I would argue for the incommensurability of the situation would be such that the Buddha could not appear in the place of Krishna to give advice.

Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu. The whole of the epic is built around Krishna being available to give advice to the Pandavas. And in general the advice is to break at crucial points the Dharma that they are sworn to uphold. So there is a kind of paradox in the actions of Krishna toward the Pandavas in as much as he councils each of the Pandavas to break the dharma rules of war in order to win and that is what sends them initially to hell while those who are evil that they fight against are seen in Heaven before Heaven and Hell are realized to be illusions.

Vishnu is to some extent a nondual between Brhama and Shiva but accepting Being (Sat). The Bhagavad Gita advocates both a way of piety and a way of intellectual approach to god.

Buddha on the other hand is a Heresy in the Hindu tradition, which rejects Sat and teaches that Existence is Empty. The basic teaching is that life is Dukkha and that means something like ultimately unsatisfactory. And this is a reason for withdraw from the world to seek enlightenment. The Buddha would not be found on the battle field. But the Pandavas could have bumped into one of the past Buddhas in the Forest. If they had he would have told them that Dharma means something completely different than they imagined. In Buddhism Dharmas are like Tattvas they are basic mechanisms of consciousness and life. Dharmas are transformed out of caste roles into aspects of reality within consciousness. In early Buddhism Dharmas are real but the Self is illusory. So if they had bumped into a proto-Buddha in the forest he would have told them that their lives as kings and warriors were illusory. And the implication would have been that the Battle was illusory, and the results of the battle for the winner would also be illusory. In Hinduism there is the idea of Maya or illusion being like magic. But for Buddhism even the reality is illusory. For Buddhism neither aspect nor anti-aspect is Empty Existence. The aspects are truth, reality, identity and presence. The Buddha does not believe that either the Pandavas nor the Kauravas have any self-identity through time yet all their actions are driven by karma and result in more karma. To the Buddha there is no difference between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. They have not arisen nor will they perish. For the Buddha the whole story of the Mahabharata is merely an illusion. So from the point of view of the Buddha the story is never told, yet it also never ceases being told. The whole story is about vesting value in certain characters (Pandavas) and negative value in other characters (Kauravas). But these distinctions are never actually made and they never actually vanish. In this sense the Buddha places himself prior to the arising of the tale and after the unceasing illusion of the tale plays itself out. There was the rock on the side of the road before the tale came along and valued some things and devalued others, but the rock at the side of the road was still there unvalued nor devalued when the tale was finished and the rock was undisturbed. No one happened to give advice to, the war did not occur, no one was killed, the disaster of the war had no effect. And the same is true from a Buddhist point of view with respect to real wars that kill real people. At the end of the real war the same rocks at the side of the road are setting there as existed untouched from the beginning of the conflict. Emptiness is an extremely nihilistic doctrine that reveals the limits of nihilism itself. Emptiness in effect uses nihilism against nihilism to refute nihilism. The advice of Krishna to the Pandavas is nihilistic. It makes it such that in fact there is no difference between the Pandavas and the Kauravas in the end — they both violate the dharma, but the Pandavas’ violation seems worse because they are sworn to uphold the dharma and they forsake it specifically under the direction of Krishna the avatar of Vishnu. So they think they have been given leave to break the dharma, but they have not and they go to Hell because of it. But ultimately Heaven and Hell are illusions, but what it does not say is that ultimately the characters are illusions as well. That is where emptiness comes in, where one would deny continuous identity to the characters. If we did that, denied the characters their Being then suddenly the whole story falls apart, as do the motivations of the characters, and the consequences, yet still we could see that there was karma circulating as a kind of quasi-causality, and empty pantomime continues with mere existence stripped of is invested meanings

People say that because the other truly great philosophers in the French school are all dead now. So he is the last one standing who appears on more talk shows. In comparison with Christopher Hitchens at least he is a real philosopher, unlike Hitchens who is also no longer standing.

As for Zizek’s contribution. Well he made Lacan make sense to me, that is something  but it does not qualify for greatness. To my mind he is not a truly great philosopher. Great Philosophers are people like Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger. They are people whose thought changed how we conceive of our world. It does not happen often.

