/pt/ – Petrarchan

>>6103 I can't

>>6110 I know the name, but not anything about him. What's the rundown on non philosophy?

>>6111 Ideology and large social narratives are alive and well. 'Human rights', rationalism, progressivism, tech-optimism, liberalism, environmentalism and even postmodernism itself are just some of the grand narratives that rule over the minds of nearly every Westerner.

>>6111 >But what is increasingly clear is that a significant part of humanity outright rejects this and that societies who embrace it are becoming increasingly unstable Do you mean this about the societies which are rejecting "postmodernism" as "breakdown of large social narratives"? Or that societies are accepting the breakdown of large social narratives, which is resulting in their degeneration? >The next great philosophical development will be how humanity reconciles the death of ideology with a world which has become dangerous. Ok, I somewhat agree. 20th century style political narratives are dropping dead, e.g. United Nations style benevolence, world revolution Soviet bloc idealists, etc. But how is the world becoming "more" dangerous?

>>6111 >a Nietzschean society is unthinkable true. but a society RULED by Nietzscheans is perfectly thinkable.

>>6130 Who is? >>6120 I agree with you over the anon you're replying to. It's hard to imagine to talking to any average Westerner without having the common acceptance of liberalism. >>6129 >Postmodernism is just an intellectual way to deal with what happens when you throw together a lot of cultures because of e.g. telecommunications, airplane transport, immigration, globalised economy, etc. What do you think postmodernism is?

>>6130 Who is? >>6120 I agree with you over the anon you're replying to. It's hard to imagine to talking to any average Westerner without having the common acceptance of liberalism. >>6129 >Postmodernism is just an intellectual way to deal with what happens when you throw together a lot of cultures because of e.g. telecommunications, airplane transport, immigration, globalised economy, etc. What do you think postmodernism is?

>>6130 Who is? >>6120 I agree with you over the anon you're replying to. It's hard to imagine to talking to any average Westerner without having the common acceptance of liberalism. >>6129 >Postmodernism is just an intellectual way to deal with what happens when you throw together a lot of cultures because of e.g. telecommunications, airplane transport, immigration, globalised economy, etc. What do you think postmodernism is?

>>6268 >What do you think postmodernism is? It's well-known that it resists easy definition, but it's reasonable to say it is a rejection of meta-narratives. But I am talking about it as an historically-situated philosophical movement so it is not necessary to define it too precisely. Hence proto-postmodernists like Feyerabend don't need to figure in my discussion. I am seeking to understand why postmodernism became popular when it did, rather than sinking into obscurity. I have already said that the quality or thoughtfulness of a group of ideas has nothing to do with the acceptance of the ideas. I am also interested in why postmodernism often has hard political edges even though, given the highly abstract level on which it has tended to operate, it could be arrogated to many non-leftist ideologies (some people have done this, like Dugin--not that I agree with him, I think he's a hack--but it has been very rare. My theory is that postmodernism would have no social role if we lived in the 1500s, even a secular, post-Christian 1500s, because back then people lived in small groupings and there was basically only one culture you were exposed to your entire life: your own. There was no sense of alienation. Everything can be taken for granted.

>>6277 What I am saying is not a tautology. I am pointing out that postmodern philosophy has been pushed by the élite because it serves élite goals. Postmodernism is a way of coping with what happens when different cultures are smashed together by, e.g., airplanes and TV. Everybody knows that life was suffused with religion back then, in a way which is very difficult to recover now. This is no secret or great discovery of yours.

>>6295 No, H Bosch (to my mind, a genius) was Christian and had no need to 'move beyond' metanarratives nor construct 'ontologies of peace'/'rhetorics of non-violence', because Christianity, in all its variegated forms, and all the variety it deployed, held the fullness of Truth. The only real work presaging postmodernism was Tristram Shandy but, like I said, I'm discussing postmodern philosophy in terms of how it serves élite purpose at a particular and historically-situated moment, rather than in terms of what its exponents claim to mean when they say what they say. >vague material circumstances The people of old lived generally in small villages of less than a hundred, and would never have seen or heard of a foreigner; foreigners being only relevant as occasional enemies and therefore being fundamentally the same, be they Spanish, French or Dutch... Our society has changed more in the past 80 years than it did from 2000 BC to 1800 AD. Divorce--new reproductive technologies--transport--the plane--media--"mass society" broadly

