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December 7, 2009
In Postmodernism and Rationality Rodolphe Gasché says that he wishes to:
claim that the postmodern interrogation of reason which has triggered a renewed interest in the question of rationality in philosophy is not exhausted by the rediscovery of the irrational, whether as a boundary problem of rational cognition or as what puts the foundation of Western culture into question. From the Greek mathematicians who discovered the irrational as a limit of rationality, through the moment when the irrational becomes a philosophical problem properly ---that is, when philosophy puts the subject in the very center of its concerns (and the irrational becomes thus determined as a region inaccessible to human cognition)----the irrational has been the unavoidable counter concept of rationality.'
He adds that It is precisely this conceptual machinery that is put into question in certain of the works that are labeled postmodern. Postmodernity is not a farewell to reason altogether, but a shift toward the reason of the plural, the indeterminate, the random, the irregular, the formless, the paralogistic. Or the nonnecessary and nonessential.
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I must protest.
I suspect that the above could have been said far more clearly in far less words. But if this had been so, it would not have appeared so 'profound.' Most of what postmodernists say could be captured in a picture by a 5 year old, yet their slippery language muddies the water so that they sound deep. Try to see through to what this guy is saying. You'll find something completely shallow. What will boggle you is why he bothered to say it at all. Perhaps, postmodern writings intrigue because we assume that the effort put into them must mean they have some value - a very obscure, 'secret' value - which excites our curiosity.
...Then you kick yourself when you realise that that assumption made an ass out of u and umption.