Postmodernism is a relatively recent phenomenon: its age is about a quarter of a century. It is, first of all, the culture of the post-industrial, information society. In general, postmodernism appears today as a special spiritual state and mindset, as a way of life and culture, and even as a kind of era that is just beginning and which, apparently, will become transitional.
Postmodern philosophy opposes itself primarily to Hegel, seeing in him the highest point of Western rationalism and logocentrism. In this sense, it can be defined as anti-Hegelianism. Hegelian philosophy, as is well known, rests on such categories as being, the one, the whole, the universal, the absolute, truth, reason, and so on. Postmodern philosophy sharply criticizes all this, speaking from the standpoint of relativism.
The immediate predecessors of postmodern philosophy are F. Nietzsche and M. Heidegger. The first of them rejected the systemic way of thinking of Hegel, opposing him with thinking in the form of small fragments, aphorisms, maxims and maxims. He came up with the idea of a radical reassessment of values and the rejection of the fundamental concepts of classical philosophy, doing this from the standpoint of extreme nihilism, with the loss of faith in reason, man and humanism. In particular, he expressed doubts about the existence of some "last foundation", usually called being, having reached which thought supposedly acquires a solid support and reliability. According to Nietzsche, there is no such being, but only its interpretations and interpretations. He also rejected the existence of truths, calling them "irrefutable errors". Nietzsche painted a specific image of postmodern philosophy, calling it "morning" or "afternoon". Heidegger continued Nietzsche's line, focusing on the critique of reason. Reason, in his opinion, having become instrumental and pragmatic, degenerated into reason, "calculative thinking", the highest form and embodiment of which was technology. The latter leaves no room for humanism. On the horizon of humanism, as Heidegger believes, barbarism invariably appears, in which “deserts caused by technology multiply”.
These and other ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger are further developed by postmodern philosophers. The most famous among them are the French philosophers J. Derrida, J. F. Lyotard and M. Foucault, as well as the Italian philosopher J. Vattimo.
Postmodernism in philosophy is in line with the trend that emerged as a result of the “linguistic turn” (J. R. Searle) carried out by Western philosophy in the first half of the 20th century. This turn manifested itself most forcefully first in neopositivism, and then in hermeneutics and structuralism. Therefore, postmodern philosophy exists in two main variants - post-structuralist and hermeneutic. She is most influenced by F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger and L. Wittgenstein.
In methodological terms, postmodern philosophy relies on the principles of pluralism and relativism, according to which in reality a “multiplicity of orders” is postulated, between which it is impossible to establish any hierarchy. This approach extends to theories, paradigms, concepts or interpretations of this or that “order”. Each of them is one of the possible and admissible, their cognitive merits are equally relative.
In accordance with the principle of pluralism, supporters of postmodern philosophy do not consider the surrounding world as a single whole, endowed with any unifying center. Their world is divided into many fragments, between which there are no stable connections.
Postmodern philosophy refuses the category of being, which in the old philosophy meant a certain “last foundation”, having reached which thought acquires indisputable authenticity. The former being gives way to language, which is declared to be the only being that can be known.
Postmodernism is very skeptical about the concept of truth, revising the previous understanding of knowledge and cognition. He resolutely rejects scientism (this is a belief system that affirms the fundamental role of science as a source of knowledge and judgments about the world) and echoes agnosticism (a trend in philosophy that denies the possibility of objective knowledge of the surrounding reality by the subject through his own experience).
He looks no less skeptically at a person as a subject of activity and cognition, denies the former anthropocentrism (philosophical doctrine, according to which a person is the center of the Universe and the goal of all events taking place in the world) and humanism.
Postmodern philosophy expresses disappointment in rationalism, as well as in the ideals and values developed on its basis.
Postmodernism in philosophy brings it closer to science and literature, reinforces the tendency towards the aestheticization of philosophical thought.
In general, postmodern philosophy looks very contradictory, uncertain and paradoxical.
Postmodernism is a transitional state and a transitional era. He coped well with the destruction of many obsolete sides and elements of the previous era. As for the positive contribution, in this respect it looks rather modest. Nevertheless, some of its features and characteristics will apparently be preserved in the culture of the new century.
concept "postmodern" is used to refer to a wide range of phenomena and processes in culture and art, morality and politics that arose in the late XX - early XXI century. Literally, the word "postmodern" means something that comes after modernity. At the same time, “modern” is used here in the traditional sense for European philosophy, that is, as a set of ideas characteristic of the New Age. Thus, post-modern is a modern era in world culture, which is designed to complete the centuries-old era of the New Age.
Under postmodernism usually understood a certain philosophical program that offers a theoretical justification for new processes and phenomena in culture. As a philosophical trend, postmodernism is heterogeneous and is more of a style of thinking than a strict scientific direction. Moreover, the representatives of postmodernism themselves distance themselves from strict academic science, identifying themselves with strict academic science, identifying their philosophy with literary analysis or even works of art.
