Manchild youtuber watched Peterson video

>Manchild youtuber watched Peterson video
>becomes enlightened
>suddenly knows everything about post-modernism
youtube.com/watch?v=PotnyAxuO2Q

is he wrong Veeky Forums

I find this equation of postermodern philosophers = postmodern psyche/spirit or even "Geist, if you want, always problematic
blaming the problems of postmoderinity (the sort, that peterson raves on about) on the postmodern philosophers, is as idiotic, as blaming "cultural dissolution" on the Frankfurt school (i.e. "muh culutral marxism /pol/ tards), and really giving to much credit to philosophy, as if it could singlehandedly alter our conception of reality
These things come in huge parts from large social/cultural/technological and economic factors like rise of mass media, social mobility, secularistion etc., which have a lot more influence on "postmodernists" as vice versa

He's wrong about the social and economic causes of the Enlightenment. They were more political and intellectual. He's pushing the Industrial Revolution back like hundreds of years, it seems like.

He's conflating Enlightenment thought with industrialisation and urbanisation which is pretty flimsy. The Enlightenment burned itself out and flipflopped into Romanticism, generations before the effects of industrialisation and the social question really kicked in.

He's conflating modernism too much with dialectic-of-enlightenment style rationalism, like it's Enlightenment 2.0, which is fairly wrong. In many ways modernism was more a result of expressive romantic ideas. The Enlightenment was what eroded the bases of tradition, but its vision of man was still more about "Enlightening," i.e., "Aufklarung," clearing away the accumulated dead weight of near-sighted dogmatism, authoritarian traditions, etc., that prevented people from being their truly free rational selves. When that refuse was cleared away, and only a disappointing void remained, romantic and expressivist ideas of self-creating and self-asserting over against nature stepped in. But these just as often took the form of mystical primeval nature-worship, or radical groundlessness and aesthetic dandyism and decadence, than hyper-rationalist technology/science worship. The uniting factor is the "Man as Self-Creating Hero, Knowing and Achieving his Own Destiny" vision of mankind, than specifically "logic and scientific endeavour" (3:40) by itself. A lot of modernism was anti-rationalist.

He's basically right about postmodernism. Postmodernism is a "decentering." It's taking faith, not just in science or rationalism, but in the ability of man to know himself, create himself, or even steer himself in the world. It's the death of "narrative," or metanarrative, of the ability to say "This is what history *is*, and therefore this is what we are, and therefore this is what will happen next and what we should do." Whenever we tried to do that, we ended up destroying half the planet. So it's a decentering of Eurocentrism, logocentrism, of any "ground" for action, because apparently no matter what ground you stand on, you apparently end up brutalising mental patients, holocausting Jews, creating an alienated meaningless existence for the entire planet, selling iPhones to retard proles while enslaving Chinese people to make them, etc.

For example, in talking about why postmodern rejections of science are problematic (around 7:30), he almost begs the question (argues circularly) by saying that they aren't "empiricist." Or at least he's ascribing that view to average joe types, who are still stuck on capitalist, Fordist scientism. The line of thought basically goes:
>Fine, I can understand being critical of science's results, sure. But even once we've critiqued science down to the ground, we need to empirically, scientifically deduce a new science, that's better and more sciencey and less critiquable.
Because people are so trained (postmodern concept of false consciousness or presuppositions) to think of "empirical" as synonymous with "logical" as synonymous with "objective" as synonymous with "what's really real" ... (etc.), they can't get out of the scientism box. They just want to reaffirm scientism.

The whole point of postmodernism, as he more or less accurately said a minute earlier, is to critique even the foundations of these presuppositions. Why should we "empirically" find our way back to anything? "So two and two make four; what the hell does that MEAN for me?"

And that's exactly why guys like Foucault come along, and do genealogical, historical analyses of these attitudes. It turns out, when you have endless uncritical faith in the narrative of "scientific empirical knowledge" (a groundless concept, as all are, when analysed to their grounds, unless you have religious faith in some ground), you will tend to do interesting things. Like reify certain assumptions about human nature, treat people in certain ways, over-engineer society. You will assume things MUST be a certain way, you will assume certain grounds and narratives exist objectively, and you will proceed from them. Science people will see a critique of science and go "OK, so science wasn't scientific enough?" without realizing that the problem is deeper than that, at the level of "being scientific enough" being synonymous with "how we should order our understanding of reality."

And those ideas didn't come about in the '60s entirely. The '60s is when they entered the mainstream and when the French really discovered them. The Germans had been wigging the fuck out about techno-nightmare worlds of endlessly managed drone people, living "orderly" but meaningless lives, since the Romantics. The French were still positivists and French republican nationalists before WW2 and decolonisation, still had faith in the narrative of the French Enlightenment being a manifest destiny to civilise the world and free everybody to live within republicanism. The shocks of WW2 and decolonisation are what caused them to shift into high gear of "fuck everything! Nothing means shit! Don't lump me in with those naive pre-war Frenchies who thought that things were good, I knew all along they were bad!" But the Germans had already been doing that since the Wilhelmine period at least.

