From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 19:06:38 BST
DMB (nobody else, though; I'm sure no one else cares what DMB and I have to say to each other ;-),
Matt said:
He goes to great lengths in his Spinoza lectures and in other places to discourage people like Derrida, Norris, and Culler from thinking that philosophy is a good political tool.
DMB said:
Postmodernism is NOT to be used in politics. Rorty goes to great lengths to pint this out. I see.
Matt said:
I think it makes the mistake of making philosophy a political weapon. Philosophy may be a good handmaiden to politics, but it is a poor master.
DMB said:
Philosophy is NOT to be used as a political weapon. The MOQ's mistake. I see.
Matt said:
I always thought of the kinds of post-modernism I like as reinstituting values, in the form of praxis and politics. Politics are all about values.
DMB said:
Postmodernism is ALL ABOUT values and politics!? Huh? What happened? I thought that's where the MOQ went wrong. How did you change your mind so quickly and completely? Did you undergo a transcendental change during the composition of that post? Are you taking BOTH sides in order to avoid criticism? Or are you just stoned on cold medicine? :-)
Matt:
Cold medicine? No.
Actually, when I wrote that last post I knew I was being really sloppy, but I was too tired to care at that point. The more careful formulation is that philosophy shouldn't be used as a political weapon, meaning that philosophy shouldn't be used on the Senate floor when debating policy (as the most clear-cut example). However, what post-modernism as a philosophical trend has helped do is clear away the conceptual debris (ala Locke) and help us realize that "everything is political" (as the slogan goes). That pans out to mean that everything is infused with values. I see post-modernism as helping us with our conceptual problems (the way we see things, describe things, etc.), but not our political ones (poverty, war, etc.).
The MoQ did not go wrong in saying that "everything is values." I've always supported the Quality metaphor. As I said, the MoQ goes wrong if it tries to be a political tool, i.e. used on the Senate floor.
DMB said:
But seriously, you are aware of postmodernism's role in the current political debates and culture wars, no? (Sorry to disappoint you, but I was talking about social trends, current events and recent history, not Rorty in particular.) My point, which you seem to have missed, was only that the attack on race and gender based hierarchies is an extension of the attack on social values after WWI that Pirsig describes in such detail. This is only a problem to the extent that these social structures are regarded as arbitrary and meaningless. Again, as Pirsig explains in detail, there are good reasons why we should examine these structures with the intellect and see what they were trying to do. Only SOME traditions and social structure will prove to be arbitrary and meaningless. We dispose of the rest at our own peril. I mean, Pirsig talks about the problems we get from throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is what postmodernism does to the extent that it throws out ALL hi
erarchies. This is what's going on whether you or Rorty like it or not, you know. In some pomo circles all hierarchies are seen as inherently oppressive.
Matt:
My point, which you seem to have missed, was to distance Rorty from these social trends. It was to say, "Well, Rorty's kinda' disappointed by them, too."
The other point was to say that, while you attribute your disappointment to post-modernism's apparent lack of meaning, Rorty attributes his to post-modernism's attempt to become a political weapon.
To the extent that post-modernism pretends to want to get rid of all social structures, it is caught in a conceptual contradiction. You can't believe it is "socialization all the way down" and want to get rid of all social structure. That doesn't make sense. That's a variant of a problem that has been plaguing Continental social philosophy since Rousseau: the longing for total revolution. Bernard Yack is a wonderful writer, scholar, and philosopher and he's written on both of these things in his Fetishism of Modernities and in The Longing for Total Revolution.
Matt
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