235. Beyond postmodernism

This blog and my philosophy books form an exercise in moving beyond postmodernism, preserving what is useful in it, and replacing what is not. The two main features of my approach have been the use of a pragmatist approach (building on Dewey, among others) and, as an extension of that, a dynamic approach of meaning, truth, identity and ethics, in terms not of what they are but how they arise and change. Following Heidegger: ‘being’ as a verb, not a substantive.

Postmodern discounting of rationality and objective knowledge does not necessarily imply radical relativism, in the sense of claiming that any interpretation or view is as good as any other. No postmodern philosopher claims that.

However, postmodernists are often cagey, evasive about truth. Some (e.g. Derrida) seem to replace argumentation with ‘narratives’, without claim to any truth, as long as they are ‘interesting’. This, together with the rejection of universals, produces irony. That is in danger of avoiding commitment to any position, and a dodging of responsibility. Without any notion of truth there would not only be no science, but also no ordinary daily discourse. We talk all the time about whether a politician or the media, or the neighbour, or one’s child or partner is telling the truth. So, what notion of truth remains?

Inspired by pragmatist thought, in this blog I adopted the notion of truth as ‘warranted assertibility’: one should be willing to give reasons, and arguments for what one asserts, and be open to discourse about them and to alternative views or interpretations. One can claim to have such arguments without claiming any final, or ultimate truth. Here, truth is the best we can do with our admittedly imperfect, biased, prejudiced views. Let others help to unearth those imperfections, biases and prejudices. And when that happens one should have the honesty to say: what I said was false, i.e. not true, i.e. not warranted.

Counter to Derrida, I maintain the notion of reference. Of course, we never know objectively whether what we say refers to anything ‘real’ ‘out there’ that is ‘present’ to us. But in daily language the intention to refer is there. We  could not deal with the world or each other without it. ‘Walk the dog’ without reference? ‘Take a chair’ without reference?

The thing is this. We should allow for reference that fails and varies between people and circumstances. In this blog I tried to work this out by also adopting the notion of ‘sense’, next to reference, as the way in which reference is decided. I proposed that this is done on the basis of a repertoire of associations gathered along one’s life path, hence different from those of others. And which from them is picked out to decide reference is triggered by the context. ‘Framing’ that is called in psychology. In item 34 in this blog I tried to elucidate this with the notion of ‘scripts’.

Difference of sense for different people, yielding differences in cognition, in what I called ‘cognitive distance’, is indispensable for individual identity and for change of knowledge and meaning in communication. Here I preserve and connect difference and dynamics as two key elements of postmodernism.

However, all this does leave a vestige of relativism. Views may be ‘incommensurable’, lacking shared meanings for debate, despite tenacious efforts at mutual understanding, using all the force of metaphor, images and joint practice that one can muster.

Next, the issue of the subject. Being embedded in the world, the subject does not disappear. Being socially constituted need not entail that it has no independence. What is constructed socially is individualised, and provides the basis for action, for taking a stand and responsibility. The condition that personal identity is multiple, opaque and variable does not make it disappear.

Zizek discusses the postmodern loss of social order (the ‘symbolic order’) by which limits and directions were taken for granted. Freedom from those creates disorientation, which evokes a groping for new certainties. I will not discuss that here.

The unworldliness of absolute, strict and fixed universals need not require a rejection of universals in any form (see item 222 for forms of universality). I go along with the postmodern view that the particular precedes the universal and trumps it morally, but that need not imply the eclipse of universals. Here also, the relation between the two is dynamic. Universals arise as contingent generalizations by which we abstract from experience to guide practice that leads to new experience that shifts the universal.

In sum, I employ the dynamic streak from postmodernism to save it from its mistakes.

However, while change is fundamental, I recognize the need for stability, in alternation with change. I will develop that in a later series of items.