Western academic philosophy has a negative attitude towards postmodernism. A number of publications do not publish postmodernist articles, and most of today's postmodernists work in the departments of literary studies, because the philosophical departments deny them places.
The philosophy of postmodernism sharply opposes itself to the dominant philosophical and scientific tradition, criticizing the traditional concepts of structure and center, subject and object, meaning and meaning. The picture of the world offered by postmodernists is devoid of integrity, completeness, coherence, but, in their opinion, it is precisely such a picture that most accurately reflects the changing and unstable reality.
Postmodernism was originally a critique of structuralism - a trend focused on the analysis of the formal structure of social and cultural phenomena. According to structuralists, the meaning of any sign (a word in a language, a custom in a culture) depends not on a person and not on objects of the real world, but on the connections of this sign with other signs. At the same time, the meaning is revealed in the opposition of one sign to another. For example, culture in structuralism is analyzed as a system of stable relationships that manifest themselves in a series of binary oppositions (life-death, war-peace, hunting-farming, etc.). The limitations and formalism of this approach led to sharp criticism of structuralism, and later of the very concept of "structure". Structuralism in philosophy is being replaced post-structuralism, which became the theoretical basis for the ideas of postmodernism
In the most explicit form, the criticism of structurality manifested itself in the deconstruction theory of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).
J. Derrida: Deconstruction
Modern thinking is clamped in the dogmatic framework and stereotypes of metaphysical thinking. The concepts, categories, methods that we use are rigidly set by tradition and limit the development of thought. Even those who try to fight dogmatism unconsciously use stereotypes inherited from the past in their language. Deconstruction is a complex process aimed at overcoming such stereotypes. According to Derrida, there is nothing rigidly fixed in the world, everything can be deconstructed, i.e. to interpret in a new way, to show the inconsistency and unsteadiness of what seemed to be the truth. No text has a rigid structure and a single method of reading: everyone can read it in their own way, in their own context. Anything new can arise only in such a reading, free from the pressure of authority and the traditional logic of thinking.
Derrida in his writings opposed logocentrism- the idea that in reality everything is subject to strict logical laws, and being contains a certain “truth” that philosophy can reveal. In fact, the desire to explain everything using flat determinism only limits and impoverishes our understanding of the world.
Another major postmodernist Michel Foucault - wrote about speech practices that dominate a person. Under them, he understood the totality of texts, sets of strict terms, concepts characteristic of some sphere of human life, especially science. The method of organizing these practices - a system of rules, prescriptions, prohibitions - Foucault called discourse.
M. Foucault: Knowledge and Power
Any scientific discourse is based on the desire for knowledge: it offers a person a set of tools for the search for truth. However, since any discourse organizes, structures reality, it thereby adjusts it to its own ideas, puts it into rigid schemes. Consequently, discourse, including scientific, is violence, a form of control over human consciousness and behavior. Violence and tight control is a manifestation of power over a person. Therefore, knowledge is the expression of power, not of truth. It does not lead us to the truth, but simply makes us believe that this or that statement is the truth. Power is not exercised by anyone in particular: it is impersonal and “spilled” in the system of the language and texts of science used. All "scientific disciplines" are ideological instruments.
One of the powerful ideological tools, according to Foucault, is the notion of the subject. In fact, the subject is an illusion. A person's consciousness is shaped by culture: everything he can say is imposed by his parents, environment, television, science, and so on. A person is less and less independent and more and more dependent on different discourses. In modern times, we can talk about subject's death.
This idea is developed by the French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980) in concept death of the author.
There is no originality. Modern man is a tool through which various speech practices that are imposed on him from birth manifest themselves. All he has is a ready-made dictionary of other people's words, phrases, and statements. All he can do is just mix up what has already been said by someone before. Nothing new can be said anymore: any text is woven from quotes. Therefore, it is not the author who speaks in the work, the language itself speaks. And he says, perhaps, what the writer could not even suspect.
Any text is woven from quotes and references: they all redirect to other texts, those to the next, and so on ad infinitum. The world in postmodernism is like a library, where each book quotes some other, or rather, a computer hypertext, with an extensive system of references to other texts. This idea of reality is developed in detail in the concept Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007).
J. Baudrillard: The Theory of Simulacra
Simulacrum (from Latin simulacrum - image, likeness) Baudrillard called "an image that copies something that never existed." In the early stages of human development, each word referred to a specific object: a stick, a stone, a tree, etc. Most modern concepts do not have a strict subject meaning. For example, to explain the word "patriotism", we will not point to a specific subject, but say that it is "love for the motherland." However, love also does not refer to a specific subject. This is, let's say, "the desire for unity with another", and both "aspiration" and "unity" again do not refer us to the real world. They refer us to other similar concepts. The concepts and images that define our life do not mean anything real. These are simulacra, having the appearance of something that never existed. They refer us to each other, not to real things.
