How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
On the other hand, this is really only relevant in regard to situations in which the masks can be exposed. By, in other words, actually being able to disclose, by using objective standards, the objective truth.
But what if the mask that one wears is only the manifestation of an identity that is basically just the embodiment of dasein. You think that what you believe about the behaviors you choose does reflect the objective truth about yourself. While instead it is actually much closer to the manner in which I suggest that values are acquired: existentially given the life you live out in a particular world understood in a particular way.
That’s my point, by and large. If the exchanges revolve almost entirely around worlds of words, then it devolves [in my view] into dueling definitions and deductions. The words never refer back to actual things and people doings things and interacting with each other such that conflicts occur. Conflicts over which words are more appropriate, more reasonable, more indicative of moral or ethical behavior.
I merely note what I construe to be an important distinction between the either/or and the is/ought world. In the former when the words do make contact with the world there is often a way to determine which words really are more appropriate and reasonable. In the latter [sans God] there does not appear to be a way to determine which words are more indicative of moral or ethical behavior.
Still, for the postmodernists, language use in the either/or world is “for all practical purposes” no different than for the modernists.
On the contrary, my point [as always] is to make a distinction between the self in the either/or world and the self in the is/ought world.
In terms of your biology, your demographics, the actual empirical/material facts that encompass your life in the world around you, masks might be worn, but there is still an objective truth that can be gone back to. John might present himself to Jane as a bachelor when in fact he has a wife and two kids. Joe might portray himself to others as a Navy Seal when he was never in the military at all.
And when the discussion shifts to the is/ought world, masks can be worn here as well. John make claim to share Jane’s pro-choice values…but only because he thinks he needs to in order to get her into bed.
But however we embrace moral and political values, in my view, there does not appear to be an objective truth to fall back on in order to determine what all rational and virtuous men and women ought to think and feel.
Jane may tell John that she has never had an abortion [though she did] because she believes telling him the truth will cause him to abandon the relationship. But however either one of them thinks about abortion as a moral issue, where is the language able to establish whether abortion is in fact either moral or immoral.
Both the postmodernists and those who reject it have access to a language able to be fully connected to the circumstantial facts involved in any particular abortion. But, in my view, sans God, where is the language able to determine the morality of it? Here the modernists and the postmodernists are both in the same subjective, rooted existentially in dasein boat.
What we need here of course is a context. One in which the modernist and the postmodernist discuss what through the use of language can be encompassed and communicated objectively and what cannot.
For example, the Supreme Court here in America just overturned Roe v. Wade. A modernist and a postmodernist discussing that. The objective facts involved that every rational man and woman can agree on, and the conflicting, subjective value judgments regarding the morality of abortion itself.
Language and law. Language and ethics.
Again, we’ll need an actual set of circumstances in order to note what either can or cannot be communicated objectively. However one intertwines nature and nurture.
For me, it’s less nature vs. nurture and more objective truth vs. subjective opinion.
Any postmodernists here willing to choose a context?
Moral narrative/political agenda. How the two are acted out in regard to particular situations.
“In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action.” wiki
Okay, let’s take this “theory” down out of the intellectual clouds and explore it in regard to the morality of abortion. How are the personal opinions rooted existentially in dasein of the postmodernists going to be different from the personal opinions rooted existentially in dasein of the modernists? For both there is what can be communicated through language objectively and what cannot.
For instance, one of the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy is that biologically only women can experience it. So, in terms of a deontological ethics, how is that to be taken into account in establishing whether the act of aborting the unborn is either right or wrong?
Again, note a context in which we can explore this less abstractly.
Well, my use of them revolves more around the fact that winning itself here is just a subjective point of view. If you think that a belief in God provides you with an objective morality “here and now” and immortality and salvation “there and then”, then, for you, it’s true.
And neither the modernists nor the postmodernists have access to the language needed to establish that in fact a God, the God, your God either does or does not exist.
Right?
So, for me, “winning” or “losing” in the is/ought world of moral and political and spiritual value judgments is a frame of mind derived from the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein in the OPs here:
Look, each and every individual who does believe in a God, the God my God – or in a No God spiritual path like Buddhism – is either more or less comforted and consoled by what they believe.