>>6296 lol

>>6301 >The people of old lived generally in small villages of less than a hundred, and would never have seen or heard of a foreigner This is precisely what I am trying to counter... We're going around in circles here. You really think that, let's say, Europeans in 1500 would never ever have "seen or heard of a foreigner". But they would have been totally steeped in the religious culture around them which talks about events happening in the Middle East. And people considered everyone "foreign" that could be 50 kilometers away, not in the broad nationstate paradigm you have today, where an Englishman would not have met a "Spanish, French, Dutch" person, but they might have met a Scotsman, Welshman or Irishman who seemed wildly foreign, spoke an unintelligible language. They might have talked to a trader or someone who did go to other lands or just fucking made up stories about it because that's how people are Your "only in occasional conflict" oversimplification of the rich tapestry of humanity is so LAZY! Especially since you just had to land on the 16th century. I am telling you that your modernist perception of how backwards the past was is fallacious, the only thing that has "dramatically increased" is the physical configurations of the technology that we use. I always get the sense that people who bang on about us being so special and advanced that only we could "get" postmodernism do this because they hate talking about history. They hate remembering all the crap and it's easier to sum it up this way instead of beholding the stupidity and blessedness that is the human race..

>>6326 What I said is true, a European back in 1500 (for instance) would, in general, live his whole life and die without ever seeing a foreigner. Artistic projections of foreigners in poetry or the Bible do not count, because that is quite different from having one living across the road from you. There was essentially one worldview you could have back then, living as an ordinary, uneducated person, which was a broadly Christian one. There was no need to accommodate the Other, or even understand him. Mostly he was a thing to be feared. Also, people in Britain (for example) were already aware of themselves as a nation in medieval periods. There is no comparing the sense of alienation from talking to someone from a village 50 kms away to what we have now. Modern world = babel of cultures. Postmodernism was promoted as a way to negotiate difference. > the only thing that has "dramatically increased" is the physical configurations of the technology that we use. The only thing that dictates the direction of society is mass and scale, and technology fundamentally alters both of these, so technology must be fundamental.

>>6326 Just adding onto this that this guy picked probably the worst time period for this point. Early modern armies were entirely made up of mercenaries from ethnic groups all across Europe, with Catholic and Protestant and troops of other denominations fighting alongside each other. It was the beginning of internationalism and also the beginning of the age of print, so the religious and cultural milieu was so incredibly diverse it's hard to overstate the amount of ideas that a literate urban dweller in Europe would have been exposed too.

>>6337 For clarity, I am not arguing that we should go back to the era I describe here, but it did have the advantage that it didn't have this alienation (a term I find too simple but one for which I can find no replacement). Suicide rates nearly nil too.

>>6337 >What I said is true, a European back in 1500 (for instance) would, in general, live his whole life and die without ever seeing a foreigner. No, this is just not true for a variety of reasons. 1) Foreign contact at that time, in the way that we understand "foreign contact", was quite common, especially if you were anywhere close to a node on a popular trading route. 2) "Foreigner" would have meant something a lot closer than what we think of today. To a 16th century Englishman, a Scot or an Irishman would be "foreign", a totally different culture and under a totally different ruler and likely a different confession. But today, a Scot, Englishman, and Northern Irish would broadly be understood as a common culture, certainly in comparison to new immigrants. 3) The people that would fit your description, never seeing a foreigner in their life, would be like the poorest of peasants who, for the purpose of this discussion, are not the ones involved in philosophical ideas.

>>6385 I picked 1500 deliberately. You have to remember the limited impact of war at that time because of limited state capacity. I also specifically mentioned villages; naturally urbanites are more worldly. Moreover, what goes on in armies is only of limited relevance because military matters represented an exception and was not understood to be the norm. Moreover, Catholics and Protestants are really easily comprehensible to each other because, to a great extent, what doctrines they had which were novel they formed in reaction to one another. Watching what Luther wrote and how he changed his mind, it seems obvious to me that much of what he was saying was, especially later on, designed to provoke the Catholic Church, and doing this necessarily involves some apprehension of the other. This is an apprehension that really could not have existed between followers of Buddhist doctrine and of Christianity. I cannot really understand how you can argue that with the advent of transportation, television and latterly the internet the world is not more connected than ever, and that there will be necessarily more cultural friction. This is not by any means a controversial statement, I see it as basically a truism. My idea is that postmodern philosophy is essentially a quietistic attempt at negotiating difference in this new landscape, and has been promoted by élite groups for precisely this purpose. That is what is interesting here. 3) is wrong, the poor have a 'doctrine' like everyone else even if it may not take a sophisticated form. But I am not talking about postmodernism retroprojected into the past, but rather why postmodernism became necessary when it did. >>6386 Your entire point essentially consists in defining foreigner as a relative term and therefore saying that people from Worcester circa 1500 would have understood people from Ireland as as foreign to them as someone from a major city today might understand someone from a small village in say Pakistan or Bhutan or Haiti. We can already see this cannot be true. Foreignness is an objective fact based on lack of common habitus (in a sociological sense). >>6389 see earlier, I say >I am not arguing that we should go back to the era I describe here This isn't really to do with foreigners but cultural alienation generally. If I were someone living in a non-Western country, I might not be too happy about having my country culturally colonized by the West

