Meme

[felis_ultharus]

I like this quiz. It came out very accurate for me. What it calls "cultural creative" is what I think of as "humanism," which definitely isn't a new philosophy but an old one that's evolved gradually over the centuries:

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. </td> Cultural Creative 94% Idealist 69% Romanticist 63% Existentialist 56% Fundamentalist 38% Postmodernist 38% Modernist 19% Materialist 13% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

Comments

[seal7.livejournal.com]

*giggles at your second place and at the fact that postmodernism didn't make last place*

>_>

*flees*

(I'm 81% CC)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

That's cool. Was that your first place one...?

[seal7.livejournal.com]

Yah. 2nd was Existentialist with 60something.

[retrogamerbear.livejournal.com]

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. </td> Existentialist 81% Postmodernist 75% Modernist 56% Cultural Creative 56% Materialist 50% Romanticist 44% Fundamentalist 38% Idealist 31% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

"Existentialist" does sound like you ^_^

[retrogamerbear.livejournal.com]

All too true :) Though, I still believe in something - just not that this something has plans for us to follow. We are on our own w/o guidance other than that we make for ourselves.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

"Though, I still believe in something - just not that this something has plans for us to follow."

Me, too. I've never believed spirituality and free will were incompatible.

[sugar-spun.livejournal.com]

I don't believe this test. It made me 63% CC, 63% existentialist and 63% postmodernist.

It can bite my exceptionally nonpostmodern ass.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

I love Postmodernism. As a philosophy I think it leaves a lot to be desired, but if you do it right, you can drive your opponent nuts trying to follow your chain of interpretations. XD

Apparently I'm an Existentialist. 81% Existentialist, 69% each Modernist, Postmodernist and Cultural Creative, 63% Idealist, 50% Materialist, 31% Romanticist, and a dismal 13% Fundamentalist.

I think my major problem, in the forests of -ists, is that I am a Linguist and I quibble with their wording a lot. ^^;; I don't see how to fix that one, other than giving the quiz in Loglan, and I don't even like Loglan -- I am very suspicious of a language that does not support puns and double-entendres right out of the box.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

"I love Postmodernism. As a philosophy I think it leaves a lot to be desired, but if you do it right, you can drive your opponent nuts trying to follow your chain of interpretations. XD"

Well, we're going to have to agree to disagree with that. I'm seriously thinking of starting a community devoting to students sharing ideas about resisting postmodernism, which is now so entrenched in university it can't be questioned without seriously risking one's academic career.

I realize you're joking about driving "your opponent nuts trying to follow your chain of interpretations." But really, that's all it is. It's become a game of one-upmanship, and an attempt to shut down real inquiry.

I could handle all that, if it was just something that some professors believed, one set of ideas among a garden of ideas.

But if ever there has been a "compulsory, hegemonic meta-narrative," postmodernism is it. Dealing with it in the nearly 9 years of my academic career, I've become a bit of an anti-intellectual :/

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

I'm not joking about driving your opponent crazy. That's pretty much what I use it for. I'm actually in agreement with you about chipping the damn thing out of the foundations of academia; the unfortunate part about getting to use it to annoy people on purpose is that they use it to annoy me back -- and usually they're serious. I feel the same way about the subset of feminists who are so set in their ways that they still write essays insisting women in the Western world are treated like chattel and scullery maids, rather than recognize that, while there are specific situations that could probably be improved, by and large we've come a long way since we were traded for land in arranged marriages.

It's a large part of why my BA is in Sociology and not Anthropology or English. My taste in 'classic English literature' tends to run towards the trashy (I love Dracula, for example, which is apparently a no-no around here) and the cultural anthro people are almost as dug-in with their value-neutral cultural-relativism as the postmodernist set. Sociologists, as near as I can tell, drink a lot more, and I'm allowed to have more opinions and parenthetical sarcastic comments in my critical work.

In my own writing I'll go so far as to propose some off the wall symbolic or allegorical interpretations of rhetorical artifacts, but people who write postmodern critiques, for serious, make me bang my head on the desk. I actually lost a letter grade in a rhetorical crit class this past spring because I attempted to write the postmodern piece he obviously wanted, and it turned out sounding like Ford and Arthur attempting to weasel their way past getting chucked out the Vogons' airlock. He got a narrative crit essay instead.

I consider the group I hang out with (IRL and online) to be pretty hard-core intelligentsia, and we spend most of our time discussing the mythological roots of names and relationships in Final Fantasy games. XD

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I like pop literature. The postmodernists sometimes approach it with an air of cultural superiority, the way the first anthropologists discussed what they called "primitive" cultures.

A favourite philosopher of mine (one I quote ad nauseum) has argued that genre literature is actually the legitimate inheritor of the great novels of the past.

He argues that science fiction (dealing with the possibilities of where we're going) and spy novels (dealing with dangers of modern politics and technology) are more relevant than the "serious" novels out there that are really just experimental literary masturbation, or the author's attempt to transcribe their dull family drama onto a page.

His theory is that novels become popular because of the ideas they play with -- ideas that the public is thinking about -- and they can't be dismissed as drivel as many intellectuals do. While postmodernists no longer believe novels "say" anything, the public knows differently, and become attached to things generally because of what they're saying.

Thus a badly-written novel like The Da Vinci Code is popular because people are increasingly questioning church-received dogma, while still not willing to give up on spirituality. And the Da vinci Code represents those things. Doesn't matter that it breaks all the rules dished out in creative-writing classes.

And meanwhile, creative writing students are writing just to be writers -- they rarely have something to say. They just want to be famous.

This philosopher -- John Ralston Saul -- takes a more Jungian approach. Rather than judging, we should be asking, "What does the popularity of a novel say about us? What are the ideas we feel the need to explore right now...? why are we exploring those ideas?"

It's a worldview I've taken to heart ^_^

"I consider the group I hang out with (IRL and online) to be pretty hard-core intelligentsia, and we spend most of our time discussing the mythological roots of names and relationships in Final Fantasy games. XD"

I've done that. I'm actually more interested in some of the mis-translations by English translators (and sometimes the original Japanese writers). For instance, how badly the French was screwed up in Final Fantasy ix >_

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

For mangled languages, you can't beat Vagrant Story. Many of the names of people, places, spells and items are some form of twisted Romance... something. A lot of them look almost-French. The main location of the game is a city called Leà Monde, which makes a lot of sense when they begin talking about the runes that line the city walls. ^_^ Plus, and this may be either an incentive or a sign to avoid it, everybody in the game looks like they go clothes shopping at Bondage Supplies 'R' Us. The hero, Ashley Riot, wanders around in a very manly pair of assless leather shorts. I would almost wish I were joking, except I have developed a taste for Squaresoft weirdness ever since playing Xenogears, and eagerly anticipate whatever bizarre epic plot they come out with next.

I'm so glad someone else thinks Dan Brown is a poor writer. I read Angels & Demons once and thought, "Well, it would get a B+ as Internet fanfic, but a C- in any English class I ran, with a note to the effect that if I saw one more set of ellipses, I would scream." You also make me feel a lot better about the box of Doctor Who/Star Wars/Saint/Laurie R. King novels I just had to haul halfway across campus, topped off with one loose paperback novelisation of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father. ^_^;;

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Well, some of the postmodern obviously-meant-to-be postmodern questions could apply to non-postmodern philosophie, as well (a few about the nature of truth).

I'm actually surprised I scored as high on that as I did.