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Comment by StevePatterson | Hacker News Reader

I love how so many of these comments revolve around the term "postmodern." This article's argument is not its title. It's the idea represented by a particular school of thinking.

Call it what you want: there is a school of thought which embraces the idea that the universe is senseless, and they claim the mind creates artificial order. You can see it in artistic work.

Obviously, this article is about that school of thought.

(which, I think you could make a very reasonable case is decidedly "post-modern." Not every representative of the school has to live in the same time frame, just like Beethoven could be called a Romantic artist, but he was a century earlier than Tchaikovsky. Nietzsche preceded the postmodernists, but his ideas fit squarely with theirs.).

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When you say, "there is a school of thought which embraces the idea that the universe is senseless" the first idea that springs to mind is existentialism[0]. Are you talking about existentialism? You mention Nietzsche, he (along with Kierkegaard) are claimed to be the fore-runners of existentialism - the idea that life has no (intrinsic) purpose, senseless in the meaningful sense.

Their claim is that one can give meaning to life by imposing or constructing a meaning or a purpose of ones own. I think it would be a stretch to equate this purposeful overcoming of the futility and the absurd with the general pattern recognition and construction that the mind involuntarily engages in moment to moment.

Postmodernism, if it is anything, is the rejection of or going beyond the project of modernism (the clue is in the name). Modernists still believed in grand projects, ideals, and narratives - for instance, the implicit idea of progress. You could say that postmodernism paradoxically rejects over-arching grand narratives and in a way claims to bring to an end the grand intellectual epochs we've had from the renaissance onwards through the enlightenment and finally arriving at modernism. I've yet to come across a satisfactory account of postmodernism beyond the one I've just relayed.

[0] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Obviously, this article is about that school of thought.

This is not a school of thought of which I am familiar, who are its proponents? In fact, I have not heard of any assertion that the universe should either a) make sense; or b) have a motivation, outside of religious texts. Of course I don't really know what sense of "senseless" you're using without your defining your terms, so I'm using two common ones.

Words mean things, and if you can't be bothered to get your terms right, why should I bother to read your article?

Chronology's a bitch. Talk about authoritarian structure.

I also love how some people think this article is a defense of anti-structuralism, while others think it's a dismissal.

As to chronology, I'm afraid history isn't on your side. One era does not end sharply as another begins. There's significant chronological overlap between schools of thought and movements in general.

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