Next rank down are philosophers such as Epidocles, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Peirce, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze and others who present penetrating analyses of the world that cannot be ignored by others.

Next rank down are people like Hobbs, Hume, Locke, Levinas, Schopenhauer, Badiou, Zizek, Sartre, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Bataille, Baudrillard, who are “interesting” as Zizek defies the term, which means that you can live without them and you wont be completely lost but it is better to know what they have to say if you can manage to work them into your study program.

Then there are those that are easy to ignore like Lyotard, Buber, Wm. James, Bergson, and othes of the lesser lights of philosophy.

However, that said I do find Zizek exciting, especially where he interprets Lacan as really being Hegel, because that is the reduction of the inexplicable to the impossible and there is something daring in that.

To me the most interesting of Wittgenstein’s books is Philosophical Grammar which is the proto-Philosophical Investigations. This is because I worked to create something called General Schemas Theory which is the next higher discipline beyond Systems Theory. For some reason this as not been created before in our tradition, not sure why. But it turns out that Wittgenstein in Philosophical Grammar he includes ruminations about a lot of different schemas which is very useful.

See From General Systems Theory to General Schemas Theory

See also General Schemas Theory Research

Being a philosopher of the Continental persuasion I have a lot of mixed feelings about Wittgenstein. My first introduction to him was when I was at LSE there was a class I took from Gellner where he spent the whole time making fun of Wittgenstein, so this did not bode well for my relation to the philosopher. First book I read was Tractatus which I felt was manifestly absurd, but now occasionally find useful, and then I read Zetel which is a book of sentences cut out of discarded manuscripts of his own and kept in a box that he liked. When I read Zetel I decided that Wittgenstein was definitely crazy. Later I read Philosophical Investigations and realized that many of the points he was making were the same as Heidegger and so that became useful because one could appeal to Philosophical investigations and those who did not like Continental Philosophy would then agree with you just because Wittgenstein had said it too. It was not until I read the precursor of Philosophical Investigations which was Philosophical Grammar that I found his work genuinely useful because basically what that book can be seen as is an exploration of the use of different schemas in our thinking. I don’t know of any other philosopher who has explored the schemas in this way. For more information about Schemas see Umberto Eco’s Kant and the Platypus.

With respect to Language Philosophy I like Schlick much better. Schlick was the older center of the Vienna Circle who promoted the work of the younger Wittgenstein. But Schlick in his work was attempting to bring the ideas of Hilbert about axioms into Philosophy. I have found his work useful for defining what I call the Axiomatic Platform in my recent dissertation. Seehttp://about.me/emergentdesign. The idea of Schlick is that we need to distinguish percept and concept and relate concepts to each other without the mixture of percepts to create an axiomatic platform for thinking. This is not really a reductionism because what it does is seek a stable basis for thinking. Wittgenstein and the other Language Philosophers following him on the other hand think that all philosophy is just a confusion of language. And if we look carefully at the way we use English language we can purge these confusions from our speech and thus from our thoughts. Thus actually it is an anti-philosophy which attempts to reduce all philosophical questions to gibberish. Of course, you can take anything to be non-sensical if you like. Wittgenstein followed on Moore who tried to make philosophy accessible to everyone by stating it in common vernacular without technical vocabulary and thus simplify it for the understanding of the common man. Basically these various strands of what became Analytical Philosophy was a retrenchment after the age of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica and Godel’s Proof which dashed the hopes of Hilbert’s programme, which was to axiomize everything in a final conclusive form. Godel showed that this was not possible. So Russell and Whitehead’s attempt of reducing mathematics to set theory and logic was also seen as ultimately futile. So for instance Higher Logical Type theory developed by Russell and productively applied to many topics by Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of the Mind was abandoned. Quine and Putnam went off in a different direction which shaped the course of Analytical Philosophy as a substream of philosophy that became dominant in America and the UK mainly because it was safe during the cold war (You wouldn’t want to refer to Hegel. for instance, because Marxists did that).

