In a certain way I think (steel) postmodernism is the natural match for the archetypical Formidable X-rationalist neo-renaissance-person who appreciates the “hard” and “soft” arts alike.
There’s the thing where one hones their craft for their entire life and learns to build very intricate and detailed and high-quality worksmanship.
Then there’s the thing where one designs a 3d-printer that can do the same, and way more, as long as the blueprints are supplied. Or uses a high-level programming language, with the grunt work abstracted away, to write in a few lines the kinds of code that require weeks of work in a less sophisticated language.
Similarly there’s the thing where one spends countless hours learning the classics, history, Latin, cultivating the tastes and refinement, etc.
And then there’s the thing where one learns to question and evaluate the very base assumptions that underlie such things.
These things seem to very comfortably sort themselves into two pairs of somewhat fundamental similarity.
And one of the pairs fits together with dutifully thinking about the lofty ideas of important philosophers, and the other with recognizing that many of the things the philosophers so dutifully ponder are actually kind of embarrassing category errors, or results of biases that we’ve discovered with empirical research in the last few decades, or…
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