Post-modernism: From surfing cows to Gollum as a lifestyle choice, pt. 6

THE FINAL POST!

of the introduction...

Last we saw that everything that we say and mean has to be taken through our system of language and thus meaning.

PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, PART 4, PART 5

As a final example for all the religious readers:

[…] to have an experience and to draw metaphysical lessons from it are two different things. No bare experience tells its own tale. The experience concerned has to play a certain role of fulfilling a prior conceptual intention, in order to be of cognitive value. This is why mystical experiences are made to support quite different theories. They are to a large extent theory neutral.   - Jitendranath Mohanty (1993)

Thus we may have what might be termed “true” mystical or metaphysical experiences (something I strongly believe), but what they MEAN, their SIGNIFIED, is derived from the use they find in our society. As soon as we talk about them, we have sullied them with the conceptual framework of our society. Thus I personally do not think it wrong to talk about true experiences, but caution must be exercised when we believe we know what they mean, or even more dangerously, what they mean for others in our society. 

The modernists still thought they could reach into the void and bring back embers of eternity. The shift to the “post” was thus like the modernists gleefully stroking their ember, cackling in their best Gollum voice, but the post-modernists came and tapped them on the shoulder and told them that the fact that they had considered that metaphysical piece worth taking and that they felt the Gollum voice and the stroking were the appropriate reactions was all conditioned by their physical experience. Essentially they said: Being Gollum is a choice guys…  

Being Gollum is a choice!

With that theory set up, I hope I didn’t scare you too much and that you would be willing to read and comment on my attempt to explain the topic (and most difficultly) the theory I want to use for my Master’s thesis.