What I have to say has several moving parts, so
one has to hang in there and wait for me to get
to a particular section.
The other day, I got to thinking about “modern philosophy”.
I Google “Modern philosophy” and I got Nietzsche, hobbes,
Kant, and Locke among others, but not one single 20th
century philosopher. I then goggled “postmodern philosophy”
and I got Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault.
I got to thinking about the difference between
“Modern philosophy” and “postmodern philosophy”.
The first difference I noticed is, the so called
“modern philosophers” are considered “great” philosophers.
When philosophy is read or talked about, it is the
“modern philosophers” that get talked about.
Even here on ILP, for the most part, when a philosopher
get referenced, it is the “modern philosophers” that get
written about, not the “postmodern philosophers”.
(I have left Wittgenstein and Derrida to the side for the moment)
What is the reason that when philosophy is talked about,
it is people who have been dead for over 100 years.
But if you actually think about it, Foucault and Satre have
been dead over 20 years. But still even in this day and age
of millions getting a collage education, (as recently as the early
1940s the idea of collage for even the middle class was
really unheard of) since the 1950’s, the idea of a philosopher was
Nietzsche or Plato, not Foucault or Satre. I suspect one of the
reasons is in the very nature of the type of philosophy done.
The “modern philosophers” dealt with issues that are more
understandable to the average person. We can now deal with
existentialism. Existentialism did deal with those big issues
and did get noticed even by the likes of “Life” magazine in the
forties and fifties. but it was considered by American audiences
as foreign, as European. And then we get to “postmodernism”.
Postmodernism talked about pluralism and relativism
and representation and multiplicity. It doesn’t
even look like philosophy. “postmodernism” doesn’t talk
about the big issues of existentialism and that doesn’t even
get to the idea of poststructuralism of Derrida.
The idea of language, of deconstruction of language or
even of Wittengestein language game theories,
as philosophy is ludicrous. Derrida death of a few years
ago put the idea of “postmodernism” back out there and
still few know or care about “postmodernism”. The very
ideas of “postmodernism” has little value or understanding
within society at large. It is philosophy of the few, by the few,
for the few. The poverty of philosophy is because it
no longer discusses ideas that the average person knows
or cares about. “Modern philosophy” had concerns that
a person could value and understand. Today, philosophy
stands at the edge of obsolescence. The poverty of philosophy
is about the lack of speaking of concerns of the average person.
Who talks about the larger matters, the larger issues
of our life and what it means to exist within the universe.
Now some out there, will say, “I failed to properly understand
postmodernism” but postmodernism is quite clearly not about
absolute truth. It is about “truth” small truth, personal truths,
and it is about relativism. It fails not because of that,
but because postmodernism does not speak of or share
the concerns of the average person.
A paragraph of Derrida Grammatology,
“Anything which determines something else (its interpretant)
to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the
same way, this interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so
on ad infinitum… If the series of successive interpretants
comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least.”
{Elements of Logic}
And in this paragraphs lies the poverty of philosophy.
It says nothing to the average person or even one interested
in philosophy. Philosophy is is on the brink of disappearing.
It is poverty stricken to the point of vanishing. Return philosophy
to the understanding of john smith, average man walking the streets.
Or doom philosophy to oblivion.
Kropotkin
