File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9806, message 100


From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-flash.net>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 08:10:25 -0500
Subject: Re: heidegger/pomoism and law


> Anthony,
> You are certainly in the mood to lay on tributes to aristotle in your 
> last posts, but yours is the oddest description of post-modernism I've 
>  seen; it's as though post-modernism is a reaction agst aristotle. hmmmm, 

No, not at all. Post-modernism was specifically a reaction to modernism. All I 
was saying was that this does not mean that it is compatible with pre-modern 
thinking, as many believe. Although post-modernism contrasts with 
modernism, it does not do so by returning to anything compatible with pre-
modern thought.

> i'd hafta disagree. "absolute starting points" has been a philosophical issue for 
> millennia and is not the most recognizable characteristic of post-modernism 
> (contrasting it to, say, certain styles of modernism).
> 
> Post-modernism has followed hermeneutical philosophy as developed by heidegger 
> and structuralism as developed by several mostly French thinkers, and it is a
> style of thinking that ceaselessly interprets while simultaneously
> dismantling, distorting, monsterizing, etc, various 
> heuristic formulae and refusing to settle in anywhere.

It's the "refusing to settle in anywhere" that I focus upon. Aristotle specifically 
argues against the position that human thought "refuses to settle in anywhere." 
In the Posterior Analytics he specifically states that all human knowledge is 
deduced syllogistically from first principles which are true, primary, and 
immediate. The prime example of this, he says, is geometry (ancient 
geometry) in which entire systems are deduced from first definitions and 
axioms which are considered absolute. This thought is specifically 
incompatible with any post-modernism I know of. If you can think of any strain 
of post-modernism compatible with this, please correct me.

> i'd shorthand it this way:  prior to post-modern thought western 
> philosophy and the sciences were going merrily along providing 
> appropriate slots for all categories of things and people (and people 
> as things) to fit into and be identifiable.  Various post-modern 
> philosophers decided that the slots were illegitimate and tied in 
> with traditional biases:  patriarchy, class, eurocentrism...
> you know, the usual suspects:  the powerful who dictate.

The very characterization of the categories as "slots" is already a break from 
modern and pre-modern thought. Aristotle treats his categories as 
representative of the way "things really are," and the moderns characterize their 
"categories" similarly, whether the way the "psyche" really is, or the way "our 
perceptions" really are, etc. This is just another way to say that they 
considered their "first principles" to be indicative of the "way something is." So 
by characterizing these first principles as mere "slots" which are based on 
patriarchy, class, etc, post-modernism is rejecting the absoluteness of first 
principles as such, which is incompatible with both pre-modern and modern 
thought as such. This is all I was saying before.

I will investigate the books you suggested.

Anthony Crifasi


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