socratic modernism
A series of disconnected thoughts as possible source material for a future project.
- The postmodern turn has been described as the rhetorical turn in critical and cultural theory.
- Socrates, as we know, was opposed to rhetoric.
- Although post-modernism is not defined via opposition to modernism (that is, pomo is understood as intensification of modernism, not its antithesis or undoing … or even, really, its successor per se), I wonder whether there can be drawn some analogy like the following: Socrates:rhetoric::modernism:postmodernism?
- If Socrates/Plato inaugurates a certain narrative of Western philosophy that culminates/is apotheosized by the Enlightenment and modernism, how does that tradition stand in relation to an (assumed) more sophistic postmodernism?
- More pressingly, if we are (as has been rumored) post-postmodern (add as many “posts-” as you see fit), does that mean we are similarly post-rhetoric? What would it even mean to be post-rhetorical?
- If we are post-rhetoric (whatever that comes to mean), what resources are left to the liberal tradition? A tradition based on pluralism, reason, and argument would thus seem to be likewise exhausted by a post-rhetorical turn.
I’m open to any comments as these ideas, nebulous as they are, begin to take shape.
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would that make us rhetro-modern? (ouch….)