Is postmodernism philosophy?

ViveLaVie

My friend insists it isn't. Now I don't know anything about philosophy so I defer to those who do! What I've read online seems to indicate it is a philosophy. Is this the case?

18AD

Some of it is philosophy. But a lot of branches of it have been abused and lean towards saying whatever they want or accept that philosophy is in fact just a form of literature.

There's the famous Sokal article that was designed to show the total vacuousness of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

ViveLaVie

I see... He is arguing though that there is absolutely no philosophical foundation to it. Would he be wrong to dismiss it entirely?

18AD

ViveLaVie wrote: »

I see... He is arguing though that there is absolutely no philosophical foundation to it. Would he be wrong to dismiss it entirely?

Non-philosophical answer: Yes.

Philosophical answer: If he is basing this opinion on a few texts or commentaries on postmodernism then he is making a huge leap. Strictly speaking, if he hasn't read or is unfamiliar with all of postmodernism then he's making a deductive assumption. It remains to be seen what individual aspects he's talking about or the reasons why he thinks it is philosophically bankrupt.

ViveLaVie

18AD wrote: »

ViveLaVie wrote: »

I see... He is arguing though that there is absolutely no philosophical foundation to it. Would he be wrong to dismiss it entirely?

Non-philosophical answer: Yes.

Philosophical answer: If he is basing this opinion on a few texts or commentaries on postmodernism then he is making a huge leap. Strictly speaking, if he hasn't read or is unfamiliar with all of postmodernism then he's making a deductive assumption. It remains to be seen what individual aspects he's talking about or the reasons why he thinks it is philosophically bankrupt.

He basically said he had never heard of it and it can't therefore be a big thing in philosophy! :-) He assumed that it was a literary invention and that I was trying to pass it off as having more merit than it does.

Black Swan

I am currently studying Jacques Derrida. He has been labeled the Father of Deconstructionism, and a member of the postmodern philosophy camp. Derrida's focus was on method and critique, and thus far I have failed to discover a formally constructed Derridean philosophical framework.

This raises the question: Is such a well known figure within the philosophy domain in fact a philosopher?

This raises yet another question: Can a deconstructionist construct a postmodern philosophy?

And lastly, are we looking at philosophy and its philosophers in a way that evidences a Western bias; i.e., bound by conventional Western philosophy frameworks, not able to venture outside the box without being criticized accordingly?

Unfortunately Derrida died in 2004, or I might pose those questions to him over a cup of java, given that he taught at my university until he died. Now only his philosophical taibhse remains. He was a professor of philosophy at University of Paris Sorbonne, Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales, and held joint appointments at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California at Irvine.

Cannibal Ox

Postmodernism isn't really a coherent doctrine, so the idea of grouping together what were a disparate group of thinkers under that title has always been fiercely resisted by those thinkers. More then one of those who plied their trade under the title during the 60s, 70s and 80s were working on projects were the idea of categorising, ordering and building bodies of knowledge was analysed and critiqued. This, more often then not, could be traced back to the influence that Nietzsche had on the post-war French intellectual circles. In particular Nietzsche's arguments about truth were expounded on, often filtered through Heidegger, Klossowski, and Bataille's interpretation of Nietzsche (Jurgen Habermas has a wonderful, if a bit flawed interpretation of all this in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity). The important point of all this being that postmodernism as a school in philosophy was a paradoxical idea in relation to the work that thinkers who were put into that school were doing.

The follow on bit, is that what is called Postmodernism was a distinctly French explosion of ideas following the second world war. Tony Judt has made a nice argument about why French intellectuals came to dominate in post-war Europe which, in a very short way, was to do with East Europe's subsumption under the Iron Curtain, the cutting in half of Germany and the intellectual and cultural depression Germany fell into following the war. That's probably true, but, importantly, the education that French intellectuals had during the war and post-war years was far, far, far superior to anything else in Europe at the time. What sparked the near domination of philosophy by Germans during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries was the establishment of the modern university and a cultural attitude rooted in the idea of self development (bildung!). This is important because it shows not just the worth of a university system directed at teaching and research, but also what it can achieve.