Right?
Sure, re dasein as “I” understand it, we can go deeper into the life that they lived. We can explore the particular trajectory of experiences, relationships, access to information and knowledge etc., that predisposed them to particular points of view about a zillion different things.
But what remains the same is that “here and now” they do in fact feel comforted and consoled by what they believe. And the modernists and the postmodernist are basically in the same boat when it comes to establishing what ought or ought not to comfort and console us in regard to God and religion.
So…
Same here: sure.
Back to Roe v. Wade.
Some were “torn up” by the Supremes ruling. Others were not. They were ecstatic. Some believe they acted in “good faith” in linking their arguments to the Constitution. Others believe they acted in “bad faith” in that they construe the Constitution itself as an adjunct of their Christian dogmas.
Okay, Mr. Modernist and Mr. Postmodernist, discuss. Where are the limits of language most likely to be demonstrated here if not when the discussion comes to focus on the morality of abortion itself?
More to the point, meaning in regard to what?
I know! Let’s choose a context, describe what is meaningful about it to us and try to communicate that to someone who does not find it meaningful at all. Or who does find it meaningful but not in the same way.
So, how are conflicts here to be resolved? Well, there’s God of course. And for others, ideology and political dogmas. Then those who embrace Kant and the rational pursuit of categorical imperatives and moral obligations. Then those who claim it all comes back to Nature. Their own rendition of what is natural or unnatural in regard to things like race and gender and sexual orientation. And the role of government. Those who insist it all revolves around “we”, those who insist it all revolves around “me”. The sociopaths and their “in the absence of God, all things are permitted” mentality.
Then, of course, me and the arguments I make in the OPs above.
Then you…
Again, this is what I call a “general description intellectual contraption”.
What we need then is a context. Preferably one in which the circumstances revolve around “I” in the is/ought world. A “situation” in which conflicting goods erupt. The abortion conflagration always works for me.
One in which someone here who construes him or herself to be a postmodernist chooses language to address it. And the language “I” choose.
How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
Once again: go about the business of living your life from day to day. A “normal day.”
Now, how many times in regard to the language you use to communicate with others is the “intellectual contraption” above going to come up?
Get back to us on that.
Language as a “self-referential system” is perfectly coherent when the self itself is perfectly coherent. Doing things wholly in sync with the meaning that we give to words to encompass our day-to-day interactions with others. In the family. At school. On the job. On the baseball diamond.
What on earth is the significance of deconstruction and semiotics then? Premodern, modern, postmodern interactions…your words and mine generating little or no ambiguity or confusion or conflict.
Same thing. Take this obtuse assessment out into the world with you. Only not “in principle”, in reality. The standards that transcend human language are mathematical and scientific laws, nature, biology, demographics, empirical facts. Words and worlds almost entirely in sync. Meaning often conveyed by and large on automatic pilot.
On the other hand, in regard to value judgments…
How are premoderns, moderns and postmoderns not equally impaled on the arguments I make above and elsewhere?
Are you a postmodernist? Know any postmodernists? Bring them on board.
Then, given a particular context let’s discuss our respective “beliefs and interests” in regards to how effective human beings either can or cannot be in communicating a sense of reality.
How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
In other words, for the moral and political objectivists among us, the functionality of language in the is/ought world is interchangeable with its functionality in the either/or world. One can use language cognitively to determine the morality of abortion as readily as one can use it to describe abortion as a medical procedure. They just employ different fonts, God or No God, to nail down the objective truth.
Again, all revolving around the limitations of language in regard to cognition – “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses” – itself.
After all, are or are not social interactions down through the ages and around the globe communicated [more or less successfully] assuming very, very different sets of premises regarding what is or is not rational and virtuous? And if language [modernist or otherwise] was there to provide us with the most reasonable and moral options, how to explain the ceaseless conflicts? Well, the objectivists of course insist that the problem revolves precisely around those who are not “one of us”…those who don’t cogitate about the world we live in as they do.
You, perhaps?
