Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 09:10:05 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: Reason & Metanarratives




On Wed, 10 Dec 1997, jon roffe wrote:
> Or, for another perspective, science as a particular view of the world 
> is profoundly based in the modernist epistemology, and is built into the 
> power/knowledge structures in our societies.

I agree entirely--this is very Nietzschean, in seeing perspectives as
varying ways of viewing the world, varying ways of positing values, each
adopted or rejected not on bases of "truthfulness" somehow latent or
buried beneath the text--waiting to be found or retrieved--but on account
of their power, their desirability. There is no way to legislate or
systematize this so that it stands outside of temporality or out of a
specific cultural context, out of a collection of practises, of
linguistic habits.  
I think that one has to "forget" this in order to philosophize, and I'm
being pejorative when I use the term "philosophize"--one has to forget the
provisionality of one's assertions in order to make a claim to "truth"
without quotation marks.
 
> I think that we need to reject the vocabulary we have inherited here 
> from the history of philosophy, and look for new ways of dividing up the 
> world.  As Wittgenstein says, philosophy should be about getting around 
> the problems inherent in our ways of describing the world.

It is the way the question is asked, how to ask new questions in new
ways, which Wittgenstein was very good at doing.  And Derrida too.

Best regards
Matt