Explaining Postmodernism

1. Postmodernism: The Anti-Enlightenment Synthesis

Postmodernism identifies its target—modernism and its realization in the Enlightenment and its legacy—and it mounts powerful arguments against all of the essential elements of modernism.

A radical rejection. Postmodernism emerged as a comprehensive philosophical and cultural movement, fundamentally opposing the Enlightenment project. It challenges the core tenets of modernism, which championed naturalism, reason, science, individualism, liberalism, and the idea of progress. Postmodernism sees these as untenable and culturally destructive.

Opposite premises. At its heart, postmodernism is anti-realist, asserting that an independently existing reality cannot be meaningfully discussed. It replaces objective knowledge with social-linguistic constructs, emphasizing subjectivity, conventionality, and the incommensurability of these constructions. Human nature is viewed as collectivist, with identities shaped by social groups, leading to inherent conflict and oppression.

Cultural manifestations. These philosophical premises translate into specific academic and cultural themes. In literary criticism, it rejects objective meaning; in law, it sees legal principles as indeterminate and driven by power; in education, it aims to instill social identity rather than cognitive reason. Culturally, it questions the Western canon, reinterprets historical figures like Columbus, and critiques capitalism, science, and technology as instruments of dominance.

2. Kant's Epistemological Revolution: Severing Reason from Reality

I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

The turning point. Immanuel Kant is identified as the most significant thinker of the Counter-Enlightenment, fundamentally altering the relationship between reason and reality. He concluded that noumenal reality (reality as it is in itself) is forever inaccessible to human reason, which is limited to understanding its own subjective products, the phenomenal world. This move was partly motivated by a desire to protect religious faith from the encroachments of Enlightenment reason.

Mind as constitutive. Kant argued that the knowing subject's identity and its causal processes are not transparent windows to reality but rather actively constitute our experience. He rejected the traditional realist assumption that the subject conforms to the object, proposing instead a "Copernican revolution" where the object must conform to the subject. This meant that universal and necessary features of our experience, like space, time, and the categories of understanding, are supplied by the mind itself, not derived from external reality.

A dangerous legacy. While Kant aimed to secure a realm for science (the phenomenal world) and faith (the noumenal world), his philosophy inadvertently laid the groundwork for extreme skepticism. By severing reason from objective reality and redefining truth as internal consistency rather than correspondence, Kant initiated a philosophical trajectory that would progressively abandon reason's objectivity, competence, autonomy, and universality, paving the way for later irrationalist and subjectivist movements.

3. The German Counter-Enlightenment: From Speculation to Irrationalism

The antinomies are not a problem for reason, contrary to Kant but rather the key to the whole universe.

Hegel's metaphysical leap. Following Kant, German philosophy diverged into speculative metaphysics and irrationalism. G.W.F. Hegel, dissatisfied with Kant's separation of subject and object, boldly asserted their metaphysical identity. For Hegel, the entire universe (the Absolute Subject) creates reality, and individual minds are mere portions of this process. His "dialectical reason" operates through contradictions, explicitly rejecting Aristotle's law of non-contradiction, and implies a strong relativism where truth evolves through clashes of opposing forces.

Irrationalism's rise. Alongside Hegel, an explicitly irrationalist strain emerged with thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. They shared a contempt for reason, viewing it as artificial and limiting. Instead, they championed non-rational avenues to reality:

• Schleiermacher: Feeling, especially religious feeling, as a mode of cognition.
• Kierkegaard: An "irrational leap of faith" into the absurd, "crucifying reason" to embrace religious commitment.
• Schopenhauer: Reality as a deeply irrational, conflictual "Will," knowable only through passionate feelings.
• Nietzsche: Reason as a tool of the weak, advocating for tapping into "unconscious instincts" and the "will to power."

A shared rejection. These post-Kantian developments, whether speculative or explicitly irrationalist, consistently undermined Enlightenment reason. They established themes of reality as conflictual/absurd, reason as impotent, and non-rational faculties as sources of deeper truth, setting the stage for postmodernism's core tenets.

4. Heidegger's Nihilistic Synthesis: Embracing Nothingness

If this [contradiction] breaks the sovereignty of reason in the field of enquiry into Nothing and Being, then the fate of the rule of ‘logic’ is also decided.

Integrating traditions. Martin Heidegger synthesized the speculative metaphysical and irrationalist epistemological strands of German philosophy. He adopted Kant's view of reason as superficial and words as obstacles to "Being," but, like Hegel, sought to get closer to Being. He embraced Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer's emphasis on feelings, particularly dark emotions like dread and guilt, as revelatory pathways.

