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Postmodern philosophy

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Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.[1][2] Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like différance, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and epistemic certainty.[3] Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values.[1]

Jean-François Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition, writing "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta narratives...."[4] where what he means by metanarrative is something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the conceptualization of truth that metanarratives presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers in general argue that truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal and that truth is always partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain.[3][failed verification]

Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, good from bad, and presence from absence.[5][6]

Subjects

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On Literature

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Postmodern philosophy has had strong relations with the substantial literature of critical theory,[7] although some critical theorists such as Jurgen Habermas[8] have opposed postmodern philosophy.

On The Enlightenment

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Many postmodern claims are critical of certain 18th-century Enlightenment values. Some postmodernists tolerate multiple conceptions of morality, even if they disagree with them subjectively.[9][10] Postmodern writings often focus on deconstructing the role that power and ideology play in shaping discourse and belief. Postmodern philosophy shares ontological similarities with classical skeptical and relativistic belief systems.[1]

On Truth and Objectivity

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According to David Novitz, philosophical postmodernism challenges the notion that truth can be achieved.[11] The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that "The assumption that there is no common denominator in 'nature' or 'truth' ... that guarantees the possibility of neutral or objective thought" is a key assumption of postmodernism.[12] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it as "a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning."[13] The National Research Council has characterized the belief that "social science research can never generate objective or trustworthy knowledge" as an example of a postmodernist belief.[14] Jean-François Lyotard's seminal 1979 The Postmodern Condition stated that its hypotheses "should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the questions raised". Lyotard's statement in 1984 that "I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives" extends to incredulity toward science. Jacques Derrida, who is generally identified as a postmodernist, stated that "every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace".[3] There are strong similarities with post-modernism in the work of Paul Feyerabend; Feyerabend held that modern science is no more justified than witchcraft, and has denounced the "tyranny" of "abstract concepts such as 'truth', 'reality', or 'objectivity', which narrow people's vision and ways of being in the world".[15][16][17] Defenders of postmodernism state that many descriptions of postmodernism exaggerate its antipathy to science; for example, Feyerabend denied that he was "anti-science", accepted that some scientific theories are superior to other theories (even if science itself is not superior to other modes of inquiry), and attempted conventional medical treatments during his fight against cancer.[15][18][19]

Influences

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Postmodern philosophy was greatly influenced by the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century and other early-to-mid 20th-century philosophers, including the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, cultural critic Roland Barthes, theorist Georges Bataille, and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.[20]

Postmodern philosophy also drew from the world of the arts and architecture, particularly Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and artists who practiced collage.[citation needed]

Postmodern philosophers

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Michel Foucault

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Michel Foucault is often cited as an early postmodernist although he personally rejected that label. Following Nietzsche, Foucault argued that knowledge is produced through the operations of power, and changes fundamentally in different historical periods.[citation needed]

Jean Baudrillard

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Baudrillard, known for his simulation theory, argued that the individual's experience and perception of reality derives its basis entirely from media-propagated ideals and images. The real and fantasy become indistinguishable, leading to the emergence of a wide-spread simulation of reality.[21]

Jean François Lyotard

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The writings of Lyotard were largely concerned with the role of narrative in human culture, and particularly how that role has changed as we have left modernity and entered a "postindustrial" or postmodern condition. He argued that modern philosophies legitimized their truth-claims not (as they themselves claimed) on logical or empirical grounds, but rather on the grounds of accepted stories (or "metanarratives") about knowledge and the world—comparing these with Wittgenstein's concept of language-games. He further argued that in our postmodern condition, these metanarratives no longer work to legitimize truth-claims. He suggested that in the wake of the collapse of modern metanarratives, people are developing a new "language-game"—one that does not make claims to absolute truth but rather celebrates a world of ever-changing relationships (among people and between people and the world).[22]

Jacques Derrida

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Derrida, the father of deconstruction, practiced philosophy as a form of textual criticism. He criticized Western philosophy as privileging the concept of presence and logos, as opposed to absence and markings or writings.[23]