>blaming the problems of postmoderinity (the sort, that peterson raves on about) on the postmodern philosophers, is as idiotic, as blaming "cultural dissolution" on the Frankfurt school (i.e. "muh culutral marxism /pol/ tards),

There are three sides to keep in mind here:

(1) The "cultural Marxist" philosophers, like the Frankfurt School, who were terrified of disenchanted modernity being a meaningless, alienated nightmare full of contented slave people, and who thought that capitalism would turn everything it touched into exactly this.

(2) The rich bourgeois fucking idiots who live in a capitalist nightmare society but don't mind it because they're from the capitalist class, the ones who benefit from being in a capitalist society, and who study "cultural Marxist" philosophers at university, and think that being a Marxist means writing articles for Buzzfeed and constantly whining about cis privilege while drinking $9 lattes and wearing sunglasses made by Chinese slaves.

(3) The /pol/ guys, who live in the disenchanted capitalist nightmare that the Frankfurt philosophers feared, who are experiencing exactly the alienation described by those philosophers, who understand that alienation at a primordial level because it's their entire way of life, and who generally aren't members of the self-contented bourgeois asshole class, who are in fact tired of rich superfluous bourgeois university cunts constantly telling them to wear different hats and adjust their meaningless Facebook profile picture to pretend they give a shit about meaningless bourgeois "I'm a good person! It's OK for me to own sunglasses made by slaves, because I changed my Facebook picture!!" LARPing.

(1) and (3) are right, at different levels, about the fact that (2) are worthless appendages of capitalism.

wtf i understand postmodernism now...

Spectacular posts, user(s).

wtf i love youtube comments now

Very good post. Agree on essentially all points.

this one really made me think

>Like reify certain assumptions about human nature
The problem isn't that postmodernists claim that we don't know enough about human nature to order our society around a particular understanding of it, but that human nature doesn't exist in the first place, which isn't true.

I hope you don't mind if I pepper your intelligent discussion with a bit of humour, anons?

>you will assume certain grounds and narratives exist objectively,
Like the notion that the foundational claims of a society are only there to perpetuate the ideas of a dominant group? That's an objective historical claim that postmodernists make.

I'm inclined to agree, and it realy is ironic, that alienated /pol/ers blame it on Ardono and Horkheimer, who wrote about the alienantion in modern capitalist society, my point was just that this,
fuck relativism, thanks Derrida & co!
or
fuck degeneracy, thanks Habermas & co!
reasoning is just retarded, they might be nice strawmen to push your agenda (esp. since most of Frankfurt school were jews) but have absolutley nothing to do with reality

>clearing away the accumulated dead weight of near-sighted dogmatism, authoritarian traditions, etc., that prevented people from being their truly free rational selves
pic related

>The /pol/ guys, who live in the disenchanted capitalist nightmare that the Frankfurt philosophers feared,
The alienation is the result of the deconstruction of the sources of meaning for these people. The postmodernist aren't just signaling the problem, they're perpetuating it. They perpetuate it by claiming that the foundations of the person's culture are just values made up by the dominant class, and that the axioms their ancestors have been living their lives by have been debunked. Capitalism only exploits the cultural vacuum, it doesn't create it.

If you comment on youtube videos more than once a month, you should be killed.

Bump

>a fucking furry crying about muh ebil postmodernism

These are truly the end times.

Ignoring biological imperatives (eating, shitting, fucking) what is human nature, then

Except it's very easy to observe how between the Enlightenment and Romantism (and beyond, really) there was a very systematic normatization and prosecution of cultures deemed "unofficial" (see linguistic prosecution of regional dialects all across Europe for the clearest example), and this sort of thing is much more capitalism / imperialism fault than anything else, you just don't realize it because you live in the US, which is the agent doing the colonizing these days.

I actually really enjoy watching these people vilify and rage against something they have less than a half formed idea about

Just because we're unable to define it using empirical methods doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, and that we can't get a close approximation of it by observing the human constants between district cultures.

All the while catering to denziens who watch the exact same shit as they do and all clap and like for approval.

Land was right The Cathedral has fallen, and the new masons are rebuilding with megablockd

>implying that there is anything to know about postmodernism except the fact that it is gay af

It's funny because Trump is the most postmodernist president that we've had yet

You just know these fucking pseuds are going to condescendingly brag to what little friends they have of their "vast" knowledge of postmodernism.

to be fair, this wouldn't happen if 2nd and 3rd generation graduates influenced by postmodernists didn't invade the media and government and push it down our throats

i mean all fascist regimes always had some kind of boogieman if cultural marxism (or judeo-masonic conspiracy, or whatever it was before that), but the existance of that boogieman doesn't mean that some kind of toxic leftist ideas have not contaminated the public discourse and will be challenged for it.

now this doesn't have much to do with primary postmodern sources, it has to do with the ideological constructs that "trickle down" from there.

is postmodernism too much of a meme to be descriptive of anything? what's a best name to describe intergalactic intersectional bullshit?

neo-reactionary stuff is all post-modern
marxism is modernist