According to Baudrillard, we do not buy things, but their images (“brands” as signs of prestige imposed by advertising); we uncritically believe in the images constructed by television; the words we use are empty.
Reality in the postmodern world is being replaced hyperreality – an illusory world of models and copies, which does not rely on anything but itself, and which, nevertheless, is perceived by us much more real than true reality.
Jean Baudrillard believed that the media do not reflect reality, but create it. In "There Was No Gulf War," he wrote that the 1991 war in Iraq was "virtual," constructed by the press and television.
To the realization of the emptiness and illusory nature of the images around us and to the understanding that everything was once said, comes to the art of the 20th century. At this time, realism, which tried to depict reality as accurately as possible, is replaced by modernism. Experimenting in search of new means and destroying old dogmas, modernism comes to a complete void, which can no longer be denied and destroyed.
Modernism initially distorts reality (in the works of cubists, surrealists, etc.). The extreme degree of distortion, which has almost nothing to do with reality, is presented, for example, in the "Black Square" by Kazimir Malevich. In the 1960s Art is completely rejected, replaced by conceptual constructions. So, Damien Hirst exposes a dead sheep in an aquarium. Dmitry Prigov makes paper coffins from sheets with his poems and solemnly buries them unread. There are "symphonies of silence" and poems without words.
According to the Italian philosopher and writer Umberto Eco (b.1932), it is this dead end that art has reached that has led to the emergence of a new era of postmodernity.
W. Eco: Postmodern Irony
Eco wrote that “there comes a limit when the avant-garde (modernism) has nowhere to go further. Postmodernism is the answer to modernism: since the past cannot be destroyed, because its destruction leads to dumbness, it must be rethought, ironically, without naivety. Postmodernism, therefore, refuses to destroy reality (especially since it has already been destroyed), and begins to ironically rethink everything that has been said before. The art of postmodernism becomes a collection of quotes and references to the past, a mixture of high and low genres, and in the visual arts - a collage of various famous images, paintings, photographs. Art is an ironic and light game of meanings and meanings, a mixture of styles and genres. Everything that was once taken seriously - sublime love and pathetic poetry, patriotism and the ideas of the liberation of all the oppressed, are now taken with a smile - as naive illusions and beautiful-hearted utopias.
French theorist of postmodernism Jean Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) wrote that "to simplify to the limit, then postmodernism is understood as distrust of metanarratives."
J.F. Lyotard: The Decline of Metanarrations
Metanarratives or (metanarrations) Lyotard called any universal system of knowledge with which people try to explain the world. These include religion, science, art, history, etc. Lyotard considered the ideas about social progress, the all-conquering role of science, etc. to be the most influential meta-narratives of the New Age. Postmodernism is the time of the decline of meta-narratives. Faith in universal principles is lost: modernity is an eclectic connection of small, local, heterogeneous ideas and processes. Modernity is an era not of a single style, but of a mixture of different lifestyles (for example, in Tokyo a person can listen to reggae, wear French clothes, go to McDonald's in the morning and go to a traditional restaurant in the evening, etc.). The sunset of metanarrations is the loss of totalitarian ideological integrity and the recognition of the possibility of the existence of opposite, heterogeneous opinions and truths.
The American philosopher R. Rorty believes that one of these meta-narratives is philosophy, or rather the traditional theory of knowledge, aimed at finding the truth. Rorty writes that philosophy needs therapy: it needs to be cured of claims to truth, since this claim is meaningless and harmful. It has to move away from being scientific and become more like literary criticism or even fiction. The purpose of philosophy is not to search for truth and foundations, but to keep the conversation going, the communication of different people.
R. Rorty: Chance, irony, solidarity
Rorty sees the danger of social fundamentalism and authoritarianism in traditional philosophy, based on the ideal of scientific truth, systems and the theory of knowledge. He opposes it with his theory, where truth is understood as usefulness and any text is interpreted from the point of view of the needs of the individual and solidarity society. Higher ideological truths are replaced by free communication and the priority of "common interest" - social control - by sympathy and trust, regularity - accident. The person must irony be aware of the illusory nature and limitations of any beliefs - others' and one's own - and therefore be open to any opinions, tolerant of any otherness and alienation. For Rorty, the life of society is an eternal game and a constant openness to the other, allowing one to escape from any "hardening" of one of the ideas and from its transformation into a philosophical truth or an ideological slogan. Unlike other postmodernists, Rorty does not criticize modern bourgeois society, because he believes that it is already quite free and tolerant: we should move further in the same direction, encouraging communication between different people and tolerance for other people's points of view.
