Postmodernism

The roots of conceptual postmodernism may be found in the ideas of some of the major figures of modernity and modernism, ideas that set in motion profound challenges to and changes in our thinking about the world and in the status of knowledge itself. Friedrich Nietzsche, in particular, initiated a radical critique of the Enlightenment ideals of absolute truth, universal morality, and transhistorical values, which he replaced with a radically multicentered or, in his terms, perspectival understanding of human knowledge, morality, and culture. It is primarily through Nietzsche and related figures, such as Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger, that the genealogy of postmodernist thinking is connected to Poststructuralism, one of the most important conceptual revolutions of postmodernism. Several parallel scientific revolutions took place throughout twentieth-century science, especially in physics (relativity and quantum theory) and biology, and in literature and art, and these revolutions also contributed to postmodernist conceptuality and epistemology.

These changes culminated in the postmodern crisis of, in Jean-François Lyotard's terms, legitimation of knowledge. "The postmodern condition" itself, responsible for this crisis, was famously defined by Lyotard as "an incredulity toward metanarratives," especially the "grand narratives" that seek to provide a single, all-encompassing or teleological framework for understanding the world. Lyotard's key example is the Enlightenment grand narrative of the progress of civilization through reason and science. He, however, extends this critique to other grand narratives of modernity, including Hegelianism, Marxism, and Freudianism. The collapse of the grand narratives has left us with no hope of a single conceptual system or discourse through which we might attempt to understand the totality of the world. Instead we have a plurality of frequently incommensurable worlds and often mutually incompatible systems of language and thought through which to comprehend them.