What Paths lie ahead...?

[Steven Nickeson]

I am seeing here a slight need to get back to Balder's original intention for this forum: speculation on the question, what paths lie ahead(?). Given the decline in participation here at IPMS, and the increase in the repetition of its generally philosophic content, and also given Rorty's often repeated observation that philosophy is more and more marginalized throughout the Euro/U.S. culture, I am guessing that such sub-sub-disciplines as Post-Metaphysical Spirituality are going to blaze only feeble little traces along the sidelines of 21st Century spirituality and religion.

Rorty held that philosophy is being replaced by poetry; the literary arts. In this light I would like to draw attention to an essay called "The Postmodern Sacred" by Em McAven.

The Abstract:

"I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms: the
rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both
produces postmodern media culture and is itself always already mediated through the realm of the fictional. Secular and profane are always entangled within one another, a constant and pervasive media presence that modulates the way that contemporary subjects experience themselves and their relationship to the spiritual. I use popular culture as an entry point, an
entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences, showing that it is “unreal” texts such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Passion of the Christ
and Left Behind that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology. I argue that it is in this interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality in popular culture that the sacred truly finds itself in postmodernity."

The Whole Enchilada

I can certainly see the attraction. Real world metaphysics tend to be onerous, boring and so 17th Century and their pomo antithesis is not much better. But fictional metaphysics are always a thrill especially if Christ-like Neo is cavorting through them on-screen. Fictional
metaphysics moot the postmetaphysical point. 

Roughly in that same spirit and on its own transcendent pathway into the nascent  Evolving Conscious Shift/Redemption is the Spirituality of Technique where one can learn to live like Neo but without all the adolescent ontology. The path ahead--Teleseminars.

[Balder]

Fictional metaphysics is fun. And perfectly in keeping with the spirit of postmetaphysics, IMO.

Teleseminars ... Why not? Sometimes they're cheesy and overblown, but not always. I've quite enjoyed the quiet little TSK one's I've participated in -- no flash or hype, just periods of group inquiry made possible by current telecommunications technology.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I too prefer my philosophy in palatable, fictional form. One of my favorite literary and pomo extraordinairre writers of the last 20 years has been Amy Tan. Recently I picked up Saving Fish From Drowning and am reading it with the usual awe I have for her talent and hypnotic storytelling. In the following passage she is describing how cultures and religions mix in China, making my recent points about worldview mixing in much more aesthetic and effective terms. She writes:

"Start with a bit of Tibetan Buddhism, add a smidgen of Indian Buddhism, a dab of Han Buddhism, plus a dash each of animism and Taoism. A hodgepodge, you say? No, what is in those temples is an amalgam that is pure Chinese, a lovely shabby elegence, a glorious messy motley that makes China infinitely intriguing. Nothing is ever completely thrown away and replaced. If one period of influence falls out of favor, it is patched over. The old views still exist, one chipped layer beneath, ready to pop through with the slightest abrasion.

"That is the Chinese aesthetic and also its spirit" (99).

[infimitas]

I can imagine that some professional, university philosophers may mourn the "good old days", before philosophy started to lose grounds to things like media studies, but has anything really changed as far as philosophy goes outside of academia, in normal society? I only say this because it seems to me that 99+% of people who saw The Matrix didn't think at all about the philosophical issues that it raised. For the masses, this movie was not about fictional metaphysics, but people dressed in leather catsuits with guns. It doesn't moot the PM point, because PM doesn't have much of a point anyway, at least not in the sense of having much of an impact on sociiety more generaly.