Discarding logic. Heidegger famously posed the "Question of all questions": "Why is there even Being at all? Why is there not rather Nothing?" He argued that this question is repugnant to reason because it leads to logical absurdities, regardless of the answer. For Heidegger, this was not a flaw in the question but a sign of reason's impotence. He explicitly rejected logic as a "mere invention of schoolteachers," asserting that contradiction is a sign of profound truth.

Emotions as revelation. To access Being and Nothing, Heidegger advocated for an emotional journey. Extreme boredom, he argued, reveals "what-is in totality" by dissolving distinctions between beings. This leads to anxiety and dread, a "foretaste of one's own death," which, if embraced, reveals the ultimate truth: Being and Nothing are identical. This culminates in metaphysical nihilism, where "every being, so far as it is a being, is made out of nothing."

5. Analytic Philosophy's Self-Inflicted Wound: The Collapse of Reason

To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth.

A different path to skepticism. While Continental philosophy embraced irrationalism, the Anglo-American tradition, initially positivist and pro-science, also converged on skeptical conclusions. Influenced by Hume and Kant, Logical Positivism, originating in the Vienna Circle, declared traditional philosophical questions meaningless and confined philosophy to the "analysis" of scientific tools. However, this analytical project ultimately undermined its own foundations.

Erosion of objectivity. By mid-century, analytic philosophy concluded that:

• Perception is theory-laden: Our theories dictate what we see, trapping us in subjective systems.
• Concepts and logic are conventional: Logical and mathematical propositions are seen as arbitrary linguistic rules, divorced from empirical reality.
• No analytic/synthetic distinction: Quine argued all propositions are contingent, making logic a matter of "social practice."

Science loses its special status. With perception, language, and logic deemed conventional and subjective, science lost its claim to objective truth. Thinkers like Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific paradigms are socially subjective enterprises, and "truth" is merely a changing construct within these paradigms. Richard Rorty generalized this to anti-realism, dismissing "truth" as an "unprofitable topic." This left the Anglo-American intellectual world without a robust defense of reason or science, creating a vacuum that postmodernism would readily fill.

6. Socialism's Profound Crisis: Failed Predictions and Moral Disasters

The crisis for the far Left was that the logic and evidence were going against socialism.

Marxist predictions unravel. Classical Marxist socialism, formulated in the mid-19th century, made specific economic and moral claims that proved disastrously false. Economically, it predicted capitalism's collapse due to exploitation, leading to an impoverished, expanding proletariat and a shrinking middle class. By the early 20th century, these predictions failed:

• The proletariat's percentage declined, and their living standards improved.
• The middle class grew substantially in size and wealth.
• Capitalists also grew in number and wealth, not shrinking to a few.

The need for an elite. The non-revolutionary nature of the working class forced a re-evaluation. Theorists like the Fabians, Lenin, and Mao concluded that socialism required strong, elite leadership to impose change "from above," rather than waiting for a bottom-up proletarian revolution. This shift acknowledged the masses' perceived inability to grasp their "true" interests.

Moral collapse. The ultimate blow came in 1956 with Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" revealing Joseph Stalin's atrocities, followed by the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt. These events exposed the Soviet Union, the flagship socialist nation, as morally bankrupt, responsible for killing tens of millions. This shattered the Left's faith in socialism's moral superiority, forcing many intellectuals, including Foucault and Derrida, to abandon traditional communist affiliations.

7. The Left's Strategic Pivot: From Need to Equality and Irrationalism

Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.

Ethical reorientation. Faced with socialism's failures and capitalism's unexpected resilience, the Left adopted new strategies. The traditional ethical standard of "need" became problematic as capitalism demonstrably met basic needs. The new focus shifted to "equality," criticizing capitalism for disparities across various social dimensions, rather than absolute poverty. This led to:

• The "Godesberg Program" in Germany, emphasizing equality in business.
• A new definition of "poverty" as relative, not absolute.
• Focus on identity politics (sex, race, ethnicity) over universal class consciousness.

Wealth as evil. A more radical shift condemned capitalism precisely for its wealth creation. Herbert Marcuse argued that capitalist comforts "repressed" the proletariat, distracting them from revolution. Deep ecology extended this, viewing wealth production as inherently destructive to the environment and advocating for radical species equality, explicitly adopting Heidegger's anti-humanism.

