Pomoconniving

Another intimation of MacIntyro-Nietzschean fusionism, courtesy of Nicola Karras:

The only answer we have yet found to the argument—perhaps the only answer there can ever be—is in the value of the argument itself. Our telos can be found, if nowhere else, in continuing our search for it. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill the heart of a man. One must imagine the Humanities student happy.

The 'must' is doing most of the work here, followed by 'one', with 'happy' bringing up the rear. The ancient discovery that our telos is only ever recognizable as our search for it was replaced in modern times by the radically different idea that our telos is only recognizable as the history of our search. The postmodern task, if you'll permit me, is to heal this divide. We cannot and should not forget history. If we are stuck with virtue, we are also stuck with the world as the expressly historical world. But we must also recognize -- in a way to which religion, I think, is of great importance -- that fate and history are not identical, that fate is how the ancients lived in the present and history how moderns lived so awkwardly in the future.

The Christian bridge between these positions involved living wholly in the present in whole, constant anticipation of the future: a powerful premonition of the later credo (somehow both dumbed-down and tarted-up) "Become who you are." The key to striking what seems like this mystical balance between passivity and agency is the obsession of the late moderns; left postmoderns typically want it to emit from the immanent self, whereas, I reckon, right postmoderns want to note that the mystically immanent self actually has much less self there than their left opposite numbers desire; that occupying that space, not terribly mystically, are the external authorities of particular narratives, particular others, and -- are you with me? -- a particular God.

Comments

[JA]

James, you write: "The ancient discovery that our telos is only ever recognizable as our search for it was replaced in modern times by the radically different idea that our telos is only recognizable as the history of our search. The postmodern task, if you'll permit me, is to heal this divide."

I'm not sure an A-theoretical/B-theoretical ricercare "divide" is really all that significant. Not after special relativity; not after the idea of 3D reference frames (being in time) and 4D worldlines (totality of facts of a being in time).

The "divide" is simply a difference in resolution, a perspectival difference, with the latter (4D) being "higher" in the sense that the former (3D) is, by definition, subsumed into it. Higher still is the 5D perspective, which contains not just the reference frame of the searcher (observer) and the accreted facts of the search (worldline), but also the possible facts of the search and their probability of decoherence (from superposition). And so on.

On the latter, you could make a case that our "telos" is to maximize the non-abelian possibilities for the search by discovering what Dennett calls "isthmuses" of possibility-space. This telos would be oriented toward finding and using a maximizing method -- i.e., discovery algorithm or algorithms situated just so, to give us the best possibility-space with the best probability distributions of aletheia (unconcealment). That's not my case, but it's something you could say (aka a "preferred lottery" argument).

Overall, though, I'm not sure how helpful it is to fixate on "telos": purpose is either arbitrary (i.e., uninteresting), or it is elected from a perspective. To me, this latter idea is far more fertile than a dialectical pursuit of "telos" tout court.

[Robert C. Cheeks]

James,

Thanks for the, as always thoughtful comments, particularly on the dichotomy of "left," and "right" postmoderns. I wonder, however, if the problem isn't contained within the culturally required eradication of the "timeless?"
If a culture abrogates the "non-existent realities" are we not left with the phenomenon of the sensorium?
Give me a little hope by the thoughtfull application of the via affirmative, and I'm good!