>>6385 I picked 1500 deliberately. You have to remember the limited impact of war at that time because of limited state capacity. I also specifically mentioned villages; naturally urbanites are more worldly. Moreover, what goes on in armies is only of limited relevance because military matters represented an exception and was not understood to be the norm. Moreover, Catholics and Protestants are really easily comprehensible to each other because, to a great extent, what doctrines they had which were novel they formed in reaction to one another. Watching what Luther wrote and how he changed his mind, it seems obvious to me that much of what he was saying was, especially later on, designed to provoke the Catholic Church, and doing this necessarily involves some apprehension of the other. This is an apprehension that really could not have existed between followers of Buddhist doctrine and of Christianity. I cannot really understand how you can argue that with the advent of transportation, television and latterly the internet the world is not more connected than ever, and that there will be necessarily more cultural friction. This is not by any means a controversial statement, I see it as basically a truism. My idea is that postmodern philosophy is essentially a quietistic attempt at negotiating difference in this new landscape, and has been promoted by élite groups for precisely this purpose. That is what is interesting here. 3) is wrong, the poor have a 'doctrine' like everyone else even if it may not take a sophisticated form. But I am not talking about postmodernism retroprojected into the past, but rather why postmodernism became necessary when it did. >>6386 Your entire point essentially consists in defining foreigner as a relative term and therefore saying that people from Worcester circa 1500 would have understood people from Ireland as as foreign to them as someone from a major city today might understand someone from a small village in say Pakistan or Bhutan or Haiti. We can already see this cannot be true. Foreignness is an objective fact based on lack of common habitus (in a sociological sense). >>6389 see earlier, I say >I am not arguing that we should go back to the era I describe here This isn't really to do with foreigners but cultural alienation generally. If I were someone living in a non-Western country, I might not be too happy about having my country culturally colonized by the West

>>6385 I picked 1500 deliberately. You have to remember the limited impact of war at that time because of limited state capacity. I also specifically mentioned villages; naturally urbanites are more worldly. Moreover, what goes on in armies is only of limited relevance because military matters represented an exception and was not understood to be the norm. Moreover, Catholics and Protestants are really easily comprehensible to each other because, to a great extent, what doctrines they had which were novel they formed in reaction to one another. Watching what Luther wrote and how he changed his mind, it seems obvious to me that much of what he was saying was, especially later on, designed to provoke the Catholic Church, and doing this necessarily involves some apprehension of the other. This is an apprehension that really could not have existed between followers of Buddhist doctrine and of Christianity. I cannot really understand how you can argue that with the advent of transportation, television and latterly the internet the world is not more connected than ever, and that there will be necessarily more cultural friction. This is not by any means a controversial statement, I see it as basically a truism. My idea is that postmodern philosophy is essentially a quietistic attempt at negotiating difference in this new landscape, and has been promoted by élite groups for precisely this purpose. That is what is interesting here. 3) is wrong, the poor have a 'doctrine' like everyone else even if it may not take a sophisticated form. But I am not talking about postmodernism retroprojected into the past, but rather why postmodernism became necessary when it did. >>6386 Your entire point essentially consists in defining foreigner as a relative term and therefore saying that people from Worcester circa 1500 would have understood people from Ireland as as foreign to them as someone from a major city today might understand someone from a small village in say Pakistan or Bhutan or Haiti. We can already see this cannot be true. Foreignness is an objective fact based on lack of common habitus (in a sociological sense). >>6389 see earlier, I say >I am not arguing that we should go back to the era I describe here This isn't really to do with foreigners but cultural alienation generally. If I were someone living in a non-Western country, I might not be too happy about having my country culturally colonized by the West

>>6390 You keep doing this rhetorical two step where you start with a wildly historically inaccurate claim like "the average European in 1500 would live their entire life without seeing a foreigner" and then when pushed back on it you go to "well all I'm saying is the modern world is more connected than ever!" Those are two different claims, the latter of which I don't have a problem with, but the former is just plainly wrong. You are also using foreigner as a relative term here, it's just that you have decided that all pre-modern Europeans are just "European" or one consistent culture group, so that a Breton and a Neapolitan would not refer to each other as "foreign". That's arbitrary because there are clearly cultural, linguistic, and religious differences that would mark those two as different and therefor foreign. Sure, a Neapolitan might be less foreign to a Breton than a Chinese person, but that relative difference doesn't erase the foreignness from the Breton and Neapolitan. If it did, then where's the line? Is there a geographic line for foreigner? Is it just about "Christendom"? Is it skin color? Is it language? All of these add into some mixture of difference that makes your initial statement completely absurd and historically misinformed.