Embracing irrationalism. The epistemological crisis merged with the political one. The Left, losing faith in reason's ability to prove socialism, embraced non-rational and irrationalist approaches. Mao's emphasis on sheer will, Gramsci's focus on subjective initiative, and the Frankfurt School's integration of Freudian psychology (Marcuse's "one-dimensional man" and "repressive tolerance") justified:

• Abandoning universalism for multiculturalism.
• Encouraging "irrational," "immoral," or "criminal" elements to "smash the system."
  This paved the way for the rise of Left terrorism in the 1960s and 70s, signaling a commitment to violence and irrational tactics.

8. Postmodernism as a Political Weapon: Rhetoric Over Truth

Postmodernism “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”

Language as a tool. For postmodernists, language is not a cognitive tool for understanding reality but a functional one, primarily for persuasion. This stems from their anti-realist epistemology, which asserts that language connects only to more language, never to a non-linguistic reality. Consequently, there's no objective standard to distinguish truth from falsehood, or literal from metaphorical.

Rhetoric without cognition. Richard Rorty explicitly states that he doesn't offer arguments against opposing vocabularies but rather tries to make his own "look attractive." This redefines rhetoric as persuasion in the absence of cognition. For many postmodernists, who view social relations as brutal conflicts, language becomes a weapon. This explains the harsh, often ad hominem nature of postmodern discourse, where effectiveness, not truth, is paramount.

A strategic response. When confronted with the historical failures of socialism, postmodernists don't engage in traditional truth-seeking (questioning premises, seeking alternatives, accepting moral responsibility). Instead, they attack the very idea of truth and rationality. Rorty's view that "a good Left... doesn't care much about our past sins" exemplifies this. Postmodernism, therefore, is a strategic use of skeptical epistemology to justify continued belief in socialism and to wage a rhetorical war against capitalism.

9. Machiavellian Postmodernism: Contradiction as a Tactic

Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy.

Strategic inconsistency. Postmodernism often exhibits glaring contradictions: claiming all truth is relative while asserting postmodernism's own truth, advocating for cultural equality while condemning Western culture, or denouncing dominance while practicing political correctness. This isn't accidental or a psychological lapse; it's a deliberate, Machiavellian strategy.

Relativism as a diversion. The relativist stance serves as a tactical maneuver. When losing a debate, appealing to "opinion" or "semantics" can deflect criticism and shift the focus from the political issue to epistemology. This buys time and disorients the opponent. The postmodernist doesn't necessarily believe in the relativism they espouse; it's a tool to undermine the opponent's confidence in objective standards.

Deconstruction as a weapon. Deconstruction, for example, is used as an educational strategy to dismantle opposing viewpoints. Kate Ellis, a radical feminist, uses deconstruction to undermine students' "liberal capitalist" values, creating a void to be filled with Leftist principles. The Sokal hoax demonstrated how postmodern journals prioritized political alignment over scientific rigor, publishing an article that was a parody of postmodern science criticism. This reveals that the political agenda is primary, and epistemological claims are instrumental.

10. Ressentiment and Nihilism: The Drive to Destroy the Enlightenment

When some men fail to accomplish what they desire to do they exclaim angrily, “May the whole world perish!”

The bitterness of failure. A darker, nihilistic streak runs through postmodernism, rooted in Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment—a curdled bitterness, envy, and self-loathing of the weak towards the strong. Having witnessed the repeated failures of socialism and the flourishing of the Enlightenment world (liberalism, capitalism, science, technology), postmodernists, invested in a failed outlook, experience profound anger and despair.

The desire for effacement. This psychological state manifests as a desire for destruction. Foucault, for instance, expressed a longing for his own erasure and the eventual "erasure" of mankind, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." Derrida spoke of embracing the "terrifying form of monstrosity" that heralds a new birth. This echoes Dadaist art, where Marcel Duchamp's urinal symbolized "Art is shit," a statement of meaninglessness and a desire to deface and destroy established artistic value.

Attacking moral worth. Postmodernism, unable to defeat the Enlightenment world in open confrontation, resorts to Iago-like tactics. It attacks the Enlightenment's core pride: its commitment to equality, justice, open-mindedness, and scientific achievement. By labeling it sexist, racist, dogmatic, and exploitative, postmodernists aim to undermine its moral worth and confidence. The goal is not to win a debate or build a better system, but to inflict damage, to destroy the opponent's psyche, even if it leads to nothing.

Last updated: March 28, 2026