How To Be A Postmodern Philosopher
How to think beyond grand narrative
There is but one philosopher who has referred to themselves as being a postmodern philosopher, Richard Rorty. All other philosophers have either not labeled themselves as postmodernists or rejected being postmodernists.
No matter Rorty’s claims about himself, we can reject him as a postmodern philosopher and realize that all other philosophers have been correct in not labeling themselves as postmodernists.
To be a postmodern philosopher means one should never have consistent thought. It is apparent that Rorty’s thought is consistent, and so is the thought of those philosophers who have been labeled as postmodern: Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault, Deleuze, and I could go on. The point is that while these philosophers might have had changes in their thoughts, they still held periods of consistency. To be postmodern is to reject grand narratives.
Yet, how do we determine if a narrative is grand or petty? Such a matter seems quite subjective; it is, as Zhuangzi points out with ethics, that there is no measuring stick, nor could such a measuring stick be made to determine if a narrative is grand or petty. Thus, the logical extreme conclusion of postmodernism is to reject all narratives.
This is because all narratives from a subjective manner could be labeled as grand. If one wishes to be a postmodern philosopher in its truest radical sense, this would be philosophizing without narratives. But how is one supposed to philosophize without narratives, one must philosophize from the standpoint of erraticism.
To be a postmodern philosopher is to bounce beliefs moment by moment; now I am Epricurean, now I am an anarcho-primitivist, now I am a warmonger, and now I am so on and so forth. A postmodern philosopher holds no belief from moment to moment because this would imply a narrative.
Instead, a postmodern philosopher only holds a belief in a moment and snaps into another belief in the next. We could argue that there is consistency within a given moment, but this is not how we understand consistency with such a conception of consistency, a single breath would be a melody.
Is this form of philosophizing even possible for a person? There is a contingent that wrongfully thinks that Deleuze wants us to be hyper-schizophrenic. But perhaps this misunderstanding of hyper-schizophrenia is possible via a constant schizoanalysis applied in and outside the realm of psychology.
Schizoanalysis is built upon breaking links and flows this analysis overtly rejects consistency and is built to destroy consistency. A postmodern philosopher must, without intention, put out thoughts that are not only disconnected but break any seeming connection between prior presented beliefs. Any philosopher acting with intention would be, by default, narrativizing; a postmodern philosopher must go about stereotyped schizoanalysis unconsciously.
Is such a system humanly possible, perhaps, but is such a system realistically humanly possible, no!
Thus, there is no guide on how to be a postmodern philosopher. Anyone who tries to become a postmodern philosopher would oxymoronically disallow themselves from being a postmodern philosopher. Instead, one could only be a postmodern philosopher by natural unconscious means.
To be a philosopher without narrativization would mean having an inhuman natural erraticism, this is currently unfounded in any human being. Even the most chaotic philosophers, such as Diogenes the Dog and Zhuangzi, narrativized.
So, there simply is no postmodern philosopher, all philosophers have fallen into grand narratives in some subjective sense. It seems no philosopher can embrace the postmodern state of things, but perhaps this would be the most advisable course of action.
