Nothing People Do Is Natural
This is the first and greatest commandment, maybe 60% of
PoMo.
The big trouble with this slogan is that you may not take it
seriously enough. I designed it to be simple and short and not to
fly directly in the face of common sense, so the result may sound
rather trivial: "Of course! everything people do is artificial,
not natural." That interpretation hardly scratches the surface.
Let me expand it a little to show how strong it is:
ABSOLUTELY nothing people do is natural, NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEAN
BY 'NATURAL.'
Of course somebody could always make up some brand-new meaning of
"natural" to get around such a sloppy informal definition, so let
me spell out some of the usual meanings of the N-word that are
relevant:
(1) artificial, untouched by human hands;
(2) material, made up of protons, neutrons, et cetera;
(3) scientific, studied by Nat. Sci. methods;
(4) based on a built-in nature or essence;
(5) unsurprising, "just what anybody would expect";
(6) normative, normal, rational;
(7) in accord with the Tao;
(8) adapted to the environment by "natural selection."
There may well be more received meanings of "natural" to exclude,
but that's enough to begin with. Everything people do, with no
exceptions at all, is none of the above. No person ever has or
ever will do anything that falls into any of these
categories.
That claim is at least 60% of PoMo. I've already explained that
it includes "antifoundationalism," which I have worded definition
(4) in particular to cover. The PoMos sometimes denounce
"essentialism" as well as "foundationalism," and hopefully (4)
manages to tie together foundations and essences and "natures" in
a satisfactory way. Although the PoMos are thus at least eight
times over anti-natural, they rarely, if ever, have anything to do
with the "supernatural." What they have to do with is mostly
"culture," meaning everything people do. Postmodernism is
sometimes called "culture criticism."
How very strong this claim is must be explained in another way
also: you should recognize that knowledge is always something
people do and therefore never natural in any of the above senses.
On the other hand, you don't have to suppose that nothing in the
world exists except what people do. Some PoMos get carried away
and seem to commit themselves to that solipsistic philosophical
proposition, but I think they're either confused or just trying to
annoy the Philistines when they say so.
I have claimed that PoMo is new. The novelty, though, lies in the
extremism or consistency of its antinaturalism, not in particular
observations. There are lots of earlier thinkers who considered
some of the things people do to be unnatural in all or some of the
above senses, but it is only applying that sort of judgment to
everything cultural all across the board that constitutes PoMo.
People who dislike it accuse it of "relativism," but that is quite
wrong, for PoMo is nothing if not absolute. (As a sort of
exercise, you might work out why being absolute as opposed to
relative does not commit us to foundations or essences or
naturalism and thus violate the very principle we're
discussing.)