Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: It occurs to me that Norm makes some good points about contextualist readings of texts here:

"Postmodernism isn't reducible to the banality which Marc gives for it: that every human perspective is a rooted, or situated, one; otherwise Karl Marx, just for one example, would have been a postmodernist, instead of claiming as he did to develop a scientific approach to history and political economy. In its authentic texts, rather than on Marc's street, postmodernism deprives us of all rational means for discriminating cognitively - that is, between explanations, theories, truth-claims - better from worse. This is a serious matter. And it also deprives us of all rational means for discriminating morally better from worse. Instead, these become matters of cultural context, perspectival preference, and authorial or personal edict."

Which is to say, if a text is nothing but the circumstances behind the guy who chooses to write it, and there's nothing objective in it at all, then there's really no difference between Karl Schmidt and Alexander Hamilton, except that their environments were different--and, to take it one step further, had you switched the men around in space and time, each could've produced the others' work.

Except this is insane, right? There's something about Reinhold Niebuhr that wouldn't allow him to be Machiavelli no matter what the milieu around him was, right? Perhaps I just haven't advanced enough in my studies to have grasped the nuances to this position.