>>6394 You are so mixed up, it's hard to know where to start. Is it really your view that with modern life and all the dislocation from traditional mores which accompanies it, that nonetheless there is no more cultural friction than in the past? It is so implausible it's absurd. >Like people from Pakistan or Bhutan live in huts or something and don't eat convenient food and scroll their phones like every other person on this planet in year 2025. I specified rural Bhutan, rural Pakistan, etc. Of course, cities are quite westernized and we all know that even the far reaches of the countryside are slowly being encroached upon by technology more and more so, and thus being subject to globalization. Re 'narcissistic injury', this is yet another instance of attacking the man rather than the idea. Needless to say, I don't think the West should be especially proud of cultural developments like watching brainrot content on TikTok or ordering Uber Eats, so I derive no pleasure from the fact it exists here in great amounts and only in smaller amounts in the less-developed countries. >Well, because you'd still be a right winger, but only in another country Surely this is not what you actually think.

>>6413 In 1500, Europe was in the main rural and localized, with most people living in small communities. Travel was difficult, often dangerous, and most people had limited exposure to cultures outside their own. Though there were urban centers and trade routes which facilitated contact with foreigners, these were just not representative of the ordinary man's experience. There are very extensive demographic studies relating to England which show how most people lived and died within the same area, having little opportunity for travel. The idea of the nation was nascent, I feel confident in saying most people would have felt their primary attachment to their local community or general region. >You are also using foreigner as a relative term here, it's just that you have decided that all pre-modern Europeans are just "European" or one consistent culture group, so that a Breton and a Neapolitan would not refer to each other as "foreign". That's arbitrary because there are clearly cultural, linguistic, and religious differences that would mark those two as different and therefor foreign. We all understand this, there is no need to explain it. It is obvious that a Neapolitan is different from a Breton. >Sure, a Neapolitan might be less foreign to a Breton than a Chinese person, but that relative difference doesn't erase the foreignness from the Breton and Neapolitan. Well, foreign-ness is not a binary matter of foreign/not-foreign. There is no line and no line need be drawn, it is a matter of degree and of intensity. It remains true that past generations were exposed to less "strangeness" than later generations are. Is this actually being denied?

>>6415 >Well, foreign-ness is not a binary matter of foreign/not-foreign. There is no line and no line need be drawn, it is a matter of degree and of intensity. Yes, thank you, that is exactly what everyone here is trying to tell you. Again, you are right that the human experience is far more connected, global, multicultural, etc. than 1500. But that does not mean that multiculturism and "internationalism" (no nations yet, so maybe globalism is better) was marginal to the point of non-relevance to philosophical or theological thinking of the time. This was THE time period where old narratives about the structure of the world, and humanity's place in it or where our salvation lies, began to break down. A new world was literally being discovered, with new ways of thinking starting to break into mainstream European consciousness. Not to mention the total disintegration of a common understanding of Christianity that led to apocalyptic bloodletting of that "one culture". Millenarianism and heresy were prolific, and new ways of thought, even new ways of seeing were appearing everywhere and humanity was both marginalized and dignified by science and philosophy at the same time. I just fundamentally don't understand how you can look at this period of time and not see any similarity between the forces that led to post-modernism in the 20th century. You can draw your line at one specific type of European villager, who would have never encountered, say, a pilgrim, much less gone to a popular market or been enlisted into an army. But that ignores the large and growing population of literate urbanites and aristocracy that were the sponsors and creators of all the new philosophy and art and lifestyle that completely flies in the face of your statement. And even if your point is that the lowliest European peasants who would have never once left their lot are exposed to less strangeness than the lowliest modern "peasant" that has always lived in their same hometown, I would still argue that those peasants would probably tell you of their own "strange" experiences that would sound rather similar to stories and experiences of today's "peasants". The more things change, the more they stay the same.

>>7069 It makes a lot of sense when you remember that academic humanities from like 1920 forward have all advanced on the terms and the timelines of young generations performatively leapfrogging earlier gens, usually by grabbing some new tool or technique just in time to shove some shit out and get tenure. The only problem with this system is that (as in art) it has prioritized conceptual gimmicks at the loss of serious appreciation and study of past masters. The foundations of a typical scholar today are quite weak. Nobody has any classical languages. Nobody does essential bibliographic groundwork. Nobody in a historicist field reads any scholarship from 20, 50, 100 years ago unless it's been canonized on exam reading lists (and even then no one is reading their exam lists).

There's resonance between >>7071 and >>7088