File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9806, message 99


From: "henry sholar" <H_SHOLAR-AT-marta.uncg.edu>
Date:          Fri, 26 Jun 1998 8:03:44 EST
Subject:       Re: heidegger/pomoism and law



>
>Postmodernism is a break from pre-enlightenment thinking as well as 
>Enlightenment thinking, insofar as it rejects all "absolute starting points." The 
>idea of such absolute starting points as principles of science began explicitly 
>with Aristotle (see Posterior Analytics) long before the Enlightenment. In fact, 
>Enlightenment science simply took this model of science from Aristotle.
>
>Anthony Crifasi
>

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, 
as if nothing has happened for a couple of thousand years for post-modernism
 to have anything really to deal with.

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.

if that is reducible to "absolute starting points" yer right.  but your aristo-tilian delight
piques my anti-aristo-tilian curiosities.  

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.

Isn't this enlightenment bruhaha grown from an important 
Foucault essay on Kant's very short essay "What is the Enlightenment?"
(I think Foucault's essay may carry the same title, at least in Eng. translation.)
Perhaps shorthand for postmodernism as anti-enlightenment comes lazily 
from this scenerio.  (How does one keep up?)

Questions of law, justice, etc. and post-modern thought are much more 
complicated than "reaction to the enlightenment" --- at least in my pea brain.  
Many folk write on it--derrida, lyotard, the nomads, and the not-really-serious
others.

By the by, check out the latest issue of the New York Review of Books with 
a "critical" essay on Derrida's politics by NYU's Mark Lilla.  

Those who read agin' the text
will notice some wonderfully self-inflicted ironies.  Lilla wears them well in his
struggle for academic prestige.  If you hurry you can read it on the Net
-AT- http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/index.html.  After Monday you'll have to 
search for it in the archives at that web page.

kindest regards,
henry



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