Over and again: how ridiculous is this? Do we really live in a world where postmodernists are able to show us that in regard to our interactions in the either/or world, our words cannot revolve around the same “external nature”, the same empirical facts?
How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
Go ahead, see if you can reconcile these two opposing social, political and economic inclinations. Aside from suggesting that all rational men and women are obligated to embrace your own language. Your own definitions and meaning.
Also, “a great deal of pain and suffering in the world and much conflict between groups” results from those who use language precisely in order to sustain it. The ruling class using code words to pit different demographic groups against each other. Ethnocentric or otherwise. MAGA in a nutshell for many.
I don’t use words like “brutal” or “severely limited” myself, but in having become “fractured and fragmented” in regard to these conflicts, I’m just as pessimistic. To me these conflicts are part and parcel of what Rorty encompasses in “ironism”:
Just choose a context.
Is the language I use here a weapon?
Obviously: Yes, no, maybe.
After all, why wouldn’t “I” be just as fractured and fragmented about this as well?
How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
Right, like the premodernist and the modernist objectivists among us don’t employ ad hominems, straw men and censorship as “logical consequences” of their own “epistemology of language”. In fact, in insisting that what they and only they know about practically everything under the sun, they seem [to me] far more likely to employ them.
Here for example.
Okay, but I say at least double it in regard to the authoritarian dogmatists who use Bibles or manifestos to anchor their own language in. And “postmodernists” of my ilk, in being fractured and fragmented regarding the language available to them, react quite the opposite. They are often anything but adamant and coarse in labeling those who don’t share their own political prejudices.
Sure, but what about the modernist epistemology of the MAGA crowd and their firsthand awareness of more traditional Republican thought and practice? What, they don’t have their own renditions Of Fish and Dworkin when it comes to creating political effigies?
How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
And what does this emphasize if not the gap – the chasm – between words carefully calibrated and then ordered theoretically in a manifesto and attempts to take these definitions and deductions out into the numbingly complex reality of actual human interactions?
Isn’t that why any number of objectivists [political or otherwise] here prefer to keep their own ideological/deontological arguments up in the clouds?
And, indeed, where nihilism often comes into play here is not over ends but over means. Everyone who is “one of us” agrees that this or that “ism” is the One True Path. But not everyone agrees to embrace “by any means necessary”.
Of course, what is this assessment itself if not another “general description intellectual contraption”? Your “logic and evidence” embracing capitalism or their “logic and evidence” embracing socialism.
Or my own “logic and evidence” suggesting that it is entirely reasonable to be “fractured and fragmented” in confronting both.
Only, I tend to eschew logic here and note how each side is more than capable of providing both reasonable arguments and ample historical evidence to make their case.
How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
Socialism/Communism are trickier objectivist fonts. Why? Because unlike any number of idealists, materialists actually attempt to be more empirical in their analysis and assessment. “Scientific socialism” they call it.
What Marx and Engels did was to explore the actual historical evolution of human economic interactions. And then to connect the dots between that and the social and political “superstructure”. Nomadic, slash and burn, hunter and gatherer, agriculturists, mercantilist, captialist, socialist. In that exact historical order by and large.
As opposed to, say, Ayn Rand who rooted capitalism in philosophy itself. To be a free-market capitalist was to literally embrace the most rational and virtuous understanding of yourself in the world around you. A “metaphysical” grasp of the One True Path. No thesis, antithesis, synthesis for her and her ilk.
But either way, the “psychology of objectivism” generally pertains. Thus, “any such deeply held vision comes to form part of the very identity of the believer, and any threat to the vision has to be experienced as a threat to the believer.”
Sound familiar?
To wit:
You “will” yourself to see what you believe. Everything contrary to the One True Path is explained away. And everything that others argue that is contrary to your own authoritarian dogma merely demonstrates their own foolish ignorance.
On the other hand, what to do with someone like me? I’m not arguing against them so much as encouraging them to explore how [existentially] they came to acquire their dogmatic convictions in the first place. And how these convictions may well revolve more around the psychological satisfaction – the comfort and consolation – that comes with of having found an objectivist font to anchor I in.
