Philosophy 101, #15: What is Post-Modernism and how does it contrast with Modernism?

Image 1: Marcel Duchamp's post-modern art, Fountain.

As mentioned in my previous post on modernism, modernism’s foundations are located in its profound confidence in reason and science and revolt against the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. This constituted the Enlightenment and, all in all, modern philosophy made individuals become freer, wealthier, live longer, and enjoy more material comfort. Postmodernism rejects the reason and individualism that the Enlightenment world depends upon. It ends up critiquing objective truth, science, liberal capitalism, and a classical liberal government.

What do post-modern philosophers have in common?

Like modernism, post-modernism has a large variety of thinkers from different academic disciplines and competing schools. This makes it difficult to characterize it in such a way that would be fair to its diversity. Nonetheless, there is a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism.

Figure 1: Pre-modernism vs Modernism vs Post-modernism.

Social subjectivism

Post-modernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is, what counts as knowledge, and how people arrive at their knowledge or perspectives of the world. Instead of experience and reason, post-modernists put (linguistic) social subjectivism at the center.

Anti-realism

Post-modernists are anti-realists, which means that they believe that the world is mind-dependent. To demonstrate the contrast between a realist and an anti-realist view of the world, consider the utterance of “snow is white”. The realist believes that there are properties in the world that can be discovered. The property of snow itself is white, and this property exists independently of our personal interpretation. The anti-realist believes that there is no objective characteristic of ‘white’ in the world, and that it’s only experience that we refer to when we say that “snow is white”.

Cultural relativism

From a cultural perspective, it represents a cultural relativism in which all cultures are placed on equal footing and in which all reality, truth and value are creations of social constructions.

Collectivist and egalitarian ethics

Instead of valuing the ethical individualism of modernists, the post-modernists call for communalism, solidarity, and egalitarian restraints.

Socialism

They prefer socialism as a political and economical doctrine over liberal capitalism.

Image 2: Modernism vs Post-modernism.

Post-modern activism

In addition, they have a disdain for reason and an obsession to explain world relations in terms of power. As Jean-Francois Lyotard states:

Reason and power are one and the same.

Influenced by the post-modernist philosopher, Jacques Derrida, post-modern literary criticism maintains that objectivity and truth can be deconstructed. Literary criticism becomes a subjective play in which the reader pours subjective associations into the text or in which the deconstructed text reveals the author’s race, sex, or class interests.

In education, the post-modernists’ method of molding is linguistic, and so language is used that will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual, and class identity. The world is seen as oppressed by whites, males, and the rich. They focus on the historical crimes of whites, males, and the rich, and as a matter of social justice emphasize on the achievements of non-whites, females, and the poor. The conflict between men and women is brutal. As Andrea Dworin expresses it,

The normal fuck by a normal man is taken tob e an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation.

Women have been chattels to men as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women. He owns you; he fucks. The fucking conveys the quality of ownership: he owns you inside out.

Where do we find post-modernists?

The philosophy of post-modernism has greatly influenced the humanities – philosophy, gender studies, post-colonial studies, social justice studies, sociology, anthropology, education etc.

They look for philosophical support in such post-modernist thinkers like Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. Those figures in turn, look for philosophical support at Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx.

Reference

Hicks, S. (2004). Explaining post-modernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

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