The world is my representation...
But the values of postmodernists, excepting a sage few like Burroughs, have been liberal, and most of the points Justin S. listed are classic liberal dogma. New interpretation, same content. Hmmm.
That's really not what I meant at all. I am rather skeptical of Idealism. I try to offer a phenomenologic grounding for postmodernism. If anyone cares, I'll try to explain the problems of Idealism vs. Phenomenology by way of a short summary/direct paraphrase of the preface to M.P.'s Phenomenology of Perception. It's also quite applicable to Cythraul's arguments here.
What is phenomenology?
Phenomenology is the study of essences and the attempt to define them. It is a ‘transcendental’ philosophy in that it considers the fundamental nature of thought and being, but it is a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there’ before reflection begins. This perspective, this ‘facticity,’ is taken as the position from which to conduct philosophical enquiry into how contact is established with the world.
Phenomenology attempts to return to the ‘essence’ of our experiences as they are, without recourse to the causal explanations offered by scientific objectivism, sociology or history. It offers an account of space, time and existence as they are lived.
Phenomenology and Science
Phenomenology is from the start a rejection of science. One cannot ‘step outside’ of consciousness and argue from an objective viewpoint. I am not an object for biological investigation, existing in coordinates of objective space. ‘All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view.’ Science is the ‘second-order’ expression of this particular point of view, this experience. If we wish to understand science properly, we must return to the primary, lived experience that underpins it.
Science offers an explanation of the lived world but in returning to the
living (as a verb) of that world we find that ‘I am not a ‘living creature’ nor even a ‘man,’ nor again even ‘a consciousness’ endowed with the characteristics biology might ascribe to them. I am the absolute source.’ There are no ‘befores,’ no antecedents to my existence. My existence is not granted by the physical and social conditions of my environment. Rather it reaches out to sustain them. I alone bring into being the world in which I live. If I were not there to scan it with my gaze, the ‘horizon’ would not exist, since its distance from me is not one of its properties.
The scientific viewpoint, holding my existence as a moment in the world’s, is therefore naïve and dishonest, ‘as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.’
The distinction between Phenomenology and Idealism.
If the demand for a description of phenomenological experience excludes the procedure of scientific explanation, it also excludes that of analytical reflection. Descartes and Kant detached ‘I’ as a subject, proposing that nothing could have existence unless the ‘I’ was aware of itself existing in the act of apprehending it. That is, certainty of my existence is the condition upon which there is anything at all: The world exists because I exist to relate it. However, because analytical reflection retreats away from direct experience back towards a subject that is the condition of this experience, it ceases to give an account of direct experience and instead offers a detached reconstruction.
Analysis is an act: a reflection upon unreflective experience. The unreflective experience is ‘already there.’ The world is already there before analytical reflection. ‘The real has to be described, not constructed or formed.’ Surprising things happen without waiting for our judgment, and likewise our most plausible figments of imagination are rejected in the real. Reflection is aware of its act of reflecting. Perception is not an act; it is simply ‘the background from which all acts stand out.’ Analysis is founded upon already existing direct experience. One might talk about the direct experience of analysing – that is, what it is like to analyse – but there is no detached ‘realm of truth’ in the ‘inner man’ which can exclude itself from the experience of being in the world. Indeed, there is no inner man. Man is in the world and only through direct experience of being in the world does he know himself. Idealism and science are built upon a phenomenological foundation. That they do not credit this is their error.
Phenomenology attempts to return to the essence of experience as it is lived. That realm from which scientific and Idealistic abstraction are attempted.
***
I am very interested in postmodernism that attempts to disclose the ontology of the phenomenological field through poetics. Prime examples of this are Gravity's Rainbow, Finnegans Wake and Nadja. Postmodernism and Surrealism reveal Being in a more complete fashion that realism. They are vital, as opposed to didactic. They liberate language from its confused fixity of onticality. Futhermore, postmodernism liberates thought from the productionist metaphysics that
dispose things as fuel for power (money, sex, destructive potential) simply for its own sake.
This is why 'word-play' is always more essential than linear plot and why, I suspect, my literary tastes differ from yours.