Postmodern philosophy is a vivid manifestation of the traditions of irrationalism in world philosophical thought. It takes the ideas of the "philosophy of life", Freudianism, existentialism to its logical limit and criticizes the fundamental ideas of traditional thought of reason, truth, science and morality.
Academic philosophy rejects the constructions of postmodernists: it considers them too chaotic, vague, incomprehensible and unscientific. However, one cannot but admit that postmodernism, in a number of its provisions, has managed to most accurately describe the changeable and fickle world of modernity with its eclecticism, pluralism and distrust of any global projects of politicians and scientists.
The term "postmodern" (post - after) is used to refer to both the specifics of the culture of the second half of the 20th century and the philosophical thought represented by the names: Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Jacques Derrida (born 1930), Georges Bataille (1987-1962 ), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Richard Rorty (b. 1931) and others.
Reference books on philosophy often characterize the work of these thinkers without resorting to the term "postmodernism", which indicates the absence of an established tradition in its use. R. Barthes, J. Lacan, M. Foucault are considered representatives of French structuralism, R. Rorty is attributed to the analytical direction of American philosophy, J. Derrida is declared the creator of the philosophy of deconstruction, and elements of surrealism, existentialism, and structuralism are found in the work of J. Bataille.
Postmodernism took shape under the influence of many intellectual and cultural currents: from pragmatism, existentialism, psychoanalysis to feminism, hermeneutics, analytical philosophy, etc. But postmodern thought moved “on the edges” of these philosophical currents, not fully belonging to any of them.
Postmodernism in philosophy is declared as a "new philosophy", which "in principle denies the possibility of reliability and objectivity..., and such concepts as "justice" and "rightness" lose their meaning...".
Factors in the emergence of the philosophy of postmodernism include:
1) the exhaustion of the managerial potential of the state;
2) anti-humanity of technological communication processes;
3) active inclusion in the social process of new social groups (feminists, ecologists).
At the heart of the postmodern worldview lie the principles of cosmism, environmentalism, feminism, posthumanism, new sexuality as answers to the new problems of the new world.
The concept of "surface" (rezoma) becomes the main one in the postmodern philosophical vocabulary. In the history of philosophy, Deleuze believes, two images of philosophers dominated: one of them is clearly represented by Plato, the other by F. Nietzsche. Plato introduced into culture the image of a philosopher-traveller, “ascending upwards” into the realm of pure Ideas, philosophical work was conceived as “a movement towards a higher principle that determines this movement itself - as a movement of self-positing, self-fulfillment and knowledge.” Therefore, philosophizing was closely connected with moral purification, with the ascetic ideal; postmodern philosophers are representatives of nominalistic culture.
Nominalism(lat. nomina - name) - a doctrine according to which only single things exist, and general concepts (universals) are the creation of the mind and nothing corresponds to them in the real world.
Based on nominalism, postmodernists refuse to recognize the importance of epistemological problems in the form in which it was declared in rationalist philosophy, they reconsider the concept of truth. So, the American F. R. Rorty in the book “Accident. Irony. Solidarity” (1986) argues that there is no outside truth, it belongs to statements and therefore “where there are no sentences, there is no truth”. The world does not speak. We only speak the language that we ourselves have created. Language texts are related only to other texts (and so on ad infinitum). They have no basis (neither divine nor natural) outside of language. The texts are included in the language game and it is impossible to talk about their “true” meaning, which dooms all attempts to find the truth to failure.
Rorty calls the traditional statement that "truth is conformity with reality" a "worn and devalued metaphor".
One of the goals of postmodernists is break the centuries-old dictate of the legislative mind, to show that his claims to the knowledge of the truth are pride and lies, which the mind used to justify its totalitarian claims.
So the philosophical postmodern is focused on epistemological and epistemological relativism.
Its main principles are:
® objective essence - an illusion;
® truth is ambiguous, multiple;
® the acquisition of knowledge is an endless process of revising the dictionary;
® reality is not a given, it is formed under the influence of human desires and actions, the orientation and motivation of which cannot be fully explained, and therefore cannot be predicted and controlled;
® constructions of reality can be arbitrarily many and none of them is definitively true;
® human knowledge does not reflect the world, but interprets, interprets it, and no interpretation has advantages over others, etc.
Postmodern philosophers abandoned the understanding of being as something absolute and unchanging, with the help of which everything that changes was explained and from which it was derived and began to work out the idea of being as becoming, changing. For example, J. Bataille described being and life as becoming with the help of the Heraclitean metaphor of fire. Life is burning, giving a feeling of pain and joy at the same time. Being as becoming is the fire of Heraclitus, eternally creating and eternally destroying, not obeying any laws in this process. The idea of being as becoming was substantiated by A. Bergson, M. Merleau-Ponty, M. Foucault, J. Deleuze, J. Bataille and others. to stay in that space and time where it has not yet received its final logical and grammatical design.
