My Current Discontent

Lately I've been attempting to familiarize myself with a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein (said with v-sounds replacing the w's).  Multiple people I've read refer to him as the most important philosopher of the 20th century.  He's one of those philosophers that defied being fit into any particular mold, though every contemporary school attempted to claim him as 'one of their own.'  

Wittgenstein somewhat pioneered the field of linguistic philosophy, or at least was the cardinal philosopher whereby the "linguistic turn" began.  His thinking is largely responsible for the trendy phenomena we would refer to as pluralism.   I could go on, but this post is about me, so I won't.

Wittgenstein's thought is what provides people like Richard Rorty with a method to declare that philosophy is dead.  He severely critiqued the capacity of philosophic inquiry to arrive at truth.  Yet, I don't know if there is a single person who would dare to consider him postmodern.  In fact, a book I've been reading lately suggest that he would be the very philosopher who implies that postmodern thought is bankrupt, which gets to what I've been generally frustrated by lately.

Postmodern culture rests on the denial of what is, but offers nothing other to fill in the void.  In fact, it seems bent on a sort of nihilistic deconstruction (a la Nietzsche) of all constructs old and new.  As soon as people offer a fresh idea of how to live, it is instantly criticizes ad nauseum for any number of reasons.  We can lash out and "free" ourselves of all the constructs of modern society, but in the process we lose all sense of identity or meaning.

Personally I'm tired of the feeling of being defined purely in negative terms:  by what I'm not.  I think this has been the case for much to long, and I'm bored with it.  This is difficult, because the things I negate as part of my identity, I negate for good reason.  Yet, it seems so often that for too many of my friends and for myself, we spend so much energy declaring what we're not, that we have precious little to say about who we are.

There's nothing in me that wants to revert to the old banners that used to offer me identity.  Only I'm ready to be something more than post_______.  

Wittgenstein once said "if you tried to doubt everything, you would not get very far in doubting anything.  The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty."  I find that to be the funny thing with postmodernists, they basically use modernism (the only certainty they have) to fight modernism.  As one book I read pointed out, "postmodernism requires the presence of a modernist discourse for its very existence - an existence we must assume will fade away as it reduces and deconstructs modernism to a groundless and pointless trace, thereby erasing itself".  Postmodernism is merely a reincarnation of modernism, with a suicidal bent.  

That's not to say that I have turned against postmodernists.  I love their points.  I'm just ready to move on to something more than an identity based on the negation of the things in the world I dislike.