This is extremely unfortunate that the course set out by Russell using Higher Logical Type theory to solve paradoxes were not pursued, because what I saw and developed in my first dissertation was the application of Higher Logical Type Theory (cf Copi) to the kinds of Being discovered by the Continentals. Basically the reason that that the idea of there being various kinds of modalities of Being made no sense to the Analytical Philosophers was because they did not have Higher Logical Type Theory to use to understand the nature of Being as Paradox or Absurdity. If you abandon the linguistic ethnocentrism of European Philosophy and realize that only Indo-European languages have Being, and then you realize that Being itself is fundamentally fragmented in its roots in the Indo-European languages and that in point of fact it represents an impossibility or absurdity and therefore an illusion, then suddenly we can apply Higher Logical Type theory to realize the meaning of the different levels of Being discovered by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Delueze, etc. Basically there are different kinds of being at different meta-levels of the representation of the repetition of Being and at each level there are the same four types (aspects) of Being (identity, presence, reality, truth) that emergently change their meaning at each meta-level of Being. These meta-levels are called Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild and Ultra. Many of the quandaries explored by the later Wittgenstein can be explained by this phenomena, because basically he is realizing the truth of Heidegger’s statement that Language is the House of Being. However, we see Wittgenstein toying with the depths of language rather than coming to grips with the phenomena as a whole as the Continental Philosophers tried to do.

What Wittgenstein discovered is that even after you reduce all philosophical problems to language you then still have language and it  has its own depths when you consider how it is used to connect us to the world in which we live. Wittgenstein’s ultimate idea is that Meaning is Use. But this is merely a reformulation of the idea of Heidegger that there is a ready to hand mode of Being of Language behind the Present at hand mode of Being of Language if we consider Language as a tool. But of course Heidegger thinks that language cannot be considered as a tool and so something much deeper is going on in language that goes beyond our relation to tools. To have a utilitarian view of language and to say that is where meaning comes from is again a reduction. Heidegger’s view is that Language is itself something that uses us to produce the meaning of Being in the world, not the other way around. Heidegger has a non-representable and non-utilitarian view which is the opposite of that of Wittgenstein. Yet they are both coming to very similar conclusions. Stanley Rosen book Nihilism is an excellent study of Heidegger and Wittgenstein as nihilistic opposites.

What is interesting is that later Wittgenstein was considered mystical by even Analytical Philosophers who are the equivalent of Plato’s “men of earth” in Philosophy.  Basically the men of earth are those who only believe in what they can hold in their hands, and thus do not believe in anything invisible. These are distinguished from those initiated into the lesser (those that understand Process Being, i.e. Heraclitus) and the greater (those that understand Pure Being, i.e. Parmenides) Mysteries. And then beyond that there are those who want Change and Changelessness at the same time, i.e. those who want to understand the WorldSoul who are the Heirophant, those who conduct the mysteries and understand what Plato in the Timaeus calls the Third Kind of Being (i.e. Hyper Being or what Derrida calls DifferAnce, and what Heidegger calls -B-e-i-n-g- crossed out). Wittgenstein to his credit began to explore the invisibles in relation to Language beyond the language games and nihilistic arguments of his followers to such an extent that he lost his family resemblance to them and went beyond them so that they could no longer understand him. Basically Wittgenstein with his doctrine of Meaning is Use is his initiation into the lesser mysteries. But also in his exploration of the use of Schemas in Philosophical Grammar and to some extent in Philosophical Investigations he is beginning to explore some of the greater mysteries that Plato alludes to.

Fundamentally, I think Wittgenstein can be blamed for the degeneration of philosophy into the handmaiden of science and the production of an anti-philosophy that was taken for actual philosophy. In this backwater only Kant and Frege were given any status as real philosophers, and the works of Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the French Continental Philosophers such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze and others carrying on the European Philosphical tradition were eschewed as incomprehensible, but of course they pursued triviality and arguments over differences between their language games that seemed to lead no where instead. A grand specialty of philosophy that does not talk about the essential conundrums of life but only the basis for science which reduces all other problems to distortions in our language sprang up which became a trivializing monster whose nihilism is apparent to anyone who has been bored by endless pointless arguments about how many unnecessary distinctions there are on the head of a pin. These arguments have nothing to do with the questions that haunt us about our existence in this postmodern era. They are quintessentially modern, and rooted in Pure Being, and ignorant of any kind of Being beyond that thus missing many of the important dimensions of the actual world in which we find ourselves that Continental Philosophy explores wantonly (eg. Zizek).

There is four states according to Kant:

Synthetic A priori
Analytic A priori
Synthetic A posteriori
Analytic A posteriori

Both Space and Time are Synthetic A priori notions

And also the Categories in Space and the Schema in Time are Synthetic A priori notions

Synthetic A priori is something we project prior to experience that is necessary to make experience possible.

Analytic A priori is any sub-notions that can be deduced from the categories or space and time. So for instance for Kant geometry is deduced from space and arithmetic deduced from time.

The thing-in-itself is beyond these projections. We really don’t know it or how it interacts with the projections to fill the world with sensations that become perceptions. But what we do is intuit things based on the presented manifolds of the A priori syntheses we perceive (with our senses) and apperceive (with cognition). The combination of the two are experience. The thing-in-itself is genuinely transcendent in the sense of not being available in any way and not being known in any way. But because of that it is really just a phantom of our imagination anyway, in fact it does not exist, and is only there as a part of the philosophical architecture to make sure that we know that everything we experience is phenomenological. The thing-in-itself is what Husserl would call a bracket, it is there so we know that what ever we posit beyond experience is out of bounds for metaphysical speculation. Prior metaphysics to Kant had all kinds of theories about the thing-in-itself, but for Kant this kind of dogmatic speculation is out of bounds and a bad use of reason.

That means that “objective” space and time beyond experience are themselves noumena. But experienced space and time as phenomena are synthetic a priori projections only. But they are different from other projections in as much as they are singular, in other words there is only one space and only one time that is projected everywhere by everybody. And in fact for Kant that is the truly “objective” space and time. Today we would say spacetime, but that they were both the same singular was unknown to Kant.

There is a direct line from Kant to Husserl. Husserl in his phenomenology attempts to get at what is happening in consciousness within the Kantian Transcendental Framework. Transcendental means necessary for the possibility of experience like Space, Time and the Categories. Transcendent means beyond experience like the noumena. Kant is a Transcendental Idealist and believes that is the only route to Transcendental Realism. Because the transcendent noumena is never known, and can never be known, our only access to reality is via idealism. Idealism for Kant is the only possible realism. When you bracket the thing-in-it-self, or noumena, completely then there is nothing else but what appears in experience, and that is real. Thus what ever is real is exactly what appears in experience. Abstractly this appears quizzical because we can continue to talk about noumena, and when we do we are really just making out of bound metaphysical claims which is a sickness of reason for Kant.

But Husserl in his thought makes a fundamental contribution when he gives up bracketing, that has all kinds of problems like the problem of intersubjectivity, and instead talks about things as appearing on the horizon of the world. This solves all the problems of the noumena, and all the problems of bracketing because it says that every thing in experience is on the greatest possible horizon the horizon of everything in the world. And things have reality to the extent that they can be explored. Real things can be explored almost infinitely and that is what makes  them real. Imaginary things have some limit to their exploitability on the horzon and that is what makes them less than real. The horizon of the world is intersubjectively constituted and not rooted in the individual alone and thus the problems of intersubjectivity as in Cartesian Meditations vanish. So if we update Kant with the insights of the later Husserl then we see that what seem to be problems of Realism that linger in Transcendental Idealism are artifacts of the way Kant talked about the noumena as a kind of bracketing mechanism in his overall philosophical system which is basically phenomenological but Kant had not discovered phenomenology as a perspective yet. We had to wait for Hegel and also Pierce for that. Husserl refined Phenomenology and got rid of the excesses of Hegel as Peirce was also trying to do. That is to say Husserl and Peirce were trying to create a Kantian Phenomenology. But Husserl is the one who had the real insight as to how to get rid of this problem that lingered of realism verses idealism, by realizing that if there is a horizon of the world in which everything appears then it is the almost infinite exploitability of some phenomena that makes it seem real, and we can gauge all other experiences of phenomena against that infinite exploitability to judge their reality. And because it is an intersubjectively projected horizon we can do science on those objects we deem real. It took a long time to refine the Kantian Idealism in order to solve the problems of understanding transcendental realism and how Idealism is our only access to what is real without positing the brackets of the noumena.

Heidegger, of course, is assuming all this. His Dasein as being-in-the-world is merely that part of us that does the projection. What Heidegger is trying to do with Dasein is get beyond the Subject/Object dichotomy that still plagues Husserlian Phenomenology. And in Heidegger’s dasein we see the basic and underlying paradox of the whole Kantian and Husserlian Idealism which is that Dasein projects the world and then is an entity within the world it projects. But it is not yet a subject nor an object, that is a Present-at-hand reification that happens later. Rather Dasein exists in a mode of the Ready-to-hand where it exercises circumspective concern in a Process Being mode over the technological infrastructure that underlies all experience that is presented as present-at-hand, i.e. in a Pure Being mode. These two modalities of Being (present-at-hand and ready-to-hand) are equi-primordial and in fact always present in each moment together, whether we emphasize one or the other. But they are ways of pointing at things and grasping things that appear on the World Horizon of our being-in-the-world as explained by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception.

Really it is necessary to have the perspective of the history of Philosophy in order to understand any one particular contribution. For instance we really need to understand Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Locke and Hume in order to situate the contribution of Kant in his attempt to ground the physical science of Newton. That grounding still stands, no one has gotten beyond the transcendental framework set up by Kant. He posited fundamental limits to what reason can know beyond experience, basically positing that we cannot know anything beyond experience, but we can see in experience certain necessary elements that make experience possible and for us those are transcendental, but what is actually beyond experience, i.e. the bracket of the noumena, we cannot know.

Schopenhauer gives an interesting twist to this, by saying that we as entities must ourselves have a noumena within us, and he identifies that with Will and he says that we have special access to that Wille via music. This is a very interesting case which Nietzsche takes up and connects to evolution via his idea of the Will to Power. Schopenhauer gave a basis for romantic reactions against Kant with his concept of Will being the thing-in-itself within us. His term Wille is wider in meaning than our term Will. This basically gives rise to the concept of the Unconscious via Nietzsche. And as we know via Freud and Jung who explored the territory that Nietzsche opened up (but denied or repressed Nietzsche in the process) the unconscious has become one of the greatest modern concepts to be reckoned with. And if we were to say that there is any road to partial intimations of glimmers of the noumena it would be through the unconscious in ourselves, our noumena may not be as closed off from our experience as the noumena of other things like objective scientific objects. Thus the story does not yet have an end. Continental Philosophy has been exploring via Lacan and those that take him seriously like Deleuze the implications of the idea that the unconscious is in fact a noumena whose effects we see directly in its warpages of consciousness even though we have no direct access to it. And of course this brings up the question of access to other noumena of other things than ourselves. Jung develops the idea of the Psychoid as a way of thinking about this in psychological terms. So although the question seemed to be closed with regard to the reality beyond experience of objective things it is not completely closed with regard to the reality of what underlies subjective things

I think you would do well to read Meister Eckhart, who was a great German mystic within the Catholic tradition who will give an antidote for the answers you might find here. Basically he says that if it “feels” like something then it is not God. If it is a vision of a concrete thing, then it is not God. I will leave it to Meister Eckhart to explain this to you if you are interested. But do not believe everything that people will tell you about things like “what it feels like to be with God.” Those how know do not say, and those who say probably do know know.

Modernism is essentially the idea that the new should supplant the traditional.

A good example of that is Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev where the word Nihilism was first introduced. I have been reading Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism: Robert Gooding-Williams: 9780804732956: Amazon.com: Books
in which the idea is that Zarathustra is the quintessential modernist position in which the idea is to ever create new values, and new value creators.

But many claim that Friedrich Nietzsche is also the quintessential postmodern philosopher as well. But as with all things it is easier to say when they start than when they end. I listened to a lecture series on Feudalism and when it came to the question when did Feudalism end, the answer was about 1850. Wow that means that Feudalism lasted a lot longer than we might have thought.

