Nowadays ideas named as Postmodernism and Post structuralism have found favour among many branches of knowledge. Literature, art, philosophy and other such subjects–not science–have received the light and breath of such departure.
I came across a passage where it is written that contrary to received knowledge, many terms of philosophical importance such as truth may not have a foundation as earlier supposed. This too is everyone’s experience. Even mathematics is not excluded from it. Ideas like the planet we live in are hanging in the air.
The limits of scholarship is at sight. If writing and reading are parts of scholarship, the question is how much anything is at the balance of appraisal. When IA Richards started circulating unsigned poems among his students,
‘Magazine poetasters were extravagantly praised, Donne, Hopkins, and Christina Rossetti firmly damned;’. This perhaps shows the emptiness of scholarship on the face of mass culture and mass response. Do the rules of the game fall flat on the supposed unawareness of the rules? Maybe there is no foundation as accepted by the light and breath giving scholars?
- Pradyot Mohapatra