What this all meant is that French intellectuals who came out during the 60s were far better equipped to go about what amounted to a complete critique of Western philosophic and scientific knowledge then anyone since the Romantics. More importantly, they were probably the last batch of intellectuals in any country equipped to do it. And they did. Which had massive consequences for the relationship between philosophy and science. You can read up on the 'science wars' on the internet, but suffice to say it was a period that neither side has really gotten over. This meant that, because they were going about a fairly total critique of everything they could get their hands on (the attempted murder of the macro) they attracted an awful lot of resistance. Which meant those thinkers labelled as postmodernists ended up getting a very bad reputation among scientists, other philosophers, and almost every other discipline in a university. Basically, they pissed off a lot of people. And, they weren't helped in this, by the explosion of disciples all across the world who, frankly, weren't as well equipped to go about the critique that was taking place, and wrote an awful lot of bull**** (and continue to do so).

This is all unfortunate. Because thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, etc, etc, made hugely important contributions to their fields, if they didn't actually establish their field in the first place. The most important of which, and the thing that makes the idea of a postmodern school paradoxical, was the absolute refusal to engage in setting up absolute systems. This, as far as I can work out, came out of World War 2 and the Nazis as well as the history of philosophical systems as establishing the truth (that word again) of things. They rejected the idea that you should set up a comprehensive system because they rejected the idea that you could set up a comprehensive system. This is fundamentally important because it distinguishes their philosophies as anti-totalitarian, as anti-authoritarian and as fundamentally concerned with the business of opening up conditions where the idea of freedom could be re-thought through an analysis of how systems were created.

So, that's a very long post about why postmodernism isn't really postmodernism because the ideas that came out of thinkers called postmodernists rejected the very idea of having a coherent system that could be called postmodernism. The consequences of which, and the answer to your friends question, is that the question is this or is that this, is not a good question and, moreover, is a phenomena of human beings that itself needs to be analysed in order to try and understand human beings and their obsession with defining one thing as true and another as not true and the consequences that has had on human beings. Which brings us all the way back to Nietzsche and the the challenge he posed with:

WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will—until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem?

...

The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

philologos

ViveLaVie wrote: »

My friend insists it isn't. Now I don't know anything about philosophy so I defer to those who do! What I've read online seems to indicate it is a philosophy. Is this the case?

Yes, it is. It's a horribly self-contradictory philosophy though. In short, it is the truth that there is no truth. There was no philosophy more painful to study than postmodernism. In some ways I guess your friend is right, it could be an anti-philosophy. Philosophy is the love of wisdom (philo - love, sophia - wisdom), but in a sense postmodernism is a concession that there is no real wisdom to be had because there's no such thing as a tangible objective truth to be grasped.

I find that postmodernism and existentialism have an interesting relationship. Albeit one doesn't of necessity lead to another, they are related in so far as they both concede that knowing the truth about reality is in some way impossible.

krd

I think of the term post-modern in a broad sense/broad church.

It's not a philosophy in the definitive sense, but a category. Like the Enlightenment, was not a coherent single philosophy.

You could define post-modernism as the end of the Enlightenment. Usually for the broad definition, the post-modernist period begins at the discovery of Auschwitz, or the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. It's when it's recognised that modernism is genuinely problematic. That it is not necessarily progressive. Or more pessimistically, that all progress impossible, and we're simply going around in circles - Sisyphean circles. Post-war French Existentialists would be legitimately post-modern, but you generally will not hear of them being referred to as post-modern - especially in a university course.

John Gray would be post-modern. Take his book "Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia".

So, it's a really broad church. Personally, I wouldn't rate Derrida. I don't think he had much to say, and anything he did have to say someone else had said better.

countrynosebag

at the risk of being given a disheartening response i still will say..
i understood postmodernism as a complete denial of specialisation or compartmentalisation in the way of there are no links of common ground between them all
so, modernism is specialisms writ large and post modernity returns to the thinking that knowledge(s)
are interlinked and interchangeable to a limited degree
so a medical person will also have to be aware of ethics, philosophy, mathematics etc.
nothing is absolute.