So, postmodern philosophers have expressed a worldview free from belief in God, science, truth, man and his spiritual abilities. They intellectually comprehended the situation of disappointment in all kinds of quasi-deities, came to the conclusion that it is senseless for a person to worship something or someone. Having proposed a way of life where everything, from language to forms of cohabitation, is deprived of its existential basis and declared the product of chance and time, postmodernists have formed an intellectual culture, the meaning of which is in the final deification of the world (the term belongs to R. Rorty).
"Transcendental" for Kant is such a priori, which is the basis of other, both a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Every theoretical science ("pure mathematics", "pure natural science", "metaphysics") has its own transcendental foundations, its own synthetic principles.
concept "postmodern" is used to refer to a wide range of phenomena and processes in culture and art, morality and politics that arose in the late XX - early XXI century. Literally, the word "postmodern" means something that comes after modernity. At the same time, "modern" is used here in the traditional sense for European philosophy, i.e. as a set of ideas characteristic of the New Age. Thus, postmodern is a modern era in world culture, which is designed to complete the centuries-old era of the New Age.
Postmodernism is usually understood as a certain philosophical program that offers a theoretical justification for new processes and phenomena in culture. As a philosophical trend, postmodernism is heterogeneous and is more of a style of thinking than a strict scientific direction. Moreover, the representatives of postmodernism themselves distance themselves from strict academic science, identifying their philosophy with literary analysis or even works of art.
Western academic philosophy has a negative attitude towards postmodernism. A number of publications do not publish postmodernist articles, and most of today's postmodernists work in the departments of literary studies, since the philosophical departments deny them places.
The philosophy of postmodernism sharply opposes itself to the dominant philosophical and scientific tradition, criticizing the traditional concepts of structure and center, subject and object, meaning and meaning. The picture of the world offered by postmodernists is devoid of integrity, completeness, coherence, but, in their opinion, it is precisely such a picture that most accurately reflects the changing and unstable reality.
Postmodernism was originally a criticism of structuralism - a trend focused on the analysis of the formal structure of social and cultural phenomena. According to structuralists, the meaning of any sign (a word in a language, a custom in a culture) depends not on a person and not on objects of the real world, but on the connections of this sign with other signs. At the same time, the meaning is revealed in the opposition of one sign to another. For example, culture in structuralism is analyzed as a system of stable relationships that manifest itself in a series binary oppositions(life-death, war-peace, hunting-farming, etc.). The limitations and formalism of this approach led to sharp criticism of structuralism, and later of the very concept of "structure". Structuralism in philosophy is being replaced
post-structuralism, which became the theoretical basis for the ideas of postmodernism.
In its most explicit form structural criticism manifested itself in the deconstruction theory of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).
J. Derrida: Deconstruction
Modern thinking is clamped in the dogmatic framework and stereotypes of metaphysical thinking. The concepts, categories, methods that we use are rigidly set by tradition and limit the development of thought. Even those who try to fight dogmatism unconsciously use stereotypes inherited from the past in their language. Deconstruction is a complex process aimed at overcoming such stereotypes. According to Derrida, nothing in the world is rigidly fixed, everything can be deconstructed, i.e. to interpret in a new way, to show the inconsistency and unsteadiness of what seemed to be the truth. No text has a rigid structure and a single method of reading: everyone can read it in their own way, in their own context. Anything new can arise only in such a reading, free from the pressure of authority and the traditional logic of thinking.
Derrida in his writings opposed logocentrism - the idea that in reality everything is subject to strict logical laws, and being contains a certain “truth” that philosophy can reveal. In fact, the desire to explain everything using flat determinism only limits and impoverishes our understanding of the world.
Another major postmodernist - Michel Foucault - wrote about speech practices, dominating man. Under them, he understood the totality of texts, sets of strict terms, concepts characteristic of some sphere of human life, especially science. The method of organizing these practices - a system of rules, regulations, prohibitions - Foucault called discourse.
M. Foucault: Knowledge and Power
Any scientific discourse is based on the desire to knowledge: it offers man a set of tools to search for truth. However, since any discourse organizes, structures reality, it thereby adjusts it to fit its ideas, puts it into rigid schemes. Consequently, discourse, including scientific, is violence, a form of control over human consciousness and behavior.
Violence and tight control is a manifestation authorities over the person. Therefore, knowledge is the expression of power, not of truth. It does not lead us to the truth, but simply makes us believe that this or that statement is the truth. Power is not exercised by anyone in particular: it is impersonal and “spilled” in the system of the language and texts of science used. All "scientific disciplines" are ideological instruments.
