The Implications of Postmodern Philosophies: Critiques and Defenses

This article and short (4 minute) film clip speak eloquently to these issues:  The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz

Negative Political Implications:
The problem with Post Modern theories is that if there is no universal Truth, how can anyone objectively criticize human acts such as the Holocaust, slavery, forced female genital mutilation…?  So on the surface, Postmodern perspectives disarm all  political philosophies, including the entire basis of liberal democracies like the United States that are based on the "self evident" principles of equality and freedom.  But these "self evident" principles, it perhaps turns out, have no more basis in objective "truth" than the basis of Nazism, the Taliban, Stalinism; they are simply another set of culturally bound ideologies.

Recall that traditionally, from an Enlightenment, Romantic, Marxist or religious context, art (including literature) served the purpose of examining and critiquing human folly and constructing possible solutions; traditionally, all art helped propel mankind toward some ideal.  Some say Postmodern creative work has given up this task and represents a culture utterly apathetic about progress, truth, love, equality etc.  Even Postmodern Power/Knowledge theory would suggest that Postmodern art is Bourgeois: it exists to further existing power structures and shore up the wall between the haves and the have-nots; it encourages the haves to ignore the have-nots and excludes those have-nots from the Enlightenment democratic dialogue. In other words, you have to be really comfortable and free to enjoy art that doesn't help you improve your position in life.  No one who is unhappy with their position in life is going to consume art that does not help them in their struggle for improvement.  Or, put another way, the hungry never celebrate nihilism.

Responses to These Implications: 
In response to this political Nihilism, though, Postmodern philosophers would argue the following:

a)      The claim that there is no universal single truth opens up the possibility of many types of useful perspectives: we can now see ideas for merit beyond faith or dogmatism: we can now, for example, examine the pragmatic implications (causes and effects) of liberal democracies vs. totalitarianism and judge each more objectively (this was Nietzsche's view: tearing down the old would open up new possibilities).

In other words: if there is no One Truth, there can now be many (small "t") contextual truths.

b)      This "many small truths" perspective offers more opportunities to solve social problems: the more ways we can see a problem, the more means we have of solving it (see below: Ideas vs. Facts).

c)      History suggests the One Truth method of solving social problems didn’t work anyway.  The history of mankind, one might argue, is in fact the history of men killing each other over their competing versions of One Truth.  The history of successful societies – the US, for example – are often the story of compromise, adaptation, and the incorporation of competing philosophies over time: toleration.   The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz

So, Morality Without Truth?
So a philosophy that does not locate any overarching, "Big 'T' Truth" type of reason against committing genocide is not necessarily a philosophy that advocates genocide; as with the Existentialists, nothing in Postmodern philosophy discounts the value of human suffering or human life because human suffering is not a philosophical concept; it is a direct experience. Philosophy is interested in meaning, and although one might argue over the meaning of suffering, this debate has no bearing on suffering as a fact.

Applying Postmodernism to Ideologies via History: 
Because of these perspective on knowledge or "truth" itself, Postmodern philosophies are often less concerned with whether or not a given idea is True and instead more concerned with why a given group believes an idea to be true.  Because all ideas are in this way seen as Ideology, we become more interested in the history of the Idea: how it was invented, spread, and made to appear as true.

Arguable, this is a much more useful means of explaining human behavior and thereby avoiding human suffering: by understanding the socio-cultural-economic factors that allowed the Holocaust to occur, we can more effectively avoid further genocide as it is likely to occur in other similar contexts.

For more on this idea, see Nietzsche and Michel Foucault (Tom's favorite PoMo philosopher!)

Ideas vs. Facts: 
The most radical or extreme Postmodern philosophies assail the factual world, asserting humans really aren’t able to objectively discern factual reality from cultural fiction, down to the level of whether, scientifically, a given table or chair even exists or not.  Such a blanket application of Postmodern perspectives, however, deconstructs itself as it turns Postmodern philosophy itself into mere Ideology.  In other words, if all reason is just Ideology, then reason-based Postmodern philosophies are also just Ideology, as well...in which case, their critique of reason is rendered ironically nonsensical (and hypocritical).

For this reason, one might do better to consider science, for example, one of many ways to explain a table or chair (or love or human nature), rather than not a way at all;  postmodernist philosophy invites me to view a thing scientifically, and artistically, and in terms of the cultural, gender, political, economic etc etc forces that define it as beautiful or useful or worth x amount of money to certain people and so on.

In this way, whereas Enlightenment rationality and equality, or Romantic compassion, attitudes toward nature etc., can be seen as tools for understanding the world, interacting with it, and representing it in art, Postmodern philosophy can be seen as a toolbox full of a wide variety of equally useful tools.  The Postmodern philosopher embraces a fairly universal episteme: a view of reality that embraces many different views of reality, applying all the various, once competing,  philosophies at different times and contexts.

In this way, Postmodernism really just describes the way most of us actually do see the world at this point in history:  when we are dealing with our physical bodies we turn to science to diagnose and cure us; when we are dealing with existential questions, we turn to religion and art; we are comfortable attending church and learning about scientific theories;  we can understand that Romanticism was  a philosophical movement that taught us to see nature as beautiful, and then we can still go out in nature and appreciate that beauty, without "worrying" about whether or not such appreciation is "True".

An Unfinished Philosophical Approach:
Finally: It's well worth noting that no one is working harder to work beyond the clear limits of Postmodern theory than those who are working in Postmodern theory; they clearly recognize the philosophical corner this perspective has painted itself into and are interested in developing new theories that accept the validity of the current theories and then work beyond them, or willingly critique their own philosophical perspective.

Personally, I think of this as I think of cancer or AIDS: no one is working harder to defeat cancer or AIDS etc. than those who are also normally entrusted to tell us we have it.  The diagnosis, then, is the first step in working toward a cure.

In other words, don't shoot the messenger.