research and deconstruction

>>9611730
>the classic Foucault thing

confirmed illiterate

reconstructionism when

>ancient romans and ancient greeks are considered special because we repeated the idea that they are so many times that we ended up believing it

This is "the truth" though. And so is

>the community has the power to change the meaning of truth every time they decide so

even though 'the community' might itself change and their 'decision' is most likely not going to be a quick hand-count.

I see postmodernism as objectivity taken to its logical conclusion: nothing is sacred. Does that mean it is destructive? I don't think so -- after all 'deconstruction' and 'destruction' are different words, escaping the punning of Derrida. One could still select a 'canon' if they have an idea of what should constitute that canon. Opinions still require evidence and reasoning.

I don't see what this has to do with the practice of deconstruction. Derrida by the way spent large part of his life defeding the ethical and veritateve objective of deconstruction, (so much for the nihilist postmodernist).

Aside from the fact that was shit opinion about the greeks, who's at fault here is the notion that any given truth is the result of certain forces at work (may they be social, cultural, economical, psychological etc) which is a something that can be ascribed to a vague postmodernism not Derrida.

So what I'm saying i: leave Derrida out of this.

>>9611772

I do not agree at all that the classics are great because the 'narrative' greatness was echoed by a community.
For instance, what they did philosophically was absolutely groundbreaking: western ancient philosophy deserves the praise it has and deserves to be considered 'classic'.
Take Plato, for instance: how could people argue that Plato is great just because people talked about him?

And also, the other problem is that there is no end to the regress of decision making if you accept the premises of deconstruction.
You say: Plato is a classic because a community decided he is, and not because of some intrinsic quality of his work. What is the criteria the decided upon?
They may have believed there is some quality in Plato's work. But again, the fact that this quality makes a good work is the result of a community deciding upon which qualities make a good work.
And again: the fact that that quality is valuable is the result of practices, and so on.
Everything that has value has not value in itself, but because we decide so. There is no fixed criteria for judgement.

Doesn't this reduce you to the point of being unable to say anything with the hope of it being stable? The point is not that nothing is sacred: this can be a premise of an honest search for truth, as many philosophers who have attacked concepts that were socially relevant (e.g. the existence of God) has shown: but they were searching for truth, that is, for a stable foundation and for something that is gained forever.

To deny that there is such foundation is extremely harmful. It seems to me undeniable that when we try to understand stuff we don't want to just make a statement that could be disproved, or changed according to new changes in the community standards: when we want to say something true, we want something that always stay the same.

Timelessness is implicit in the idea of truth. If you search the truth, you search something unchangeable, otherwise you are not searching the truth. You put evidence and justifications to opinion because you want them to be true, that is, you don't want them to be undemined, i.e. changed over time.

To claim that every 'truth' can be changed over time is to claim that there is no truth at all. This makes all research useless and, I believe, it is partly because of this mindset that the humanities are considered 'useless' today.
Not only it doesn't look that we are producing knowledge, but we are actually not even searching for it, because we are not searching for the truth when we do research.

>>9611802
I think you're mischaracterising the opposition argument. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and I didn't think you literally meant Plato was considered special because he was considered special.

There are criteria, yes, which is how communities decide on quality. These criteria change. It's not a postmodern intervention that undermines all claims to truth; it's the conclusion of historical study, that when we uncover more information on something our idea of what the 'truth' is changes.

Something being 'classic' is not a truth. It seems you're defining 'truth' as not an actual truth but something that offers narrative cohesion which I don't think is true.

>but they were searching for truth, that is, for a stable foundation and for something that is gained forever.

Like the idea that models of understanding (that, in turn, help define criteria for judgment) are dependent on the society that creates them. That's a truth that will probably not be challenged for a long, long time. It is a truth that can be built upon to create something more substantial than what modernism offered.

>To claim that every 'truth' can be changed over time is to claim that there is no truth at all.

No, just that it may be unreachable, considering the way that we describe truth is through fallible language.

>>9611730
>ancient romans and ancient greeks are considered special because we repeated the idea that they are so many times that we ended up believing it
this is true. the victorians who discovered most of the shit we know about the greeks and romans edited it to make it seem like they were the natural descendants of that culture. that's why every book about ancient rome isn't filled with thousands of pictures of dicks and people dying of malaria if they could not abandon the city in summer. germany did the same thing, even going so far as to make artifacts like statues of the great german past to dig up like they were from the supposed great german past.
the greeks and romans used do the same thing too, so it's not really surprising.

they're wrong about there not being such things as classics though. and seemingly what deconstruction means since they think it leads to a definitive outcome either way.