In Progress

Where else would I discover that even though the Hegelian Dialectical model of philosphical inquiry, where a thesis is proposed, followed by an antithesis and resolved in a synthesis, was named after Hegel, he never employed it himself and in fact denounced it?

It’s a model we’ve seen time and again, where a particular school of philosophy holds sway, until another one rises to challenge it and the first falls into disfavor. Then a third one comes along to say, oh the first one wasn’t so bad after all, let’s just pull these bits from it.

Post-modernism is in some ways, the rejection of that entirely. Postmodernism says, we’re not gonna do this anymore, it’s all played out. We’re done with assertions of what is, we’re only gonna talk about what isn’t. And now it’s been 50 years since postmodernism stormed the world stage, and we’re still talking about postmodern this and postmodern that. Powerful. And is now itself played out, we know that. But we’re all afraid to create new schools, new labels, for fear of the old cycle of rejection, disavowal, moldering in obscurity.

My new model for reasoning works something like this. We’ve got a great toolkit of theoretical frameworks. We should keep adding to it, but it’s also the age of remixing, let’s do some of that. We throw all our theories up as variables, start thinking on modulation. Using vocabulary like frequency, pitch, intensity, we can combine them in new ways that lead to unexpected results.

Not that this is new at all, really. This is what computer modeling does already, so I guess programmers are the current innovators in the arena of reasoning. Well, I enjoyed the ramble, hope those of you who stuck around for the anticlimactic conclusion aren’t too annoyed.

Cheers!

Posted on November 19th, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Uncategorized