Postmodern ideas...

If it’s at all possible, I’d love to see all posts that fail to meet a minimum threshold of 20 coherent sentences removed from this thread. Ideally, we should make this a standard rule moving forward. Let's move away from point-by-point rebuttals or quoting individual lines; instead, let's aim for actual discussion. As for whether we keep the debate with the outlaw elements, I'll leave that entirely up to the moderator's discretion. We should also avoid dropping links. Of course, potential essays are more than welcome and can certainly include quotes or references to other people's ideas—provided they aren't in a foreign language I don't speak. Let's strive to make these true essays. If we can't, then it's better if we just stay silent rather than having people post nothing of substance because they couldn't be bothered to actually engage with what they've read.
I really want this space to feel cohesive. That includes this post of mine, naturally. Thanks in advance.
See you tomorrow night.👋

Amanda Fowler2 said:I’d appreciate it if this thread didn't get bogged down by common-sense lecturing from >. I've got work tonight, so I'll pick back up with postmodernism tomorrow morning. >, please weigh in—this is honestly just total nonsense.

Fair enough—I already knew postmodernists weren't exactly known for their groundedness. But what happened to your whole "anything goes" philosophy???

As far as I'm concerned, the mods can scrub my posts if they want, but please leave these snippets from the "down-to-earth" Richard Dawkins. Maybe reading them will give some of these postmodernists a much-needed reality check.

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:

"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously."

This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattar, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattar goes on indefinitely in this Vein and offers , in The opinion of Sokal and Bricmont "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered".

MORE TO COME

...

Deleuze and Guattar have written and collaborated on Books described by The celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and Bricmont, however, aren't buying it: "These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous -- and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge."

The problem is, that’s a pretty tall order for the average reader. Look, I get it—there are probably ideas so deep and complex that most of us wouldn't recognize the language they're written in even if it hit us in the face. But there’s also that other kind of writing: language specifically engineered to be incomprehensible just to hide the fact that there’s no actual substance behind it. How are we supposed to tell where one ends and the other begins? What if you actually need a PhD just to figure out if the emperor is wearing any clothes at all? Specifically, how can we tell if this trendy style of French 'philosophy'—which its followers have basically hijacked huge swaths of American academia—is actually profound, or if it's just empty rhetoric from a bunch of high-brow con artists?

Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics AT , respectively, New York University and University of Louvain. They've kept their critique focused on the books that actually try to borrow concepts from physics and math. Since that's their home turf, they actually know what they're talking about, and they don't pull any punches. Take Jacques Lacan, for instance—a guy whose name is treated like gospel in humanities departments across US and British universities, mostly because he mimics a deep grasp of mathematics:

"... although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish."

...

Then there's the feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray, who gets her own dedicated chapter from Sokal and Bricmont. In a stretch of writing that feels a bit like a certain infamous feminist take on Newton's Principia (calling it a "rape manual"), Irigaray claims that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation." Her reasoning? Apparently, it "privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us"—and let me tell you, I'm quickly learning that "vital" is a massive buzzword in these circles. It’s classic for this school of thought to tackle fluid mechanics, too. The idea is that fluids have been unfairly ignored because "masculine physics" is obsessed with rigid, solid objects. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made The mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in somewhat clearer terms. This gives us a rare, unobstructed look at the situation, and yeah, the emperor is definitely naked:

"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have Sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to spot the sheer absurdity of an argument like that—honestly, we've heard this tune far too often lately—but it certainly helps to have Sokal and Bricmont around to point out the actual reason why turbulent flow is such a nightmare: the Navier-Stokes equations are just incredibly hard to solve.

...

AND MORE

in similar manner , Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion of relativity with relativism, Jean-François Lyotard's 'post-modern science', and those all too common, totally predictable ways people misuse Gödel's Theorem, quantum theory, and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only One of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again , Sokal and Bricmont Help US by analysing The tricks being played. This specific sentence—which, despite being packed with scientific jargon, is essentially gibberish from a scientific perspective—is a perfect example:

"Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes."

I’ll stop quoting there—mostly because, as Sokal and Bricmont point out, Baudrillard’s prose just "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense." They really drive home how much scientific and pseudo-scientific fluff is crammed into sentences that, as far as anyone can tell, don't actually mean anything. In fact, their critique of Baudrillard could easily apply to pretty much any of the authors being torn apart here who happen to be lionized throughout America:

"In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away. "

...

Still heading toward the end...

