>  ___ Sarah ___
>| But post-modern philosophy is positioned not only against the
>| idea of absolute truth, but also against the possibility of
>| truth itself...
>  ___
>
>I don't think that is quite accurate.  I'd say it is against the
>possibility of a kind of truth as referencing "things-in-themselves."

I always push the idea to my students who question postmodernism as a purely
skeptical and pessimistic form of theory that denies truth that this is a
gloss and that we should attempt to problematize the gloss...
so,

just to add to clark's beginning...I think that postmodernism--better in
this case, poststructuralism--claims that truth is constructed; therefore,
there is truth constructed or there exists representations of reality called
truth.  Nevertheless Truth--as a journey or dialogue or with a capital
T--whereas it's a thing itself out of vogue, Truth has not vanished.  It has
always been an ideal representation based upon a subject's meditation in the
world.  One merely need look towards postenlightenment poetry--Donne--to the
Romantics--Wordsworth and Keats.  I mean, the rejection of classical and
neoclassical thought is/has been present in history since before the
renaissance--read Nicolas de Cusa's essays on Ignorance and Darkness.  We
credit Descartes with changing things, but his meditations were merely a
more publicized and acceptable form/precursor...a grotesque spectacle...ball
of wax...where do you go from the cogito but to a place where everything is
a construct...from I think, I am to I think the truth.

see also:
The Germans romantics--Holderlin.
If we look at film: Herzog's characters all battle with
Truth/Recognition/Nature...

Marx: The move from "class in itself" to "class for itself"; whether or not
Marxism is a viable practice, we still think about the difference between
having true or false conscious.

Postmodernism is a recognition that there are symptoms and states of
beings...we point to things rather than see things...reference rather than
create...structure rather than build...but it isn't the end of
phenomenology, that's for sure.

uhmmm, hey...I just reminded myself...If anyone cares to share some
bibliographical work with me concerning Citizen Kane please send it my way,
off-list.  I am taking my comps...and am reading lots of things, of course.

I am particularly interested in anything about gender.

Thanks!

Gary Norris


That kind of
>Kantian project that really goes back to Plato is denied.  However many
>postmodernists still speak of truth.  However it is a truth within context
>-
>perspectivism rather than "objectivity."
>
>Deconstruction certainly rejected both the correspondence and coherence
>theories of truth.  However I'm not sure that we ought to say it has
>rejected truth.
>
>
>
>-- Clark Goble --- [log in to unmask] -----------------------------


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