Richard Rorty

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In the United States, a well-known pragmatist and self-proclaimed postmodernist was Richard Rorty. An analytic philosopher, Rorty believed that combining Willard Van Orman Quine's criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction with Wilfrid Sellars's critique of the "Myth of the Given" allowed for an abandonment of the view of the thought or language as a mirror of a reality or an external world. Further, drawing upon Donald Davidson's criticism of the dualism between conceptual scheme and empirical content, he challenges the sense of questioning whether our particular concepts are related to the world in an appropriate way, whether we can justify our ways of describing the world as compared with other ways. He argued that truth was not about getting it right or representing reality, but was part of a social practice and language was what served our purposes in a particular time; ancient languages are sometimes untranslatable into modern ones because they possess a different vocabulary and are unuseful today. Donald Davidson is not usually considered a postmodernist, although he and Rorty have both acknowledged that there are few differences between their philosophies.[24][25]

Douglas Kellner

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Douglas Kellner insists that the "assumptions and procedures of modern theory" must be forgotten. Kellner analyzes the terms of this theory in real-life experiences and examples.[26] Kellner uses science and technology studies as a major part of his analysis; he urges that the theory is incomplete without it. The scale is larger than just postmodernism alone; it must be interpreted through cultural studies where science and technology studies play a large role. The reality of the September 11 attacks on the United States of America is the catalyst for his explanation. In response, Kellner continues to examine the repercussions of understanding the effects of the 11 September attacks. He questions if the attacks are only able to be understood in a limited form of postmodern theory due to the level of irony.[27] The conclusion he depicts is simple: postmodernism, as most use it today, will decide what experiences and signs in one's reality will be one's reality as they know it.[28]

Criticism

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Main article: Criticism of postmodernism

Some criticism responds to postmodernist skepticism towards objective reality and claims that truth and morality are relative, including the argument that this relativism is self-contradictory. In part in reference to postmodernism, conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't."[29] In 2014, the philosophers Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn wrote: "the statement that 'No unrestricted universal generalizations are true' is itself an unrestricted universal generalization. So if relativism in any of its forms is true, it's false."[30] Some responses to postmodernist relativism argue that, contrary to its proponents' usual intentions, it does not necessarily benefit the political left.[30][31] For example, the historian Richard J. Evans argued that if relativism rejects truth, it can legitimize far-right pseudohistory such as Holocaust denial.[31]

Further lines of criticism are that postmodernist discourse is characterized by obscurantism, that the term itself is vaguely defined, and that postmodernism lacks a clear epistemology. The linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky accused postmodernist intellectuals of failing to meaningfully answer questions such as "what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc.?"[32]

