ยป OMG I Was Wrong, It Was Kant All Along!
I have half a Baccalaureate in Philosophy. But since it’s a joint degree, there were low breadth requirements. So I know my Aristotle, Berkeley and Carnap, but not a whole lot about continental philosophy.
Since graduation, I’ve been trying to fill in those blanks. I don’t feel that I have the interest nor the time build a foundation of orthodox modernism* and modernist critical theory, and then apply the dialectic method to learn postmodernism from that, so I read postmodern stuff without the prerequisites.
I’m particularly interested in postmodern identity theory. It has been said that late modern and postmodern philosophy is all “footnotes to Kant“. It turns out that Kant laid the foundation for what I consider postmodern identity:
Kant says that things have a phenomenal nature, which you can perceive, and a noumenal nature that is unknowable. Your noumenal self is basically your “soul” or core self, but you can only perceive your phenomenal self, which is socially constructed. Morality rests on the rational free will of noumenal selves.
But Nietzsche says that noumenal things are a meaningless fiction: since they have no properties, the world can be entirely explained in terms of phenomenal things. So we are all just bundles of constructed identities and moral relativism is king.
Flashback to your review of I’m Not There.
Don
7 Apr 09 at 1:30 pm
Oh wow, good memory (research?) Don! I guess what I’ve learned in the last 15 months is that modernist philosophers invented what I consider “postmodern identity”.
Perhaps one of the responses to your original criticism is that if we have a single internal mask, then Kant’s argument for morality doesn’t hold. But I’m not sure I care much about that.
Jared
7 Apr 09 at 2:47 pm
A little of both and not much of either. Because I’m narcissistic, I remembered my earlier response although not that it was in response to your review of I’m Not There. Then I looked it up and found your review again.
My original criticism doesn’t apply as fully to Kant’s theory of self as I hope it did to your earlier pins-without-the-pincushion description. My point was that if there is just one pin/persona that we use for our internal dialogue, then what’s the difference – just call that our “true self”/pincushion. That doesn’t seem to apply to Kant because he defines the “true self” as qualitatively different.
Although, like Nietzsche, I tend to disregard things that have no effect on the material world.
Don
7 Apr 09 at 5:17 pm
[...] “postmodern identity theory”. I’ve tried to define it a few times in blog posts (most recently) but I’m mostly just waving my hands around. Here’s another [...]
Modern Identity is a Fundamental Error | MentalPolyphonics
19 Jun 09 at 12:02 am