Philosophy is simple in as much as it is about our highest concepts like what is Being, what is Existence, what is Cause, what is Moral, etc. But it is complicated by the fact that there are just so many ways of thinking about these highest concepts from so many perspectives AND if you try to think several of them at once there are many different ways of arranging them, and connecting them, and justifying their content in relation to the content of other higher concepts that the permutations are endless, and the number of different philosophical positions that have been taken in history if not endless are a very large number out of which we have selected a representative cannon about which we talk because these are the deepest views that people in our tradition have come up with about these things that are different and map out the kernel of the space of possibilities that can be agreed upon.

Check out: Amazon.com: The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image (9780226452791): David Farrell Krell, Donald L. Bates: Books for some interesting context.

I am reading a book called Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism by Robert Gooding-Williams and it seems to me that is as good a place to start as any.

The first thing you really need to come to terms with is that Nietzsche’s philosophy is non-systematic, even anti-systematic, which basically means it is one huge mess, a gigantic puzzle. After Hegel and Kant this is a real relief, but on the other hand you can, and people do make about anything they want out of it. So finding good commentaries that make sense of some portion of it is well . . . extremely difficult.

Recently I read Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future by James I Porter and that filled in what was for me a really big blank in Nietzsche’s career, his academic life as a philologist. After reading that book I had a much better appreciation of where Nietzsche was coming from in terms of his discipline in academia which I had not really thought about before.

In terms of Genealogy a good book is Philosophical Genealogy in two volumes by Brian Lightbody where he contrasts Nietzsche and Foucault’s approaches to Genealogy.

Another interesting book I read recently is Zarathustra’s Last Supper: Nietzsche’s Eight Higher Men by Weaver Santaniello which got me interested in trying to re-approach Zarathustra again.

One thing that hit me reading Zarathustra over the last few days along with the Gooding-Williams book is his saying in it that people who write aphorisms in blood want not to be read but memorized. I think that is a particularly telling remark from Nietzsche on how he wants to be approached.

I had a class at UCI which was a year long reading seminar on Nietzsche under Martin Schwab [UC Irvine – Faculty Profile System] and that was really good because we read not just Nietzsche but some of his main commentators like Heidegger, and Deleuze. It helps to have someone who can guide you who actually has a fairly deep knowledge of the German context in which Nietzsche is writing and to warn about the pitfalls of the translations. That was a really great experience that consolidated my grasp on Nietzsche’s philosophy. Of all the books I read during that time the one Parkes: Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology: Graham Parkes: 9780226646879: Amazon.com: Books who came to talk to us impressed me the most. Nietzsche writes his philosophy through metaphors and Parkes explores the field of metaphors that Nietzsche uses, which is extremely interesting to see as a whole field.

There is no one way that is best to approach Nietzsche. You have to just start reading, and then read over and over, then read commentaries, then read again later after having gained some insight by trying to think it through on your own. What ever you think Nietzsche is saying, he is actually saying something deeper than that, that is guaranteed.

I wrote three  papers around that time that tried to use and capture some of what I learned:

Primal Ontology and Archaic Existentiality
Nietzsche’s Madness: thinking through darkness and light
Idea, Essence, Existence and Archetype (On Nietzsche, Jung and others)

See also Kent Palmer’s Homepage

• Amazon.com: Modernity (9780745652917): Peter Wagner: Books
• Amazon.com: Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (9780822307679): Matei Calinescu: Books
• The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments: Gertrude Himmelfarb: 9781400077229: Amazon.com: Books
• Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750: Jonathan I. Israel: 9780199254569: Amazon.com: Books

I mention these books which I have not read just to show that there is a literature out there on modernity. It might be a good idea to consult it.

My concept of modernity is that it basically starts with Descartes and reaches its height with Kant and Hegel and then slowly starts to unravel, with the true danger sign being Nietzsche who was the precursor to the world wars in the early 20th century which transformed everything. Modernity is coeval with the colonialization of the world by the West which started to collapse once there was not much world to colonize any more and the colonial powers turned to war on each other in order to continue their expansion, which in fact merely caused the whole colonial regime to collapse in the sixties after the second world war. For me post-modernism and post-colonialism are just about the same thing.

