It may seem a bit strange to have a whole category devoted to opposing what appears to be, basically, a school of academic philosophy (and a mostly extinct one at that). Certainly, Hegelianism, say, or Russell’s analytic philosophy had some impact on the world outside academia, but I can’t imagine either of those meriting a category if this website had been written a century earlier (presumably as a book). Postmodernism, though, is aimed not at continuing the long thread of philosophical inquiry in Western civilization, but rather at pulling up the foundations of Western civilization. THAT deserves opposition!
Postmodernism has been mentioned in a couple of earlier posts, mainly here. In that post, we used Pluckrose and Lindsay’s basic exposition, which we recall here for convenience –
They give the two main principles of postmodernism as:
- Knowledge: Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism.
- Politics: A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.
They then state that it has four major themes:
- blurring of boundaries: a deprecation of the use of categories – objective/subjective, truth/belief, man/other animals, man/machine, health/sickness, sex and gender, etc.
- power of language: any attempt at objective truth becomes simply a linguistic construction of chains of “signifiers” with no real external referents.
- cultural relativism: everything is relative to the culture in which it is embedded; discussion of another culture is impossible and discussion of one’s own culture is hopeless except as one is oppressed or marginalized.
- loss of the individual and the universal: the concept of universal human nature is naïve and the concept of an autonomous individual is a myth; only small local groups or tribes positioned in the same way relative to power are worth serious consideration.
The earlier discussion centered on the specific influence postmodernism had on late Critical Theory (also called Applied Postmodernism, Critical Social Justice and Contemporary Critical Theory). For this category, though, we need to examine postmodernism more broadly for its potential impact on USA version 2. Obviously, I don’t know precisely what the intellectual landscape will be at that time, but I would guess that there is some similar ideology performing a similar job: making nihilism academically respectable. I would be surprised if postmodernism itself is still around, but my suspicion is that the critiques of postmodernism now will also stand against the future “academic nihilism du jour.”
I will mention in passing that I am critiquing philosophical postmodernism, not artistic postmodernism (or even musical postmodernism). There are relationships among all these ideas, but it is important not to conflate postmodernism itself with its various aesthetic relatives (some of which are distant enough to be benign). It’s important for USA version 2 to have bulwarks in place against philosophical postmodernism, but not, for example, against the music of Charles Ives, Bill Bolcom or Arvo Pärt (each of whom has been described as “postmodern” using various criteria – I’m pretty sure the Graceful Ghost Rag is no danger to freedom-loving citizens of the future).