One of the powerful ideological tools, according to Foucault, is the notion of the subject. In fact, the subject is an illusion. A person's consciousness is shaped by culture: everything he can say is imposed by his parents, environment, television, science, and so on. A person is less and less independent and more and more dependent on different discourses. In modern times, we can talk about death of the subject.
This idea is developed by the French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes(1915-1980) in concept death of the author.
There is no originality. Modern man is a tool through which various speech practices that are imposed on him from birth manifest themselves. All he has is a ready-made dictionary of other people's words, phrases, and statements. All he can do is just mix up what has already been said by someone before. Nothing new can be said anymore: any text is woven from quotes. Therefore, it is not the author who speaks in the work, the language itself speaks. And he says, perhaps, what the writer himself could not even suspect.
Any text is woven from quotes and references: they all redirect to other texts, those to the next, and so on ad infinitum. The world in postmodernism is like a library, where each book cites some other, or, rather, a computer hypertext with an extensive system of references to other texts. This idea of reality is developed in detail in the concept Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007).
J. Baudrillard: The Theory of Simulacra
Simulacrum (from Latin simulacrum - image, likeness) Baudrillard called "an image that copies something that never existed." In the early stages of human development, each word referred to a specific object: a stick, a stone, a tree, and so on. Most modern concepts do not have a strict subject meaning. For example, to explain the word "patriotism", we will not point to a specific subject, but say that it is "love for the motherland." However, love also does not refer to a specific subject. This is, let's say, "the desire for unity with another", and both "aspiration" and "unity" again do not refer us to the real world. They refer us to other similar concepts. Concepts and images that define our life, do not represent anything real. These are simulacra, having the appearance of something that never existed. They refer us to each other, not to real things.
According to Baudrillard, we do not buy things, but their images (“brands” as signs of prestige imposed by advertising); we uncritically believe in the images constructed by television; the words we use are empty.
Reality in the postmodern world is being replaced hyperreality- an illusory world of models and copies, which does not rely on anything but itself, and which, nevertheless, is perceived by us much more real than true reality.
| Jean Baudrillard believed that the media do not reflect reality, but create it. In "There Was No Gulf War," he wrote that the 1991 Iraq War was "virtual," constructed by the press and television.
To the realization of the emptiness and illusory nature of the images around us and to the understanding that everything was once said, the art of the 20th century also comes.
At this time, realism, which tried to depict reality as accurately as possible, is replaced by modernism. Experimenting in search of new means and destroying old dogmas, modernism comes to a complete void, which can no longer be denied and destroyed.
Modernism initially distorts reality (in the works of cubists, surrealists, etc.). The extreme degree of distortion, which has almost nothing to do with reality, is presented, for example, in Kazimir Malevich's Black Square. In the 1960s art is completely rejected, being replaced by "conceptual constructions". So, Damien Hirst exposes a dead sheep in an aquarium. Dmitry Prigov makes paper coffins from sheets with his poems and solemnly buries them unread. There are "symphonies of silence" and poems without words.
According to the Italian philosopher and writer Umberto Eco(1932-2016), it was this impasse that art reached that led to the emergence of a new era of postmodernity.
W. Eco: Postmodern Irony
Eco wrote that “there comes a limit when the avant-garde (modernism) has nowhere to go further. Postmodernism is the answer to modernism: since the past cannot be destroyed, because its destruction leads to dumbness, it must be rethought, ironically, without naivety. Postmodernism thus renounces the destruction of reality (especially since it has already been destroyed), but begins with irony rethink everything that has been said before. The art of postmodernism becomes a collection of quotes and references to the past, a mixture of high and low genres, and in the visual arts - a collage of various famous images, paintings, photographs. Art is an ironic and light game of meanings and meanings, a mixture of styles and genres. Everything that was once taken seriously - sublime love and pathetic poetry, patriotism and the ideas of the liberation of all the oppressed, are now taken with a smile - as naive illusions and beautiful-hearted utopias.
French theorist of postmodernism Jean Francois Lyotard(1924-1998) wrote that "if we simplify to the limit, then postmodernism is understood as distrust of metanarratives" .
AND.F.Lyotard: The Decline of Metanarrations
Metanarratives (or metanarrations) Lyotard called any universal system of knowledge with which people try to explain the world. These include religion, science, art, history, etc. Lyotard considered the ideas about social progress, the all-conquering role of science, etc. to be the most influential meta-narratives of the New Age. Postmodernism - time the decline of metanarratives. Faith in universal principles is lost: modernity is an eclectic connection of small, local, heterogeneous ideas and processes. Modernity is an era not of a single style, but of a mixture of different lifestyles (for example, in Tokyo a person can listen to reggae, wear French clothes, go to McDonald's in the morning and a traditional restaurant in the evening, etc.). The decline of metanarrations is the loss of totalitarian ideological integrity and the recognition of the possibility of the coexistence of opposing, heterogeneous opinions and truths.