The French psychotherapist and philosopher, Félix Guattari, rejected its theoretical assumptions by arguing that the structuralist and postmodernist visions of the world were not flexible enough to seek explanations in psychological, social, and environmental domains at the same time.[33] In an interview with Truls Lie, Jean Baudrillard noted: "[Transmodernism, etc.] are better terms than "postmodernism". It is not about modernity; it is about every system that has developed its mode of expression to the extent that it surpasses itself and its own logic. This is what I am trying to analyze." "There is no longer any ontologically secret substance. I perceive this to be nihilism rather than postmodernism."[34]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ a b c Duignan, Brian. "postmodernism (philosophy) (Encyclopædia Britannica)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  2. ^ "Definition of POSTMODERN". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 7 April 2018.
  3. ^ a b c Aylesworth, Gary (2015). "Postmodernism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  4. ^ Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press.
  5. ^ Sim, Stuart. Routledge Companion to Postmodernism
  6. ^ Taylor, Victor and Charles Winquist. Encyclopedia of Postmodernism "Binary Opposition"
  7. ^ Problematizing Global Knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 23 (2–3). Sage, 2006
  8. ^ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211201023207/https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
  9. ^ Baghramian, Maria and Carter, J. Adam, "Relativism Archived 18 March 2019 at the Wayback Machine", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
  10. ^ Blackburn, Simon (2005). "Postmodernism". The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford University Press, UK. ISBN 9780198610137. In its poststructuralist aspects it includes a denial of... any fixed reality or truth or fact to be the object of enquiry.
  11. ^ The Poverty of Anti-realism Critical Perspectives on Postmodernist Philosophy of History. Lexington Books. p. 13.
  12. ^ Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Postmodernism, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N044-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/postmodernism/v-1 Archived 19 April 2018 at the Wayback Machine.
  13. ^ Aylesworth, Gary. "Postmodernism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. sep-postmodernism (Spring 2015 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 18 October 2024.
  14. ^ Council, National Research; Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and; Education, Center for; Research, Committee on Scientific Principles for Education (2002). Scientific Research in Education. National Academies Press. pp. 20, 25. ISBN 9780309082914.
  15. ^ a b Preston, John (2016). "Paul Feyerabend". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 19 April 2018.
  16. ^ Phillips, Denis Charles; Burbules, Nicholas C. (2000). Postpositivism and Educational Research. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 1. ISBN 9780847691227.
  17. ^ Kidd, Ian James (21 December 2016). "Was Feyerabend a Postmodernist?". International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 30 (1): 55–68. doi:10.1080/02698595.2016.1240463. S2CID 151746255. This article asks whether the philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend can be reasonably classified as postmodernist, a label applied to him by friends and foes alike.
  18. ^ Horgan, John. "Was Philosopher Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"?". Scientific American Cross-check (blog). Retrieved 19 April 2018.
  19. ^ Pierre, Elizabeth Adams St (July 2016). "Comment: "Science" Rejects Postmodernism". Educational Researcher. 31 (8): 25–27. doi:10.3102/0013189X031008025. S2CID 145216107.
  20. ^ Aylesworth, Gary (5 February 2015) [1st pub. 2005]. "Postmodernism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. sep-postmodernism (Spring 2015 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 12 May 2019.
  21. ^ Hannay, Alastair (2005). "Baudrillard, Jean". In Honderich, Ted (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 81.
  22. ^ Lyotard, Jean François, The Postmodern Condition, 1979, translated 1984, [1]
  23. ^ Derrida, Jacque, Of Grammatology, 1967, translated 1976, [2]
  24. ^ "An interview with Rorty". unc.edu. Retrieved 7 April 2018.
  25. ^ Davidson, D., 1986, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," Truth And Interpretation, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, afterwords.
  26. ^ Kellner, Douglas (1988). "Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems". Theory, Culture & Society. 5 (2–3): 239–269. doi:10.1177/0263276488005002003. ISSN 0263-2764. S2CID 144625142.
  27. ^ Lule, Jack (2001). "The Postmodern Adventure [Book Review]". Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 78 (4): 865–866. doi:10.1177/107769900107800415. S2CID 221059611.
  28. ^ Danto, A. C. (1990). "The Hyper-Intellectual". The New Republic. Vol. 203, no. 11/12. pp. 44–48.
  29. ^ Scruton, Roger (1996). Modern philosophy: an introduction and survey. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-024907-9.
  30. ^ a b Sidky, H. (2018). "The War on Science, Anti-Intellectualism, and 'Alternative Ways of Knowing' in 21st-Century America". Skeptical Inquirer. 42 (2): 38–43. Archived from the original on 6 June 2018. Retrieved 6 June 2018.
  31. ^ a b Evans, Richard (1997). In Defence of History. London: Granta Books. pp. 232–3, 238–9. ISBN 9781862073951.
  32. ^ "Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism". bactra.org.
  33. ^ Guattari, Felix (1989). "The three ecologies" (PDF). New Formations (8): 34. Structuralism, and subsequently postmodernism, have accustomed us to a vision of the world in which human interventions - concrete politics and micropolitics - are no longer relevant. The withering away of social praxis is explained in terms of the death of ideologies, or of some supposed return to universal values. Yet those explanations seem to me highly unsatisfactory. The decisive factor, it seems to me, is the general inflexibility of social and psychological praxes - their failure to adapt - as well as a widespread incapacity to perceive the erroneousness of partitioning off the real into a number of separate fields. It is quite simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate. Indeed, if we continue - as the media would have us do - to refuse squarely to confront the simultaneous degradation of these three areas, we will in effect be acquiescing in a general infantilization of opinion, a destruction and neutralization of democracy. We need to 'kick the habit' of sedative consumption, of television discourse in particular; we need to apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses of the three ecologies.
  34. ^ "The art of disappearing – BAUDRILLARD NOW". 22 January 2021. Archived from the original on 22 January 2021. Retrieved 2 March 2022.

Further reading

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  • Charles Arthur Willard Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. University of Chicago Press. 1996.
  • John Deely "Quid sit Postmodernismus?," in Roman Ciapalo (ed.) Postmodernism and Christian philosophy, 68–96, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. 1997.
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