Premodern and Postmodern Nihilism

Yesterday we spoke to the post-maturity of progressive demopaths who pretend to defend human rights while destroying them. Today we will speak to the post-reality of the postmoderns. Starting at the beginning, Landes asks precisely "What was the 'modern' that postmodernism claimed to go beyond?"

Good question: what was so wrong with modernity that couldn't be fixed with more of it? Seems like we were on a pretty good trend from ancient to premodern to modern. Why blow up the whole train and the tracks that got us here? Let them answer the question of what is post- in postmodern:

According to them, it was the Western "grand narrative" of the conquest of nature through objective science, rational (phallo-logo-centric) discourse, and its world-transforming technology.

Excuse me, but technology and penises? Really? And how can postmodernism be a narrative that isn't one? Easy: just throw out your phallocentric logic, and anything is possible. 

Wait -- cut off your ontological johnson? 

Some things are too stupid to critique, so I'm tempted to move on -- back to our survey of philosophical starters and nonstarters. To be sure, postmodernism is one of the latter, but I had wanted to proceed in order. There are rules. 

In the book we're using as a template, there are chapters on the Cynics and Sceptics, but postmodernists are the opposite: naive, credulous, and parochial. They're also dickless, but it's nothing to boast about.

Actually, the Cynics weren't cynical in our sense of the word, but were surprisingly dudish: "They were what we would now call dropouts" who embraced "a basic, simple life." However, they eventually went too far and became more than a little nihilistic, advocating "no government, no private property, no marriage, and no established religion."

But Diogenes went even further than John Lennon's most florid imaginings. He

aggressively flouted all the conventions, and deliberately shocked people, whether by not washing or by dressing, if at all, in filthy rags, or living in a burial urn, or eating disgusting food, or committing flagrant acts of public indecency. 

A pederast? It doesn't say. But given his retrograde attitude, he would likely have had no compunction to steal a valued item, nor does it say whether he purchased the burial urn, but it's not like you can rent one. Even the most modestly priced receptacle is a hundred and eighty dollars, but they range up to three thousand. And there's no Ralph's anywhere.

Well, say what you want about the Cynics, at least it's an ethos. Unlike the Sceptics. These dipshits beliefed in nussing! NUSSING! 

Recall that Socrates knew that he didn't know anything, but at least he believed "that knowledge was possible, and, what is more, he was bent on acquiring some." But the Sceptics maintained "an active refusal to believe anything." 

In a way, they confronted the same problem as the postmodernists, in that there were so many conflicting narratives on offer, why not jettison the whole belief in narratives? 

Seeing "the diversity of opinions that are to be found among human beings," they essentially said fuck it:  

For almost everything believed by the people in one place there seem to be people somewhere else who believe the opposite.... The best thing was to stop worrying and just go with the flow, that is to say swim along with whatever customs and practices prevail in the circumstances we happen to find ourselves in.

Truly truly, confined to such a worldview, strikes are gutters and gutters are strikes, and who can say there's any objective difference, even in a league game?

Nevertheless, no one is wrong about everything. Gödel smiles: 

[Pyrrho] pointed out that every argument or proof proceeded from premises which it did not establish. If you tried to demonstrate the truth of those premises by other arguments or proofs then they had to be based on undemonstrated premises. And so on it went, ad infinitum. No ultimate ground of certainty could ever be reached. 

Is he wrong? Yes he is, because Gödel's point is not that we cannot know truth, rather, that we can know truths that we cannot be proved with mere logic. Big difference.  

True enough, reason per se is tautological:

What a valid argument proves is that its conclusions follow from its premises, but that is not at all the same as proving that those conclusions are true. 

This constitutes a vicious epistemological circle, such that "every 'proof' rests on unproven premises," from "logic, mathematics, and science" to "everyday life." 

Having said that, some arguments are better than others. And the best argument of all is that we can indeed know a great deal about everything -- which is to say, Being -- but that we can never know everything about anything, not so much as a single gnat.

And for the same reason. In other words, the same principle accounts for our capacity to know being but never know it fully, for then we would be this principle, which is to say, God.