American philosopher R. Rorty believes that one of these meta-narratives is philosophy, or rather the traditional theory of knowledge, aimed at finding the truth. Rorty writes that philosophy needs therapy: it needs to be cured of its claims to truth, since this claim is meaningless and harmful. The goal of philosophy is not to search for truth and foundations, but to keep the conversation going, the communication of different people. It has to move away from being scientific and become more like literary criticism or even fiction.
R. Rorty: Chance, irony, solidarity
Rorty sees the danger of social fundamentalism and authoritarianism in traditional philosophy, based on the ideal of scientific truth, systems and the theory of knowledge. He opposes it with his theory, where truth is understood as usefulness and any text is interpreted from the point of view of the needs of the individual and solidarity society. Higher ideological truths are replaced by free communication and the priority of "common interest", social control - by sympathy and trust, regularity - by accident. The person must irony be aware of the illusory nature and limitations of any - others' and one's own - beliefs and therefore be open to any opinions, tolerant of any otherness and alienation. For Rorty, the life of society is an eternal game and a constant openness to the other, allowing one to escape from any "hardening" of one of the ideas and from its transformation into a philosophical truth or an ideological slogan. Unlike other postmodernists, Rorty does not criticize modern bourgeois society, because he believes that it is already quite free and tolerant: one should move further in the same direction, encouraging communication between different people and tolerance for other people's points of view.
Postmodern philosophy is a vivid manifestation of traditions irrationalism in world philosophical thought. It brings to the logical limit the ideas of the "philosophy of life", Freudianism, existentialism and criticizes the fundamental ideas of traditional thought of reason, truth, science, morality.
Academic philosophy rejects the constructions of postmodernists: it considers them too chaotic, vague, incomprehensible and unscientific. However, one cannot but admit that postmodernism in a number of its provisions has managed to most accurately describe the changeable and fickle world of modernity with its eclecticism, pluralism and distrust of any global projects of politicians and scientists.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
- 1. Postmodernism - a radical trend in irrational philosophy that describes the transitional state of modern culture. It is a reaction to structuralism and criticizes the ideas of consistency and consistency.
concept "postmodern" (post - after) since the eighties of the XX century, it has become firmly established not only in the university, but also in the everyday vocabulary. It can be conditionally said that the term "postmodern" is used to refer both to the specifics of the culture of the second half of the 20th century and to philosophical thought represented by the names Georges Bataille (1897 – 1962), Jacques Lacan(1901 – 1981), Jacques Francois Lyotard (1924 – 1998), Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995), Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007), Felix Guattari (1930 – 1992), Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004), Julia Kristeva(born in 1941) and others. However, even postmodern theorists find it difficult to give a precise definition of this concept. In postmodern philosophy, four main themes are often distinguished (Polikarpov V.S., 2001, pp. 113 - 114):
– agnostic- not a single meaning exists outside the language, therefore the truth is a linguistic phenomenon; knowledge is a set of verbal constructions of various groups of people who pursue their own interests;
– pragmatic- intellectual products are carried out in practice; the criterion is success, the achievement of the plan;
– eclectic- a conscious attitude towards eclecticism, the choice of a wide variety of means, their mixing and combination to achieve the goal, the principle of mixing styles;
– anarcho-democratic- knowledge is distributed among certain groups of people involved in language games that are needed to organize power, violence against a person, his consciousness and behavior.
Postmodern is a special type of worldview in which:
· Freedom in everything, spontaneity and desires of a person, his game principle are proclaimed as the main values;
· there is a critical attitude to modernity, radical pluralism in the assessment of modern culture and society.
As early as the middle of the 20th century, Western scholars were declaring "obsolescence of man» and, consequently, human existentials, the most important of which is love. In the extermination camps, the individual is annulled, the person becomes a copy. In this regard, emphasizing the growing role of computer technology, one of the main theorists of postmodernity, Jacques-Francois Lyotard, in the late seventies of the twentieth century, in his work “The State of Postmodernity” notes: “Databanks are the encyclopedia of tomorrow. They exceed the abilities of each user and by their “nature” belong to a postmodern person” (Lyotar J.-F., 1998, p. 125). Postmodern philosophers state: technology displaces man. The economic relations of production and the service sector materialize a person and reduce his capabilities at the expense of instrumental processes and technical capabilities.
In the light of postmodern theory, it seems that man is constantly forced rediscover yourself. If the project of a modernist person consisted in the unity of life aimed at the development of self-consciousness and personality, then the biography of a postmodern person is characterized by breaks, new beginnings and variability. It is an uncertain life in which one can no longer rely on the proven coordinates of modernity: there is no central subject, no center of life, no prescribed goal, no fixed starting point.