Then choose your “methodology”:
God and religion by and large, but, “deontologically”, philosophers have come up with their own “theoretical” contraptions.
“Marxism was an integral aspect of Beauvoir’s political and theoretical orientation from the mid-1940s onwards and it colors much of her writings. This chapter first locates Beauvoir in her politico-intellectual milieu. It then traces the complex ways in which, throughout her works, she draws on materialist and humanistic aspects of Marxism while also often distancing herself from the more mechanistic Marxism of the French Communist Party.”
In other words the question that stands out boldly is, to what degree does reductive thinking play a part between the aspects of humanistic socialism as contrasted with the dogmatic substitution of substantive material for the ideal structural conventional ideology.
Is that question to remain in the uncharted, hidden annals of dystopian anti progressive denial, a return albeit negatively to the shadows that were cast by Rousseau against Hobbes?
Is this glaring darkness a mere phantom of a less then objective background that does not offer the canvas on which to deflect the leveling exclusions by which traditional logic has met it’s match?
Is this not consistent with the failure of Marxism to avail to it’s unreasonable humanistic counterpart?
The absurdity of reducing ideas to matter, that do in fact matter , can not operate on both levels of the logos. It becomes a theoretically absurd attempt below a certain point, and that is exactly what Marx wants us to believe,.
The dialectical operation of an ideal world, can not function on the level of mere materiel, …And most of the struggles on the real battlefields of life , causing insurmountable damage , can not or could not be previewed from the classical annotations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
That is how such subtle distinctions’ neglectful application of the double edged sword can have unexpected and terrible effects .
The simple overreach of such reduction, while true , is no menu for the uninitiated academic non warrior.
A return to a classical sender , a process as folly, as if a time travel back- word, could answer the most foundanental question of all :
Was there a logic , a logical behavior before language exploited it , to it’s best advantage?
Was the savage really noble at heart, or was conflict resolved through the post modern games of resigning into mutually beneficial patterns of give and take?
Is survival ruled by the fittest in all senses of the word? Or, the clans who manage to form a resistant force field around him?
Does this field consist of sungular , underground negation of power, creating the anti-matter which effects more power then the one that has been reduced and is the cause of it’s generation…
In this sense, humanism wins hands up, for it is humanism which has been borne of the early logistics of pre-conscious existence, and it has evolved thriugh single minded efforts of a mere handful , who realized that singularity, that Singular ,all containing power, is reduceable toward an impossible priority.
The coming singularity of post modern consciessness is an evolutionary tour de force of a process which has already been pre determined to meet up pre lingual logistics with it’s logical metaformation into a new metamorphosis.
How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
No, seriously, I challenge someone here to note a particular context they are familiar with…note how Kant might have explained how, in that context, reason was cut off from reality. How we can use epistemology in our choice of language to propound moral obligations when the context involves conflicting goods.
Left, right, in between. What thinkers either have or do not have available to them is a choice of language that allows them to differentiate moral from immoral behaviors. After all, left, right or in between, language abounds that permit all of us to access objective truths in the either/or world.
Indeed, that’s why, in my view, so many here prefer to keep the value judgment exchanges up in definitional logic realm of the theoretical.
And, as though our feelings and passions were no less the existential embodiment of dasein out in a particular world historically, culturally and personally.
More “intellectual” gibberish?
And, as though there is not the politically correct equivalent of this on the capitalist Right.
How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website
His postmodern discourse. In mine, the objective truth still seems to be an entirely reliable component of our interactions with others in the either/or world. Though perhaps not in yours.
That’s why the single most important factor in regard to the words we choose revolves around the extent to which we can demonstrate that what we think or believe or claim to know is true “in our head” is in fact true “out in the world” in regard to our interactions with others.
What in particular are you attempting to be absolutely dogmatic about? Whether Joe Biden is president of the United States or whether he is doing a superb job. Whether Uma Thurman had an abortion or whether abortion is immoral. Whether Johnny Unitas played on a professional baseball or football team or whether baseball or football is the better sport.
