ABSTRACT
What we have come only very recently to think of as philosophical postmodernism is the final, perhaps the most intemperate, stage of a long reaction to the central doctrines of Enlightenment thought. Modern philosophy, and with it the contemporary idea of the natural sciences, hence the idea of modernity itself, stems from the thought of the Enlightenment (Habermas 1987: Lecture I). This is why one cannot properly understand the ideas that constitute postmodernism unless one also understands the central tenets of Enlightenment philosophy. And in order to understand this, one has to try to understand how European history and European philosophy come together in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One has to think of the dreadful power of kings and of the medieval and Renaissance church, and one has to try to remember (and imagine) what life was like in a feudal world where the aristocracy had the power of life and death over most people and where the church could consign the unfaithful not just to persecution and misery on earth, but to eternal damnation. This was a society, based on rigid metaphysical and epistemological beliefs: the Earth was the center of the universe, blessed by God, who not only empowered kings, bishops and popes, but who afforded them privileged sources of knowledge not available to ordinary minds, all of which could be challenged only on threat of pains too great to comprehend. It gradually transpired – first with Copernicus’s challenge to Ptolemy and later on
with Galileo – that the heavens themselves refused to obey the received version of God’s will. The Earth, far from being the center of the universe, was not even the center of the local planetary system. Astronomy seemed to show that the divine plan, whatever it was, was much bigger, much more diffuse, and much less concerned with “God’s Earth” and “God’s creatures” than the church would ever be willing to concede. Hence, by the time of the sixteenth-century Renaissance, there was a move away from
an uncritical acceptance of the worldview that had been dogmatically proclaimed by the church (with alterations and emendations) for nearly 1,400 years. There was now a growing emphasis on the importance of the rational capacities of the individual, and on natural ways of coming to know and understand. Mathematics, deductive
and inductive reasoning, and empirical observation came gradually and imperceptibly to be held in greater esteem than some of the doctrines of the Christian church. Prayers, it seemed, could not move very much at all, let alone mountains; levers and fulcrums, and a growing understanding of the laws of dynamics, could and did. The Enlightenment emphasized the rational powers of the individual: the capacity
of all people to reason, in the process to discover the truth, and so to determine autonomously what was or was not morally required of them. In this way, insight, knowledge and understanding were no longer the province of a privileged few; the Enlightenment emphasis on a shared human nature had effectively democratized rationality, knowledge, understanding and moral comprehension. Nor were truths hidden from us: if Hobbes and Locke are to be believed, literal language can convey these to us (Hobbes 1962: 13, 22; Locke 1961: vol. 2, 105-6), so that any ordinary human being can achieve a well-grounded understanding of the world, provided only that we use those natural ways of coming to know that are part of our shared human nature. Truth, rationality, the possibility of natural (rather than supernatural) sources
of knowledge, the capacity of individuals to understand, to decipher, to invent, discover, discern, and so judge independently of authority, were and remain the perennial themes of modern (Enlightenment) philosophy. What is now called postmodern philosophy begins with the denial of some of these themes in the late nineteenth century. The term itself, we should note, was the invention not of philosophers but of artists. According to Charles Jencks, its earliest appearance “extends to the 1870s when it was used by the British artist, James Watkins Chapman” (cited in Appignanese and Garrett 1998: 3). But it was a term that was used by philosophers only as a result of the growing influence in America of French post-structuralists or deconstructionists like Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard. Even so, there can be no doubt that the tendency in human thought marked by the term “postmodernism” predates the first appearance of this term among philosophers. Typically, philosophical postmodernism is critical of the idea that the truth is
attainable, if by that is meant that it is possible to determine and so come to know how things really are, in and of themselves, by using our natural faculties. Since one cannot have unmediated access to things themselves, to brute facts, language is not constrained by an extralinguistic world; rather “the play of signs” creatively constructs what we mistakenly believe to be a world of brute reality. Thus we find in the work of Jacques Derrida a well-known attack on both the “metaphysics of presence” and the “myth of logocentrism”: on the ideas, that is, that reality itself, real objects, real meanings can be directly present to us, and on the idea that these presences constrain the way in which people use language (Derrida 1974: 49ff.). Postmodernism is critical, too, of the idea that there is or could be an unconstructed
human nature that is shared by all human beings and that affords them the capacity to be rational. Far from being a natural endowment, rationality is seen as historically and culturally constructed. Indeed, appeals to reason and rationality, far from being an appeal to some neutral, widely shared arbiter of human practices and judgments, is the product of the common human desire to control others (Nietzsche 1987; Foucault 1989; Rabinow 1984: 3-29), and has nothing at all to do with a naturally ordained and enlightening human capacity.