Postmodernists deny the possibility of rationally substantiating the meaning of life , human society, morality, therefore, they believe that you need to live only in the present, not caring about either the past or the future. Postmodernism seeks to provide the possibility of living in an ever-changing situation. Thus, the person himself is no longer at the center of his actions. Instead, postmodern theorists speak of a "decentred subject".
"Man" disappears in the postmodern.Therefore, postmodern theory postulated the "death of the subject". In postmodern discourse, a person appears as flexibilized, schizophrenic, normalized, undisciplined, decentered, subject to chance as well as desires and desires.
In addition to these, the most important methodological principles of postmodern discourse, in our opinion, include the following:
1) postmodern philosophy as a whole is aimed at pluralizing the singular key concepts of modernity: instead of one truth, one reason, one aesthetics, etc. postmodern stands for many truths, many manifestations of the mind, many types of aesthetics, etc.;
2) postmodern postulates the philosophy of decomposition of the reliability of modernity: doubts the reality of the material world in the last resort. On the contrary, reality appears in postmodernity as a simple medial simulation and virtual reality (J. Baudrillard);
3) philosophizing after modernity and for postmodernity there is philosophy after the end of doctrines(i.e. communism, democracy, capitalism), after the death of the subject and under the sign of a total loss of meaning and destruction of meaning up to chance (J.-F. Lyotard), philosophizing after philosophy - why philosophical texts can be read equally with other texts or contexts (J. Derrida).
The main principles of postmodern philosophy can be called:
Recognition of the individual's right to otherness;
· actualization of the primacy of the singular, the unique over the universal;
· rejection of "monologism" and "narrativity", scientistic rationality and logocentrism, total rationalism;
· actualization of coexistence and interaction of different cultures and life styles;
articulation of the intentionality of consciousness;
Where modernism emphasized the inevitable conflict, postmodernism sees unresolved problems, trying to find a way out of the current conflict situation. In the postmodern social connection appears as consisting of many language games, subject to various rules. The "textualization" of the world leads to the revolt of the voice of the Other as opposed to the authoritarian voice that seizes all power. There is an opportunity to become a participant in interpretive games that offer unexpected and original movements. Postmodernity is characterized by the desire to look for other mental layers that belong to the sphere of the unconscious. Postmodernity does not set itself the goal of a total denial of values. The main goal is rethinking, deconstruction, reassessment, replacement of plus signs with minus signs and vice versa. Personality is analyzed in communication, in intersubjectivity, and different cultures - in a system of equal dialogue. Postmodern changes the paradigm of critical thinking of modern science, it is perceived as a way of a new perception of the world, as the mentality of a new cultural era.
Tests for self-control for chapter 9
1. He rejected logical connections in nature, the perception of the world around him as an integral and regular system, criticized Hegel's dialectics and the very idea of development:
a) irrationalism;
b) Marxism;
c) positivism;
d) existentialism.
2. Schopenhauer proclaimed the universal principle of his philosophy:
a) idealism;
b) Machism;
c) Freudianism;
d) voluntarism .
3. Friedrich Nietzsche is considered the founder of:
a) "philosophy of life";
b) "philosophy of science";
c) "philosophy of technology";
d) “philosophy of religion”.
4. Marxist philosophy consists of two large sections:
a) metaphysical idealism and geographical idealism;
b) bourgeois capitalism and proletarian socialism;
c) vulgar materialism and subjective idealism;
d) dialectical materialism and historical materialism.
5. The direction of philosophy, the essence of which is the desire to put philosophy on a solid scientific basis, free it from non-scientific features and make only reliable scientific knowledge as a support.
a) irrationalism;
b) positivism;
c) Marxism;
d) existentialism.
6. Which direction of positivism included the great English philosopher, sociologist and logician Karl Popper?
a) classical positivism;
b) empirio-criticism;
c) neopositivism;
d) postpositivism.
7. Which of the philosophers of American pragmatism believed that the main task philosophy is not to use experience correctly to achieve individual goals, but to transform experience itself with the help of philosophy, to systematically improve experience in all spheres of human life?
a) Charles Pierce
b) William James;
c) John Dewey
d) Richard Rorty.
8. Which of the representatives of psychoanalysis put forward the concept that the basis of the "great" human actions, hyperactivity, superaspirations, as well as mental illness is a repressed inferiority complex?
a) Sigmund Freud
b) Alfred Adler;
c) Carl Jung;
d) Erich Fromm.
9. The founder and most prominent representative of phenomenology is:
a) Edmund Husserl
b) Karl Jaspers;
c) Albert Camus
d) Hans Gadamer.
10. Which of the thinkers believed that philosophy should turn to a person, his little problems, help him find a truth that is understandable to him, for which he could live, help a person make an inner choice and realize his "I".
a) Georg Hegel
b) Soren Kierkegaard;
c) Friedrich Schleiermacher;
d) Wilhelm Dilthey.
