Postmodernism's Doomed attempt at Freedom

Here's a very concise lecture on postmodernism if anyone is feeling in the cerebral mood. As you'll see, postmodernism contains within it an element of truth, ie, that the objects in the familiar world are determined by our concepts. But because postmodern thinkers share the same fallacious preconceptions as those of nominalism*, they attribute these concepts to mere arbitrary creations of culture and the human mind. Thus postmodernism is the result of individuals failing to take the step in soul towards seeing the objective reality active within thought, instead reducing the concept and everything it grasps to a mere social construct. The postmodernist then describes how these socially constructed categories are used to suppress certain groups in society and believes that in order to liberate these groups, the categories themselves must be destroyed.

Yet postmodernism contains one fatal error in its bid for freedom; it fails to recognise that the value of a category goes above and beyond its use for power. The category can, after all, pertain to some aspect of truth. 

Postmodernism is thus the fool's path to liberation - by destroying conceptual categories for the sake of liberation it robs the individual of the very tool necessary for actual liberation; it robs the individual of the conviction that thinking can reveal the truth. Without this conviction, the individual is forever trapped in a state of ignorance and dependency. 

Thus the postmodern liberation movement is destined to become the tyranny of perpetual revolution - where liberation is reduced to nothing but the freedom to destroy meaning where-ever it emerges.

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*nominalism is the doctrine that universals or general ideas (ie, all concepts) are mere names without any corresponding reality. For the nominalist, only particular objects exist, and properties, numbers, and sets are merely features of the way of considering the things that exist. Nominalism, according to Rudolf Steiner, found its fruition in the work of Emanuel Kant. Steiner's philosophical writing begins with an all-out critique and refutation of Kant. Steiner's philosophy, when properly understood, will provide the human soul with the means to avoid falling into the postmodernist self-contradictory world-view-trap.