In our last seminar together, we discussed the ideas of postmodernism and how it began as a reaction against the tenants\u00a0of the modernist philosophy, namely of the belief of grand narratives, or metanarratives about universal or absolute truths such democracy, progress, science and the belief that these narratives are leading up to some as-yet-unknown great destination.\u00a0It encouraged an attitude of incredulity and skepticism of everything and the acceptance that there are no single truth but an enormous plurality of competing narratives each containing different aspects of the truth.<\/p>\n
In recent years\u00a0however, a growing number of critics\u00a0–\u00a0including such acclaimed scholars as Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, and our very own Jacob Clark, have began to question the usefulness and the longevity of the postmodern condition. \u00a0They argue that merely reacting against\u00a0<\/em>metanarratives is not enough if they do not offer a suitable alternative in its place.\u00a0They say it is far too vague just to say there are countless numbers of localized narratives in the world and\u00a0that such ways of thinking\u00a0does not offer much more insight than is already immediately apparent (i.e., certain systems of thought is advance by certain power structures and therefore is not always reliable). They argue\u00a0perhaps the approach\u00a0ironically examining and deconstructing existing metanarratives, which may indeed have severed an useful purpose at the time of its conception, has run its course.<\/p>\n Some critics argue that new sensibilities has already begun to evolve. One such proposed alternative is\u00a0\u00a0metamodernism, that is a\u00a0way of combining both\u00a0modernist and postmodernist sensibilities. Dutch philosophers\u00a0Timotheus Vermeulen and\u00a0Robin van den Akker says\u00a0that\u00a0metamodernism “can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism” an acceptance that\u00a0“grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed.” They recognize that while there may be no universal, absolutely unchanging Truth out there in the Platonic sense, it is not futile to\u00a0try and find pursue some approximation to it to the best of our collective abilities. If we wish to move forward, a balance must be struck between ironic detachment and sincere, passionate engagement, one must “embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In our last seminar together, we discussed the ideas of postmodernism and how it began as a reaction against the tenants\u00a0of the modernist philosophy, namely of the belief of grand narratives, or metanarratives about universal or absolute truths such democracy, … Continue reading