Life is a relational poem! If we turn it into an optimization problem, then we are fucked! I don't know how else to say that! I don't know how you will understand this. I guess it depends on whether you have a dominating optimization plan.
We should look at Schopenhauer and the Vedic scholars of the Upanishads, with special reference to the meanings in the words Maya, Atman and Brahman. And when we have managed to do that we should look at Leela.
Maya is the illusion that objects are separate divided and isolated from each other, what Schopenhauer called indviduationis. Atman equals the deepest individual soul which when Schopenhauer stared into his, he saw Will. This Atman - Will - is identical to Brahman which for Schopenhauer and the Vedic scholars of the Upanishads is a universal reality, a single blind energy of the cosmos, that makes Maya, the idea that all objects are separate, a grand illusion in the human mind. And indeed when a person feels empathy, Vedic scholars would argue, that person is tearing away the veil of Maya.
Schopenhauer was a brilliant, miserable, unhappy hermit. His joy at reading at least some of the Upanishads, which he read in a Latin translation, gave him hope and a way to see himself in a Will as a blind, horrible monster that ate itself the only escape from which was to deny the flesh, isolate the self, close the curtains sit in a room and write. Otherwise life was a terrible tragedy of pointless striving and pain.
What Schopenhauer missed was the Vedic understanding of Leela, the divine, playful, sport of consciousness. Or as Tagore might have suggested to Einstein, that while everything was one, reality remained a shifting symphony of relationships in which a pluralism is the source of enthusiasm and joy, the landscape too vast for one script.
Sabot is French for the clogs poor, rural country people used to wear. The word sabot was a derogatory term, people who wore wooden clogs, unsophisticated, slow and clumsy.
Inevitably clog wearers were seen as less connected to the wider society, they were suspicious of progress, anything that looked like change was evil. They were dense, back row inbreds. Obviously along with their lack of enthusiasm, their dumb insololent mouth breathing, they'd toss their wooden clogs into the machinery of the new industrial age in their refusal to accept progress. And that's exactly how some might view the postmodernist use of irony.
The main criticism was that postmodernism had nothing to believe in, no great theory, they were ungrounded, cynical and not at all cool in the born again sense. They were Goths with tooth aches.
Postmodernism was also a gateway drug to being a beatnik, or a hipster, a hippy, a street corner sign carrier, the end of the world is nigh and eat the flour live in the bag sort of thing. And, apparently, postmodernism was yet another gateway drug for Fake News, those random collections of lies, conjectures, hopes and dreams presented as Truth.
Postmodernism is and was the understanding that reality and knowledge are subjective, constructed by language, culture and personal experience rather than objective facts. Postmodernist's disavow grand narratives and are unmoved by the idea of universal truths in an essentially fluid universe.
Would an understanding that placed a universal, anonymous, unfeeling will into the fabric of the universe provide the transcendental signified that grounds the postmodernist understanding in a quantum wave begin to relieve postmodernism of the criticsms against it?
My answer is a flat "No!" And by the way wooden clogs are extremely comfortable, good for the feet.
The Celts never took to writing. Even though writing was a thing they knew about, unlike Sumerians they chose to continue maintaining their traditions orally, and as it happens they enjoyed fighting, a chance to prove worthiness so you get the sense that agreements were matters of honor and decency, not contracts. A visceral matter, not a search for loopholes in the law, or lost homework. Cheating was as clear and apparent in those days as it is today, but today glory is gold plate, the difference between winning and losing avoids the awkwardness of honor and keep in mind bear baiting, a favorite sport of both King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, is currently an illegal blood sport.
