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| Are we seeing dawn or nightfall? |
N.B. Today is a day of remembrance. On 6 January 2021 the U.S. Capitol was sacked by native barbarians, a first. A year later, we must anticipate & respond to further attacks on democracy and the rule of law. I've not selected any special quotes for today, so, as usual, the selection will be a more or less random selection from my past reading. However, in the near future, I do intend to post some reflections about the state of our nation.
Reductionism envisages a universe of things – and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with. That is because what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; ‘things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions. I have nothing against things, provided we don’t see them as primary.
[W]e must also be prepared to find that, as Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not. This is itself a version of the realisation that what applies at the local level does not necessarily apply in the same way at the global level.
Seeming—the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived.
Since the 1960s modernity has had to contend increasingly with a new cultural opponent. Within the philosophy of developmental politics, this third major worldview is most frequently called “postmodernism,” although other terms such as the “cultural creatives” or the “green meme” are also sometimes used. Even though the term “postmodern” is itself a battleground of meaning, this word is very useful (and worth fighting for) because it well describes the modernist worldview’s cultural successor. Modernist critics of postmodernism attempt to define it narrowly by equating it with the critical theory of philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, for instance, characterizes postmodernism as “cultural Marxism.” From Peterson’s perspective, postmodernism is not a new worldview but merely a virulent ideology that has hijacked academia.
Yet while academic critical theory is certainly a feature of postmodern culture, it is only a relatively small part of this larger worldview, and not all postmodernists agree with its tenets. As with modernism and traditionalism, the worldview of postmodernism is not a monolithic belief system. It is a cultural structure of progressive values that contains its own internal contradictions and debates. But as will become increasingly apparent as our discussion unfolds, postmodernism must be recognized, not merely as a critical branch of academia, but as a third major worldview in its own right.
Along the way . . . politicians and other public figures learned how easily they could manipulate journalistic two-sidedness to spread misinformation.
The Constitution of Knowledge builds reputational credibility over decades; cancel culture demolishes it overnight.
Historians do not proceed by reference to testimony, but by putting testimony to the test.
Like trial lawyers.
And the sun is also a god, Apollo, or Apollo Helios, whose name, Plotinus and others tell us, is a-pollo, or not-manyness, the god of light and life, of the sun, of prophecy, of truth. We experience the god within us as intelligible, that is, as reality perceptible by us; and this reality is experienced as the overwhelming illumination of light and the warmth and illumination of truth itself. It is also beautiful, even if its beauty is also terrible in its transcendent indifference and blasting light.
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