[mswas]

Originally Posted by WednesdayAddams

Having a strong opinion does not preclude one from being a Post Modernist Philosopher (or Poststructuralist with respect to AHunter3). While Lacan was a psychoanalyst, he's credited with inspiring the Poststructuralist movement and Philosophers like Derrida and Beaudrillard, who espoused his ideas and took them even further. He introduced 'The Three Orders;' the imaginary, the symolic and the real, claiming that the third overlays all but transcends language and is therefore impossible to either describe or know, because you can't know what you can't explain.

Ok. I am not entirely sure I know what you are accusing Lacan of. I tend to agree with him that language cannot fully describe the real because language is based on definition, de-fine, or set limits to. Reality is not so limited as the architecture of language. Reality is fully empirically integrated in a way that language does not have the facility to compensate for.

I don't know that that is the truism we take it to be. We don't analyze all of our own biases or preconceived notions, but I think most people go through a period of self-actualization and engage in some fairly harsh self analysis. Do we justify? Yes. Are we subjective? Of course. Impossible not to be. But we're not quite as unwilling or incapable of questioning and analyzing our motives and actions as Poststructuralism makes us out to be.

I am not saying incapable so much as generally unwilling. I do believe some people can go through a full self-deconstruction, and that many people do go through self-deconstruction to a point. Anyone who dabbles in philosophy must do so, but there are so many people who do not dabble in philosophy at all. Though you are probably right that it's something that most people do. Most people are confronted with the limitations of their own personality to some degree or another, but it's a very small percentage of the populace that makes a point to deconstruct as such.

It isn't just the more stringent adherents to that school of thought that causes me to reject it. It's that it's incomplete as a Philosophy. It takes a certain amount of logic and then reinforces itself with circular reasoning.

I hear that a lot, 'incomplete philosophy', what does it mean exactly? That statement always strikes me as being pregnant with the presentiment of expecting the philosophy to fulfill something that is isn't intended to fulfill. How are you using it? I think post-modernism is useful to the degree that it gets us to its core lesson regarding the limits of our semantics. Past that it's a lot of angels dancing on pins, just as are most philosophies that had millions of words written about them but can be distilled in a few paragraphs.

The Matrix is too morally judgmental to qualify (to me) as a post-modern film. I'd probably go with There Will Be Blood or The Big Lebowski. Burn After Reading, too. Agree on Fight Club, though.

Fair enough about the Matrix. I don't know about There Will Be Blood, because the protagonist is explicitly the devil, and it's a story about a Christian falling from grace and receiving his reward for his fall. As for The Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading, I just don't see what you're getting at. Not that I am saying you're wrong. I'm just not getting it.