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It is 1760 vs 1850. Neither is postmodern. The postmodern resolution to the culture war would beceverybody declaring “happy to be misunderstood” and going their own way, trying to figure out solutions to material conflicts that take disengagement as a first principle.
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Divergentism is NOT centrism. It is epistemic exit via willingness to be misunderstood. It is similar to “courage to be disliked” except without courage as a default. You just go away to where being disliked is irrelevant.
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My fork point: death is the only truth. Everything else is compliance with standards and passing audit examinations. So long as you’re staying alive and retelling your story to your own satisfaction that’s your truth.
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The enlightenment was never more than like 0.1% of the population excitedly clustered around a single gloworm convinced they’d learned to stare into the sun and dreaming wishfully of eternal daylight for all.
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1700: world population ~600 million, and maybe a few hundred people in Europe convinced they’d become societally enlightened and the rest would soon think as they did. 2019: 7 billion, and maybe a few hundred thousand believe something of the sort.
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Somehow the entire world got along without “enlightenment” truth narratives until around 1700, and almost the entire world even after that. I’m not even sure it had much impact on the scientific/industrial revolutions. Much of the causation went in the other direction.
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Like read stories of Leibniz and Spinoza and both drawing scientific+philosophical inspiration from Galileo. Leibniz did calculus and other technical things. And philosophy. Spinoza was a lens grinder. And did philosophy. Chicken-egg perhaps but I think science egg came first.
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Ironically if you look at where the main trunk of enlightenment thinking ended, it landed on roughly a justification of postmodern divergence. Hume era argument that you can’t justifiably and rigorously believe very much with the kind of confidence modern convergentists crave.
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“Truth” is primarily a set of habits of thought that work for you, and a leap of faith concerning their validity as a mode of inquiry. This would be a very Humean view I think.
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Replying to
Even tho I’m not a fan of calling it “postmodernism”, I’m really liking this thread and the forking metaphor. What’s missing for me is how “PoMo” is not only a methodology of divergence, but also tools that enable critiques of Enlightenment & other epistemes.
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Not sure about 9/11, but yes, there’s a kind of ghostly foundation in “PoMo”: on what does it stand to make its critiques? Prob better to think of it as a methodology rather than a cosmology or ideology.
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It stands on accounts of the thing itself afaict. Greatest strength and greatest weakness at once. Treating maps as territories and looking at the phenomenology of mapmaking.
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