Modernity is about the difference between the colonial powers and their colonies. What makes the colonial powers different and fit to rule their coloniies? Well it is obvious, we are modern and we are bringing the benefits of modernity to savages, which sounds very similar to the first justification, which was we  are christian and we are bringing the benefits of true religion to savages. Modernism however is coeval with secularism, the replacement of sovereignty with democracy, the emphasis on freedom, liberty and equality, in modern industrial states which are run by rational bureaucracies based on technical competence rather than just cronyism or nepotism. Many of these standards were set by Germany and Britain and then America for what is modern.

Modernism covers such a wide swath of history and is so recent it is hard to say whether it is good or not because it mixes nihilistically great good with great evil. It is good that we have broken out of sovereignty  But the disconnects and violence that this unleashed is surely evil. It is probably best to think of modernity and the rise of science and technology more of a fate than something good or evil. What we need to do is confront the implications of this fate for the world.

The culmination of modernity is the wars of ideology in the twentieth century which capitalist democracies won hands down. This was a terrible scorge on mankind which we are really still recovering from. What we are tying to do now is to convince ourselves that we are in a post ideological age and that we have gotten past those ideological wars. But I think Zizek is right when he says that what we think of as a post ideological world is really an intensification of ideology rather than the lack of ideology. Much of that ideology concerns global corporatism which is the newest sovereign challenge to democracy. The fact that we got out of the Two Hot and one Cold wars without a totalitarianism in the central european powers is quite amazing. We need to preserve that. Think if the Axis powers or the Communists had won, then everything today would be more or less like it is in China with their totalitarian system which is running their  capitalist transformation corruptly. Capitalism and Democracy are uneasy partners and not a particularly good system for running things, but just so much better than all the other alternatives that it is worth while fighting to keep our system in place as long as possible. The alternatives are even more horrific than the bubbling of our democracy and the out  of control antics of the capitalists who are exploiting everything in sight. The chaos of freedom is preferable to all the trains running on time.

Point it out generally without mentioning the person who made the mistake.

Say something like: There are those who say X which implies Y, but of course X can be seen as an error, if you consider the following reasons based on the following assumptions.

Then of course they can come back at your own assumptions and reasoning, which in fact might be wrong.

You must take into account that if they are a prominent scholar they have been raked over the coals many times by many others, and there is a good chance that they have produced all kinds of arguments for their position by which they can defend it. There is a good chance that what you have come up with as a mistake has been brought up to them many times before. Thus the best thing to do is to say something like:

I may be mistaken but what about X which impies Y. And then if you do not get a reasonable answer that has sufficient backing with arguments, then you might want to suggest that they think about their position a bit deeper.

The best way to approach anyone is to say something like. I have similar thoughts that are parallel to yours but diverge in some respect, and I would like to explore the differences and similarities with your thoughts in order to learn more about my own thinking.

Then they will attempt to straighten you out, and you can judge for yourself whether their arguments are sound and persuasive. But the chances of getting them to admit a mistake are slim. However, the greatest minds are those who easily admit mistakes and relish finding the limits of their thought. The greatest minds are not those with the deepest thoughts or the most profound thoughts but which never change their mind and defend their positions to the death. The greatest minds are those who are poised for an opportunity to grow and learn and sieze that opportunity as soon as it appears. Of course, they will defend their positions until they are sure that what ever is suggested is genuinely better than their own thoughts on the subject, but once they discover that someone else has thought deeper than they have about the subject and are correct in their reasoning, then they embrace the change and move on to explore the new territory that is opened up for them by the constructive criticism of others.

As socrates said the greatest of us are those who know they don’t know, not those who think that they do know. Socrates discovered he was wisest because he knew he did not know the answers to everything. But in this journey of abandoning position after position where knowledge seemed secure but was discovered to be limited in some respect one develops wisdom, and that wisdom is really the most precious thing we can attempt to possess ourselves.