But wait—don't the postmodernists argue they're just "playing games"? I mean, isn't the core of their entire philosophy built on the idea that anything goes? They suggest there's no such thing as absolute truth, that every piece of writing holds the same weight, and that no single perspective deserves special treatment. If we're following their own logic regarding relative truth, isn't it a bit hypocritical to call them out for messing around with linguistic puzzles or pulling little pranks on their readers? Maybe so, but it leaves you asking a bigger question: why is their work so incredibly, mind-numbingly dull? If you're going to play games, shouldn't they at least be fun, rather than being so stuffy, self-important, and pretentious? Even more revealing—if they’re supposedly just joking around, why do they throw such massive temper tantrums when someone decides to pull a fast one on them? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Sokal, and instead of the amused laughter you'd expect after such a masterclass in deconstructive maneuvering, his success was met with total outrage. It seems that once you've successfully climbed into the halls of the establishment, it stops being funny when someone comes along to deflate your oversized ego.

...

I've highlighted the key sentence, just for Amanda Fowler2. 🙂

That's all from me, feel free to ban me now. 🙂 🙂

Tufir, get to work on that translation. You really think I have the energy to strain myself reading that? Seriously, put in some effort. What, should we just scrap all these websites now? That makes zero sense. Of course postmodernism encompasses every form of critique. Honestly, if those two quoted sentences weren't clear to you, I don't know what else you're looking for here. If there’s some hyper-scientific solution to postmodernism, go ahead—start a bearing manufacturing company or study brain wave frequencies. Either way, you won't escape the "postmodern condition," that specific moment that leaves us all hanging. I'll try to read what you copied later and give you an answer tonight.

The fundamental difference between modernism—as a philosophical tradition—and postmodernism lies in how they approach history. It’s all about the idea of progress and whether we can truly transcend the archetypes of humanism. We are moving away from the old way of seeing things, where an artistic vision of reality was treated as an unquestionable truth, or where history was just a collection of "facts" written by the winners. We are essentially abandoning that teleological view of reality. In the realm of philosophy, Hegelian absolute idealism attempts to internalize the entire history of the world spirit. Yet, paradoxically, this very system trembles under its own dialectical reasoning. By critiquing destructive reason, Hegel acts as a symbolic God of thought regarding the idea of development. He opens the door for philosophy to question its own lofty role. In this inverted sense, he actually becomes the first philosopher of postmodern skepticism, questioning the very foundation of objective vision and its ultimate purpose. Once we establish this intellectual openness, it allows for a non-historical critique of how reality is manufactured. This happens through a reinterpretation of the Hegelian dialectic, shifting it toward Marxian materialism and the revolutionary advancement of technology within the scientific sphere.

A philosophical look at the drive to transcend progressivism owes much to the Nietzschean demand for a total revaluation of all values and that desperate cry for the death of God. Nihilism isn't just a phase; it’s the inevitable state a person enters once the spirit has been fully realized within time. We see an attempt to take traditional thought and strip it down through deconstructive dismantling—reducing the subject to a sense of unsettling ontological finality, essentially, death. Through the lens of metaphysics, humanism has been hollowed out from its core and branded as nothing more than archetypal hypocrisy. What we see now is the replacement of "rudimentary hermeneutic ontology"—that closed semantic homogeneity described by the Wittgensteinian critique of Western thought as a kind of logical-conceptual masonry—with a poetic opening toward the imaginary. It moves toward the a-logical and the nonsense, tapping into the chthonic forces of the unconscious. It expands the field of experience beyond rationalist categories to capture what is truly "human, excessively human."

On the other hand, Heidegger’s work in his famous *Being and Time* attempts something quite similar to Hegel by situating the struggle within temporality. However, he points toward a total forgetting of the very concept of struggle. We attempt to return to it through a "leap"—a radical break from traditional metaphysical thinking. Much like Nietzsche, who looked back to the Pre-Socratics and a cyclical view of history, Heidegger is driven by a hope to reclaim the lost ground of philosophy. This perspective actually links him to the postmodern idea of the library, positioning him as a precursor to postmodern philosophy. Heidegger uses the term *Event* to describe that specific realm where man and being meet in their pure, primordial unity. It is the only place where one can truly experience the essential origins of identity. You could interpret the meaning of this word as an "event of appropriation" or the "process of being itself coming to pass." In making these demands, Heidegger arguably remains within the reach of the very metaphysical closure he seeks to critique. But there is a more vital concept at play here. He highlights the separation between thought and being—a rift that began at the very dawn of Greek philosophy when Parmenides argued that thought and being were one. Using this separation as a starting point to dismantle entire logical systems is a fundamental requirement of the postmodern, post-historical refusal to conform.

