generate more reliable and durable knowledge about art and culture. We can reawaken a long-dormant spirit of intellectual adventure. We can help spur a process whereby not just literature, but the larger field of the humanities recover some of the intellectual momentum and “market share” they have lost to the sciences. And we can rejoin the oldest, and still the premier, quest of all the disciplines: to better understand human nature.” -Jonathan Gottschall, proponent of literary Darwinism
“History is a shifting problematic discourse, ostensibly about an aspect of the world, the past, that is produced by a group of present-minded workers (overwhelmingly in our culture salaried historians) who go about their work in mutually recognizable ways that are epistemologically, methodologically, ideologically and practically positioned and whose products once in circulation, are subject to a series of uses and abuses that are logically infinite but which in actuality generally correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any given moment and which structure and distribute the meanings of histories along a dominant-marginal spectrum.” -Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History
“Over against both of these positions [positivism and naive realism], I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of “knowing” that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence “realism”), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence “critical”). This path leads to critical reflection on the products of our enquiry into “reality,” so that our assertions about “reality” acknowledge their own provisionality. Knowledge, in other words, although in principle concerning realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower.” -N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God
“Truth isn’t outside power . . . it’s produced by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. . . . Each society has . . . its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which it is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. . . . By truth I do not mean “the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted” but rather “the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true,” it being understood also that it is not a matter . . . “on behalf” of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays. “Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operations of statements. . . . A “regime” of truth.” -Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge
“To see—really see—all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so Gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor,
compassion, fun.” -John Horgan, science writer