Posed Modernism (DB Exclusive, 4.1.25)
It sounds good, in theory.
This past January, I shared my views on a topic which has been of interest to me for some time: postmodernism and its rejection of meta-narratives. Over the past half-century, philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault have ‘liberated’ us from stable, objective realities and encouraged us to espouse the primacy of personal narrative, in which truth and morality are contextual and relative.
Has this world view served us well, or have we been fooled? This April 1, I offer you my perspective laid out over five posts — consolidated in this DB Exclusive for easier reading.
To kick us off, I explain my interest in “New Yearnings”, which centers on the twin-faced Roman god Janus, an appropriate metaphor for the notion that there are both objective and subjective explanations for the observable world.
Over three subsequent posts, I explore the ideas of truth (“Truth Ache”), beauty (“Beauty Contested”) and goodness (“Goodness Graces”). These are linchpins in any theistic description of the world, and are therefore hopelessly out of fashion, perhaps to the point of being so counter-cultural as to pique the curiosity of the independently-minded soul. The thread uniting these explorations is the human propensity to corrupt pure things — which raises the essential question whether the post-structuralists have it right that nothing is absolute, or, whether the theists have it right that we are absolutely nothing without God.
In “Sign Wave”, I offer a closing argument of sorts, reasoning less from the perspective of theory than from practical observation. Have our efforts to define noble things on our own terms helped, or hurt, our peace with self and our sense of wholeness? If the world seems to you to be short on common sense and high on destabilizers, I invite you to consider the questions I raise, even if you need to wander over the comfort zone demarcation line to do so.
- J
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