The entire revolutionary agenda, spanning from Nietzsche to Heidegger, represents the remaining core of philosophical thought that dares to claim it holds the face of Truth itself. It’s a closed code that doesn't really fit the postmodern mold. Instead, it paved the way for philosophy to splinter into semantics—think Derrida and his many followers—as well as the critique of social symbols through thinkers like Baudrillard and Foucault. Then you have the move beyond language itself, which serves as an overturning of psychoanalysis, much like what Deleuze proposed.

Structuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics... it feels like people just dismiss them as abstract nonsense. I honestly don't see them as essential right now. I’ve been trying to dive into some Gadamer and Habermas to make sense of how we ended up in this postmodern mess, and I even have Adorno sitting on my shelf waiting for me, though I haven't quite found the motivation to crack it open yet. If anyone sees things differently, I'm all ears.

I wasn't exhausted. I was just worn out. We will eventually make our way to the living legends—our actual contemporaries. Slowly but surely.👋

Way to go, Tufir. Just keep sticking to common sense.

When my faith in life starts to fade,
I turn to you, Heidegger.
My German isn't exactly great,
But if they see me with a book,
The folks at School—my peers and professors—
Might think I've actually figured out this twisted puzzle of existence.

Et cetera, et cetera, blah blah, I'm over it. Honestly, calling Luce Irigaray a philosopher is an insult, considering her entire thesis just boils down to some cryptic interpretation of cliché male-female polarities.

Hey, Tufir, please forgive me, I haven't been feeling quite myself lately. You understand, I hope.

Regarding the bolded part—as for everything else, I noticed the E=mc² connection. That sent me right back into a bit of a dilemma. Could you please pull out five key sentences in English for me? I’m genuinely curious. It’s not irony; I just can't afford to waste my energy right now.
By the way, I wouldn't label myself a postmodernist. I'm more of an admirer of Baudrillardian critiques of society. And literature, of course, but that's beside the point.

Honestly, I find this style much more appealing 🙂

Just because we hold diametrically opposed views or come from totally different backgrounds doesn't mean we can't have a decent debate and poke some fun at each other along the way 😁

Alright, let me try to keep this brief.

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Sokal affair, but I really don't have the energy to recount the whole saga right now—you can dig into the specifics via the other link. In short, a physicist named Sokal submitted a completely nonsensical paper to a postmodern journal called Social Text, and they actually published it. It passed peer review, and nobody realized it was a total hoax. Of course, once the dust settled, it sparked a massive scandal and a heated debate over the actual validity of postmodern philosophy and everything else bundled up with it. I pasted the Dawkinsian commentary because I think his take is incredibly straightforward and lucid—written in a clean, popular science style rather than that dense, impenetrable mess you get from modern French thinkers 😉

Because of that, I can't exactly dive into every single niche thesis put forward by postmodernist thinkers—I'm just not intimately acquainted with all of them—but I can certainly tackle some of their fundamental premises. Besides, the title of this thread is the IDEA of postmodernism, which suggests we should be questioning those very foundations.

CONTINUED

1. Postmodernists tend to wrap their lack of actual philosophical or scientific substance in this impenetrable, indigestible prose. If they just wrote clearly, their emptiness would be exposed instantly.

2. Just because something is incomprehensible doesn't mean it's profound. (Check out that first link I sent—the postmodernism generator)

3. These folks love to hijack terminology from the hard sciences—without actually grasping the underlying concepts—only to peddle interpretations that are fundamentally flawed, inconsistent, and just plain nonsensical.

4. To mask their inconsistency and lack of analytical clarity—which, let’s be honest, is a prerequisite for anyone calling themselves a philosopher or a scientist—postmodernists hide behind claims of total relativity and the impossibility of true knowledge. They argue that standard science and philosophy (the kind built on logic and empirical evidence) are merely one system among many, essentially operating under an "anything goes" mantra. But if that's really the case, why have they fought so hard to occupy the social sciences and humanities departments at universities across the country? And why are they so incredibly thin-skinned when faced with criticism, if "anything goes"?

A bit long-winded, I know. 😉

ironcrane7 said:When my faith starts to slip away,
I turn to Heidegger to save the day.
My German isn't great, it's true,
But if they see me with a book or two,
The folks at the local School, or even the profs,
Will think I've mastered the deepest of offs.

