post modernism ethics

Look at how truth is constructed in the news today compared to the way that it was in earlier eras.  Walter Cronkite told the news in a way that attempted to tell the truth.  Most cable news shows have two people with opposing viewpoints yelling back and forth at each other with the anchor serving as an mediator between them.  There is often little attempt to decide what is, ultimately, correct or to call out either of the opposing sides - even when they're saying things that are demonstrably wrong.  So, there is no longer any gold standard of truth that they are looking for - just different versions.

Similarly, look at the way that political news talks about perceptions of the President.  A while ago Bush announced that he was reading lots of books, and most media commentary on that announcement (as far as I recall) was not focused on the books themselves.  Nobody asked Bush what he thought about the specific books he claimed to read, or how he managed to read so much given his demanding job.  Rather, you had various people asking, "How will this announcement influence people's perception of the president?"  Nobody was interested in the reality of the statement, but on how the statement would reflect the way that people talked about things.

Postmodern literature serves as a reaction to the supposed stylistic and ideological limitations of modernist literature and the radical changes the world underwent after the end of World War II. While modernist literary writers often depicted the world as fragmented, troubled and on the edge of disaster, which is best displayed in the stories and novels of such modernist authors as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann, postmodern authors tend to depict the world as having already undergone countless disasters and being beyond redemption or understanding.

For many postmodern writers, the various disasters that occurred in the last half of the 20th century left a number of writers with a profound sense of paranoia. They also gave them an awareness of the possibility of utter disaster and apocalypse on the horizon. The notion of locating precise meanings and reasons behind any event became seen as impossible.

Postmodern literary writers have also been greatly influenced by various movements and ideas taken from postmodern philosophy. Postmodern philosophy tends to conceptualize the world as being impossible to strictly define or understand. Postmodern philosophy argues that knowledge and facts are always relative to particular situations and that it's both futile and impossible to attempt to locate any precise meaning to any idea, concept or event.

Postmodern philosophy tends to renounce the possibility of 'grand narratives' and, instead, argues that all belief systems and ideologies are developed for the express purpose of controlling others and maintaining particular political and social systems. The postmodern philosophical perspective is pretty cynical and takes nothing that is presented at face value or as being legitimate.

Similarly, at the core of many postmodern literary writer's imaginations is a belief that the world has already fallen apart and that actual, singular meaning is impossible to locate (if it can be said to exist at all), and that literature, instead, should serve to reveal the world's absurdities, countless paradoxes and ironies.

 Camus opens the essay by asking if this latter conclusion that life is meaningless necessarily leads one to commit suicide. If life has no meaning, does that mean life is not worth living? If that were the case, we would have no option but to make a leap of faith or to commit suicide, says Camus. Camus is interested in pursuing a third possibility: that we can accept and live in a world devoid of meaning or purpose.

Sartre’s basic philosophy, existentialism, is neither a narrowly definable school of thought nor limited to Sartre and his French contemporaries such as Camus. Although in a certain sense Sartre and Camus were the first to name and define existentialism, it is best understood as a long-running current in Europe’s philosophical history, a current that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Existentialist philosophers believe that philosophy should emphasize the individual human experience of the world, and they consider ideas of individual freedom; individual responsibility; and how it is possible, if it is possible at all, for individual human beings to act meaningfully in the world.

These ideas themselves belong to a larger philosophic trend that sought to expose the ostensible bankruptcy of traditional philosophy, in particular the philosophy of the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, philosophy had put its faith in the idea that reason and rationality hold the answer to all of humanity’s problems. To nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and twentieth-century existentialists, such as Sartre, a radically different approach was needed if philosophy was to rediscover its urgency. Instead of attempting to contain reality within an absolute theoretical framework, iconoclastic philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard felt that philosophy should emphasize the individual’s subjective experience rather than the individual as the bearer of abstract, universal rights. As adopted by Sartre, this emphasis on individual experience emanated from the belief that, ultimately, people cannot appeal to universal notions of morality or ethics to guide their behavior. Any attempt to generalize human nature, and hence any attempt to construct a system based on these universals, is doomed to fail.

Sartre was unique within this current of thought largely because of the way he wedded phenomenology to his rejection of traditional philosophy. Phenomenology can be described as the study of consciousness, or how the external world appears to our minds. Phenomenology poses the question of whether it is possible to find the objective reality behind how something appears to us—a question that weighed heavily on Sartre’s own meditations on the individual’s experience of and interaction with the world.

Sartre’s thought also comprises elements of Marxism. Sartre strongly self-identified as a Marxist and was a firm believer in certain key tenets of Marxist thought, including the inherently exploitative nature of the capitalist system, the fact of class conflict as the animating engine of history, and the dialectical nature of all being. That said, Sartre’s Marxism did not act so much as an influence on his existentialist philosophy as something that existed alongside it.