Systematics and postmodernism

The will of order is strong within all of us. Facing with a chaotic world, we'd come out with all sorts of systems to classify and to instill order to it. In science, systematist come out with classification systems to relate one organism with another. Hence, while Felis concolour and Felis sylvestrie are both under have similarity to warrant them as members of the feline family, the classification is at most an academic exercise, for both the panther and the dosmetic cats won't behave as if they're from the same family and coexist together.

In arts, we look for ideas and group them together, as though they're part of a certain movement. For instance, we have happily dissected classical music into different eras - medieval, renaissance, baroque, classicalism, romantics, 20th century, contemporary - based on the temporal factor, as well as the dominating trend. However, a thinking composer would not limit his/her expression to comply to that dominating thought, and works across styles are commonplace. Yet, because of systematics, we insist that those works are the "abnormal" few, and simply insisted on our perception that the composers oughtand should conform to the norm.

We love to classify things. Not only that, once we have establish a certain classification, we remain resistant to changes or suggestions that would or could make the current classification obsolete. It's perhaps our folly in the first place to think that the multitudinal aspects of the world could be pigeonholed nicely, to instill order in chaos. And perhaps our yearn for security makes us all the more resistant to this seemingly orderliness. A very modernist notion Imust say.

Yes, most of us are modernist. We reasoned things out and established thoughts that make sense of the world; forming knowledge of truth to our world. Yet, how many of us actually bothered to question about this knowledge that we'd gained through our reasoning? Have we questioned about the legitimacy of these knowledge, that's constructed on certain fundamental truths? What are these fundamental truthsanyway? Why should we assume these are the truths anyway?

I'm never a fan of mathematics, but non-Euclidean geometry has been an awakening call to postmodernism to me. Similar to Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry follows the postulates that Euclidean geometry follows, except for one - the summation of the three interior angles within a triangle does NOT equate to two right angles. It's amazing that a change of one building block, resulted in proofs that detract so much from the Euclidean geometry, so much so that Pythagorus theorem does not surface at all. A small challenge on the assumption of the truth that Euclidean geometry based upon, resulted in a whole field of non-Euclidean geometry that's useful in calculation of the surface of a globe, and for pilots to calculate the shortest path viaflight from point A to point B.

Postmodernism is not exactly a movement. It's a thought that have sprout out simultaneously in numerous field, questioning the founding principles which we based our knowledge upon. Whether it's an "-ism" in the first place is quite debatable. However, the spirit of postmodernism is simply the questioning of things we'd always taken for granted, take it down to elements, understand it, and put it inplace all over again.

Sounds senseless? Yes, it does. But a microcosm of a microcosm, enable us to see things even more clearly. It also makes one more cynical in things, and complicated live pretty much. Hey! If it's not hard, it'snot worth doing isn't it?