👍

It looks like there are still plenty of poetic responses out there exposing the real reason people dive into "heavy" literature. Honestly, sometimes I feel like Heidegger is one of the main culprits behind why we—the poor socialites, the humanists, and the philosophers—have become such easy targets for everyone's jokes. 😢 🙄

Using humor to take a jab at the establishment.

🙂

The Sokal affair is honestly just hilarious. I actually stumbled upon that paper online before I even knew what the deal was or why it was written—I was just searching for stuff on Bohm, and Google served it up. Honestly? At first, I thought the guy had just completely lost the plot. You see it all the time online, people trying to mash Taoism together with genetics, or throwing Lacan in with quantum physics. So yeah, I realized he was talking nonsense, but I had zero clue the whole thing was a massive prank. When I found out later it actually got published in a legit academic journal, I was floored.
So, I guess that must be pretty awkward for the postmodernists. But still, if you look at it from a slightly less cynical angle, it doesn't really say anything about the heavy hitters of postmodern thought. Like, it’s not fair to blame Plato for Platonists, or Marx for Marxists, or Heidegger for those who follow Heidegger, or even the big-name postmodernists for some random rambling. Just saying, totally speaking theoretically here, since I haven't actually read much of those Frenchmen.

And I don't know how much noise this made, but it feels to me like scientific positivist philosophy just took a massive hit recently. Basically, a research paper was published in a scientific journal that was entirely produced by a computer. Like, the machine itself posed the problem and ran the whole "study."
What am I even supposed to say about that? If I bring up Heidegger saying "science does not think, science calculates," you'll probably just roll your eyes at me. But seriously, though—what do we say when a computer actually *does* think? Maybe it's even doing philosophy?

crimsonjackal8 said:All that doom and gloom about technology hasn't really played out the way people said it would.

I mean, what's even left to fear...? Like, should we wait for a nuke to drop, or for parents to start ordering custom-made genetically modified babies that look like their favorite superheroes, or for us to finally chop down the last tree in the Amazon rainforest...

crimsonjackal8 said:Yeah, I definitely think a lot of the points you made in your first post are pretty shaky, even if they are super interesting to dive into.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind if you pointed out where my logic is falling apart—maybe some light can leak through the cracks (as Amanda Fowler2 would say).

I don't know how much noise this actually made, but it feels to me like scientific positivism just took a massive hit. A paper was recently published in a scientific journal that was entirely the work of a computer. Basically, the machine framed the problem and conducted the entire "investigation" itself.

Do you have any specifics?

What's there even to say about it? If I bring up Heidegger saying "science does not think, science calculates," you’ll probably just roll your eyes. But what do we say if a computer actually *is* thinking? Maybe it's philosophizing now, too?

Look, I've never been some wide-eyed optimist regarding the ultimate reach of science—in short, I don't think we're ever going to stumble upon a final, all-encompassing theory of everything (if anything, I suspect many questions will remain forever beyond scientific grasp—hint: consciousness and qualia) and I certainly don't buy into any future scientific utopia. Nor do I think everything in science—especially in day-to-day practice—is sunshine and rainbows. At the same time, it never even crossed my mind to deny the value or necessity of philosophy.

That said, the superficiality bugs me—the intentional misuse of data, the terrible, pseudo-intellectual style, and the endless emptiness found in so many modern "thinkers." But what irritates me most is the malicious criticism and the blatant weaponization of science by people who haven't even bothered to understand what they're writing about (just look at Dawkins' examples). I don't think we should be so quick to sacrifice Enlightenment ideals, no matter how banal they might seem today or how easy they are to tear down. And we especially shouldn't abandon the standards of good science and philosophy that have stood since ancient Greece, despite all the postmodernist chatter about the "end of all grand narratives." I'll stop there before I veer too far into being overly dramatic. 🙄

By the way, regarding machine thought, I'm a pretty hardcore skeptic, even though I am a cognitive psychologist. But that's a whole other "grand narrative" entirely. 😁 😉

crimsonjackal8 said:Got any more info on this?

Here’s the link to the thread over in 'Natural Sciences,' and I also dropped the link to the actual article in Nature right here.

I am genuinely glad I learned about that Sokal affair; it serves as a perfect example of the "computerized scientist." My goal in starting this thread was, of course, to learn something new. I don't think I'll be able to write much right now, but once I finish an essay on Baudrillard that would be accessible to someone hearing his name for the first time, I will post it. And crimsonjackal8, you might want to check out my thread on Postitorij somewhere around page two. I want to write about the essence of post-history—specifically how our technological world has caused the entire human race to drift away from reality, leaving us in a schizophrenic state where we can no longer accurately perceive our own position.

