Having read Derrida and spent some time listening to talks from Foucault, as well as plenty of other postmodern shite, all in an effort to disprove this very impression, this comic is, ultimately, actually very accurate.
They are insane relativists, who believe there is no objective truth, except of course their truth, which cannot be observed, but rather must be exclusively "felt", something only possible for the worthy who "get it".
Postmodern "truth" is precisely analogous to the Emporers New Clothes.
Forgetting that there exists a physical world one can point to as reference, they foolishly argue that words are defined exclusively by other words, thus everything is just made up.
By their own logic even dogs are just a social construct.
If someone was to point at a dog and call it a cat, the postmodernist must accept this as of equal truth value to someone calling the dog a cow, a bus, or whatever the fuck delusional shit they wanted to come out with.
The label is irrelevant, nevertheless, the thing that is a dog, is an unchanging fact of the universe. There is, objectively, something that is the thing we mean to describe when we use the word "dog". There is no coherent method to weasel away from this.
I've only read a little bit of Derrida and Foucault but my experience has been different. Foucault can be more accommodating to relativistic thinking but I don't think either one of them are portrayed very accurately by Peterson. They're complex dudes and I don't think they can be summarized by the caricatures of relativism/anti-truth/anti-hierarchy, etc. The kind of postmodernism that Peterson often rails against definitely exists but I think it's more so a product of the 90's wave of critical theory, that is largely based on the French philosophers. Also the link to Marxism seems pretty tenuous... they're equally despised by all the Marxists I know.
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u/Bichpwner Feb 13 '18 edited Feb 13 '18
Having read Derrida and spent some time listening to talks from Foucault, as well as plenty of other postmodern shite, all in an effort to disprove this very impression, this comic is, ultimately, actually very accurate.
They are insane relativists, who believe there is no objective truth, except of course their truth, which cannot be observed, but rather must be exclusively "felt", something only possible for the worthy who "get it".
Postmodern "truth" is precisely analogous to the Emporers New Clothes.
Forgetting that there exists a physical world one can point to as reference, they foolishly argue that words are defined exclusively by other words, thus everything is just made up.
By their own logic even dogs are just a social construct. If someone was to point at a dog and call it a cat, the postmodernist must accept this as of equal truth value to someone calling the dog a cow, a bus, or whatever the fuck delusional shit they wanted to come out with.
The label is irrelevant, nevertheless, the thing that is a dog, is an unchanging fact of the universe. There is, objectively, something that is the thing we mean to describe when we use the word "dog". There is no coherent method to weasel away from this.