Hegel? Why go there or to Aristotle? Given a particular set of circumstances, you can either demonstrate that all truth is relative, that all cultures are equally deserving of respect, that values are subjective, that technology is bad and destructive, that tolerance is good and dominance is bad, or you can’t.
Of course, in regard to the language employed by those involved in the physical sciences, new discoveries often bring about a new language…new words for new things that had 1] previously never been known or 2] had never been grasped fully. But what’s crucial is that the words invented to describe these brand-new discoveries are applicable to all of us. We are all in the world together and the laws of nature excludes none of us. So if there are still limitations, they are likely to revolve around how these new discoveries are used politically.
No, what really sets us apart from the rest of the animal world is how our own communication often breaks down. With “lesser” animals, it’s all about instinct and drives. Biological imperatives that evolve through random mutations that are completely beyond the control of life on Earth itself.
So: why, over and again, do we come toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball with this: youtu.be/qYe8cGy9TeI
Thus:
Many forms. But no is/ought world for them, right? No value judgments or conflicting goods. No being authentic. No dasein. No “fractured and fragmented” sense of existence.
Unless, of course, we live in a wholly determined universe such that even our own “failure to communicate” is but the psychological illusion of actual autonomy.
On the other hand, in regard to trees, an actual object out in the world we live in, there is a ton of objective information that we can fall back on pertaining to whatever language we choose and however the language we do choose is explored…semiotically?
Signifiers can generally come to the very same conclusions about whatever trees are being signified.
That is, until the discussion configures into a debate between the tree huggers and the lumber industry. What then is of significance? One side side deconstructing the other side based on which language deemed to be the most appropriate?
First trees. Now dogs.
How about this: Jim holds dog-fighting contests in his back yard out near the garden next to the oak tree where the dogs, trained to be savage beasts, battle viciously to the death. A “picture theory of language” here.
Pictures that depict the war in Ukraine. So, reality – the truth – from the perspective of Vladimir Putin or from the perspective of Volodymyr Zelenskyy?
Your assessment of what the pictures are telling us about this conflict or mine? Or the perspective of others regarding the reality – the truth – there?
What proposition containing what facts about the war in Ukraine or about Trump and MAGA?
And how exactly are philosophers not correct regarding the language they use in distinguishing truth and falsity in the either/or world?
Yeah, if propositions are defined as “a statement or assertion that expresses a judgment or opinion” then I agree that the tools of philosophy seem to confront limitations in a No God world. But to then propose further that “whereof one cannot speak [objectively], thereof one must be silent” is completely out of sync with the reality of human interactions. Only in isolating oneself completely from others is that relevant.
Instead, moral nihilists of my ilk suggest that the “best of all possible worlds” revolves around “moderation, negotiation and compromise” in a political economy that revolves as much as possible around “democracy and the rule of law.”
On the other hand, “for all practical purposes” what does this mean given the fact that in most communities the killing of others is a fact of life. And the language we use in reacting to that fact – to the killings themselves – must accommodate countless sets of circumstances. So the question becomes who decides what the limits of language are in connecting the dots between words and worlds.
Logic then.
Logic and capital punishment. Logic and assisted suicide. Logic and euthanasia. Logic and abortion. Logic and self-defense. Of course here the language employed by science is no less problematic.
That’s why I created a language of my own. One that revolves around differentiating the use of language and logic in the either/or world and in the is/ought world. In one, being altogether and in the other fractured and fragmented.
Then back to how this in and of itself is but another “general description intellectual contraption”. The sharp boundaries and clarity revolving around how we define the meaning of these words…logically?
And clear and distinct thoughts when you defended, say, the trucker protest in Canada, or clear and distinct thoughts when you defended the government?
Context please…how does this apply in our everyday life, like when Mary Land fucks a loser, Jack Black, and is impregnated with his undesirable seed?
How do we apply your copy paste, references then?
She always wins…lose/lose for the resat of us.
If you respond, she wins; if not, she wins…no matter what you say, she ignores it and posts the same nonsense and wins.
This cunt is unbeatable.
Like all cunts.
What man has ever gotten into a fight with a cunt and not walked away…as she laughed at him ‘running away’?