Regarding your argument that this is all just unintelligibility, I have to disagree. Not everything is lost; history doesn't just leave behind nonsense, just as only a few sophists remained. However, given the current trajectory of our development—the sheer volume of theorists and the general rise in knowledge—we will eventually see a philosophy purged of this syncretic gibberish. That said, quantity does not equal quality. If we look at it that way, there would have been no point in philosophizing after Aristotle. By that logic, one could say the same about Hegel. Centuries have passed, and it took a millennium and a half to reach a new philosophical bloom. The period immediately following Aristotle was dominated by Epicureanism and Stoicism, which, by your standards and even today's, could be seen as quite nonsensical because they didn't tackle fundamental ontological questions. Postmodernism is more serious, though; even if it offers absurdity or abstraction, it clears a path toward something new, which is exactly what I’ve tried to demonstrate in my writings.

It seems to me the issue lies in the sheer breadth of our choices, and perhaps in the realization that massive philosophical systems simply don't apply to society—or rather, look at their corrupt role in the hands of Marx. Not to mention the collapse of liberal theory and the democratic state within this crowded landscape that feels increasingly totalitarian. Baudrillard is brilliant; you absolutely must read him. He elevates the conversation regarding political correctness to a higher level of ethics, revealing it as a mere mask of empty rhetoric and codes of concern for the marginalized—a kind of elevated hypocrisy that isn't a set program, but rather a necessary condition of posthumanism. I can quote and comment on his work, and I will try to illustrate these points with examples as much as possible, using the ones he provides.

As for the others: Derrida acts as the defender of democracy in his analysis of metaphysics, violence, and the thesis of solidarity. But that is already politics, or rather, ideology. I have also read some Foucault and certain works on Deleuze, who most closely resembles that "meaninglessness," yet holds the right to claim it because he discusses Psychoanalysis and thinking through the body. It’s a sort of intellectual game that also touches on Lacan, whom mistyfox812 mentioned. I would love to see someone with deeper expertise write something on this. Honestly, any attempt is welcome, because I fear that in a society this sick, no one has the right to label a truly sane person as "mad." To me, that is the whole point of translating "insane" language into philosophy—to allow something valuable to grow from it. Don't be afraid.

Sending my best to everyone. Love you all.👋

Alright, let me give this a shot. I’ll try to summarize your initial post—at least how I interpreted your core argument—and then respond point by point, even if Nightmare isn't exactly a fan of that format. It's just easier for me to organize my thoughts this way. 🙄

1. Science requires a teleological worldview.
2. Dismantling that teleological assumption.
3. An attempt to seize control.
4. A lack of foundation and any sense of value.
5. The decline of the West.
6. The postmodernist response.

1. Honestly, I don't see why science needs to assume the world has an inherent purpose, much less that the Creator designed it. For science to function, all you really need is to assume there's an external reality—which is impossible to prove, sure, but it works as a working hypothesis; a little common-sense pragmatism goes a long way. You also have to assume the universe isn't pure chaos—meaning laws exist—and that our cognitive abilities are actually up to the task of grasping those patterns. I realize those are shaky assumptions, but the point remains: purpose or a Creator aren't prerequisites for scientific inquiry.
2. That mostly holds up. However, losing a sense of purpose isn't the same thing as falling into total chaos. Just because there isn't some grand cosmic Goal or Meaning out there in Space doesn't mean Space itself has become chaotic. The same physical laws apply to a Christian and an atheist alike. So, why shouldn't we both try to figure them out?
3. Trying to take matters into our own hands isn't some modern phenomenon; it’s just part of being human. The real question is simply what tools we have at our disposal to do it.
4. I can't go along with that one. Purely from a logical standpoint, Ivan Karamazov is right when he says, "If God is dead, everything is permitted." But that doesn't mean he's necessarily correct in practice. Many values are recognized as "good" across almost all human societies—meaning, aside from our destructive impulses, the intuition toward doing good is also baked into human nature. And you don't strictly need to believe God made us to be decent to one another.
5. People are constantly crying about the fall of the West, but I don't really see it happening. Sure, there are plenty of disruptive trends, but it seems to me there's still a "healthy core" holding things together, despite everything.
6. How is being incomprehensible and grumpy supposed to be an exit strategy from anything? Wouldn't it be better to actually try and build something? On this point, I agree with the critique regarding the pessimism of Western thinkers mentioned in that essay published in the Comma (my third link).

That's about it for now. My brain is starting to feel a bit fried. 😠 Maybe next time...