Abstract
The major indictments of the postmodern and postfoundational thinking were that they had no soul, and their legacy was so empty that they were impossible to take seriously (Murray 2003). Detractors claimed they playfully supported “chaos, flimsiness, and instability in our experience of reality,” (Lash 1990), and were seen as something cultivated by a “Yuppified post-industrial bourgeoisie” (Lash 1990). They promoted a “secular culture,” and supported Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead” (Lash 1990), signifying particularly to writers about the spiritual a “regressive and narcissistic flailing about,” (Wilber 1996) in a world where “anything goes” (Feyerabend 1975). Some felt postmodernism in the arts was about decadent expressionism, existentialism, and “empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous” art, with Andy Warhol and pop art, punk and new wave rock, accompanying a rapidly evolving commercial film tradition that signaled an emergent “aesthetic populism,” (Jameson 1983) and a melding of virtual and common reality. It and postfoundationalism were seen as a phenomenon driven by a heightened sense of superficiality and consumerism (Bauman 1995).
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Notes
- 1.
In a similar vein Wittgenstein distinguishes between “empirical propositions” and “norms of description”.
- 2.
Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York, Scribner, Habermas, J. (1984–89). The Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.. These separations are also apparent in earlier works, such as Kant, I. (1990). The Critique of Pure Reason; The Critique of Practical Reason, and Other Ethical Treatises; The Critique of Judgments. Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- 3.
Rorty, R. (1989). Postmodern and history. It reflects, but readers are mistaken to align it with relativism. See above.
- 4.
The Economist, June 6, 2002.
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Zajda, J., Rust, V. (2021). The Moral Face of Postmodernism and Postfoundationalism. In: Globalisation and Comparative Education. Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-2054-8_6
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