If you have asked yourself once before, “what is postmodernism,” you are in the same boat as the rest of us. The term “postmodern” is thrown around a lot these days often without qualifiers. It is assumed that you know what it means or perhaps that nobody really knows what it means – in that case it’s a rather useless term. For some reason, I thought we used words to convey meaning to another person – hence intersubjectivity, but I suppose with the term “postmodern” that does not apply. I have heard postmodern used, or seemingly so, to refer to a particular worldview, a historical current or era, and even used synonymously with relativity – another term that needs certain qualifications. In short it is used to refer to something that is other than and after modernism. So it seems that for postmodernism to be understood, what ever it is that immediately preceded it must be clarified first. Modernism is more or less generally understood, though I doubt if I could summarize it here in a few words. To decipher the meaning of postmodernism, it might be easiest to examine the tapestry thread by thread. But postmodern threads were once modern in color and must be considered accordingly.
Let’s think of modernism as a philosophical project and cultural attitude involving both certain optimisms and severe criticisms of the way things were. There was an optimistic press toward universal understanding and a critical reevaluation of religion, among other things. They sang their philosophic tunes with relish. “We can know what actually is! And we shall leave the archaic superstitions by the wayside at last!” Before I digress into sounding similar to an introduction to the history of philosophy, let’s leave modernism with these thoughts: modernism made certain assumptions – as do we all no matter when we are living – that were treated as essential. Their optimism perhaps clouded their already cloudy vision, and their arbitrary scrutiny of religion regarded religion as the dusty underpinnings of the uncivilized, uneducated, superstitious person. Perhaps, modern folks supposed that by exposing religion for what it is they might proceed past the impediment that is religion. “Religion has shackled people for long enough.” Thus, the moderns recreated. A person possesses reason; a person is good, and a person is autonomous. What then is stopping us from acquisitioning truth?
Though modernism – the ism that lives in the hearts of people and most notably the ideas of people that infect other people long after the original people have died – would not loosen its clutches on western civilization without a fight. But history has a way of being rather interesting, and just when a Goliath begins to seem unstoppable a little David comes along with a few pebbles and a sling. Only this time there were multiple Davids. I shall mention three.
The Melancholy Dane, Kierkegaard, wrote many things most of which I do not understand. He ridiculed cultural Christianity and nominalism. But what I find myself most interesting is his seemingly undying desire to sort out what it is “to be a person in the nineteenth century.” He indicated three spheres of existence and the pandemic of despair. A person is sick, and a person cannot be rid of it; this sickness only intensifies when a person tries to play doctor on himself and eradicate it.
Across the globe in the long winters of Russia, another David emerged, Dostoevsky. His writing career was marked and inspired by his cruel and cold exile in Siberia. Something happened there, and he was never the same. Resurrecting from the depths of exile, he showed a person to be a ghastly creature capable of the worst if given the opportunity; these images of sick humanity are in all of his novels. But in contrast, humanity is somehow also capable of some good – Raskolnikov is somehow a murderer and a charitable giver; Dmitri is a sensualist but he can see his own depravity. Oh but a person not only has the capacity for good and evil, but a person is more than a rational animal. “2+2 may equal 4” but “reason only satisfies the rational side of man’s nature.” A person is not a mechanism that needs only the proper modern oil; he is something else, something more, with the capacity for utmost corruption and good.
A fermenting devil who felt victory over the modern remnants was just a few pen scratches away, Nietzsche, steamed and scoffed at the world for its moral tomfoolery. I can imagine him saying, though more eloquently, “Those peons who speak of moral this and moral that are but picking their noses and winking at each other. That morality is the fabricated way of the weak. I shall rise above their inverted morality that was esteemed by their dead god. I am destiny...I am superman.”
I would not attribute the fall of modernism and the rise of postmodernism to any one of these fellows, though they each played their own part in their own way. These formidable revolutionaries, though revolutionaries they were, remained within certain modern assumptions. But they did dent or bruise certain modern anthropological assumptions. Humanity is more than rational; humanity is not ultimately good, and what is good anyway? What then is stopping humanity from acquisitioning truth?
So what is man? The paragon of animals? A freak? Something else?
This is a feeble description of an anthropological thread that ran through modernism and was countered by three Davids of the nineteenth century. But this is merely one thread. There are many others in the tapestry, but those are for another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment