Status Updates From Explaining Postmodernism: S...

That weakness is the sole source of postmodernism’s power against it.

What is still needed is a refutation of those historical premises, and an identification and defense of the alternatives to them.

The Enlightenment was based on premises opposite to those of postmodernism, but while the Enlightenment was able to create a magnificent world on the basis of those premises, it articulated and defended them only incompletely.

Showing that a movement leads to nihilism is an important part of understanding it, as is showing how a failing and nihilistic move-ment can still be dangerous. Tracing postmodernism’s roots back to Rousseau, Kant, and Marx explains how all of its elements came to be woven together. Yet identifying postmodernism’s roots and connecting them to contemporary bad consequences does not refute postmodernism.

Nihilism is close to the surface in the postmodern intellectual movement in a historically unprecedented way.

If we now add to the postmodern epistemology of language the far Left politics of the leading postmodernists and their firsthand awareness of the crises of socialist thought and practice, then the verbal weaponry has to become explosive.