Yet, at the same time, there has emerged a new way of thinking. One could say that modernism and postmodernism continue to live side by side. Among the main tenets of postmodernism are the following. It rejects all universal systems or ideologies ways of explaining reality. Christianity has failed but so have its competing ideologies of communism, Marxism, capitalism, and liberalism.
There is no absolute truth and authority. Not only faith in God but also faith in science has failed to provide certainty. Scientists are as prejudiced and biased as theologians.
All truth is subjective and relative. There are no absolute norms and values. Related to this is the emphasis on feelings and experience. When judging and evaluating things, the question is not whether something is true or false but how it feels. If it feels good it is good and what is experienced must be true. Examples of highbrow culture are the arts, painting, sculpture, stage plays, classical music, poetry and literature.
The mainstay of lowbrow culture is entertainment: television, soap operas, movies, popular music, commercial art and cheap novels. To appreciate highbrow culture one needs some level of education and for that reason it is generally seen as an elitist pursuit for the affluent and sophisticated. Lowbrow culture, however, is accessible to the masses. It is popular culture requiring little or no education or art appreciation. Advances in communication technology have made it almost universally accessible.
As one art critic has written,. Popular culture is something like a computer virus that insinuates itself into every nook of society, overwriting what is there with its own program, replicating itself, corrupting existing files, and causing untold damage to the world of high culture. Quote by Chuck Smith, Jr. Today we live in an image and information age. We, and especially our children, see and experience the world around us mostly via the media. Producers of television programmes are presenting image and fiction as reality in contemporary music, sitcoms, TV movies and even documentaries.
Postmodernists justify this dissolving of distinctions between fiction and truth by their claim that truth is basically fiction. Reality is what we perceive it to be. As philosopher Richard Tarnas says,. The mind is not the passive reflector of an external world and intrinsic order, but is active and creative in the process of perception and cognition.
Reality is in some sense constructed by the mind, not simply perceived by it, and many such constructions are possible, none necessarily sovereign. The Passion of the Western Mind , p. The following is a quote from an article by R. Wesley Hurd, founder of the McKenzie Study Center, a Christian organization that seeks to help students cope with the harmful influences to which they are exposed at secular institutions of learning.
Parents, are you aware of this danger that threatens your children? Perhaps your teenagers have no access to MTV in your home but they can — and many do — listen to the same immoral, hedonistic anti-Christian poison on their CD players and Ipods.
Postmodern ideas and methods are also infiltrating our educational system. The emphasis in many schools is on the visual rather than the audible and written word. Students are being conditioned to process only study material that is presented to them through audio-visual means.
This is also becoming a problem for ministers and elders who teach catechism and youth workers and Bible study leaders in church. It is to be expected that what goes on in the larger educational world will also impact the church.
The magnitude and rapidity of transformation provoked a great variety of reactions ranging from rejection to disillusionment. Most of these reactions can be related to one or several specific developments during Modernity. Since rationality and reason were perceived as cold and sterile the emphasis was laid on human emotions and an aspiration for warmth and harmony. The rapidly accelerating process of industrialization and all its ugly concomitant phenomena such as impoverishment and exploitation triggered deprecative, sometimes hostile and violent reactions.
A complete renunciation of some of the core themes of modernism is represented in the philosophy of nihilism developed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche asserted that there is no such thing as an universal or objective truth and that history is but a cycle of recurrent patterns with neither progress nor an end.
Because God did not exist humans will have to rely on themselves and the prospect of this notion is rather pessimistic. The increasing mechanization and technological advancement in general provoked a theory which argued that the future of humanity is threatened by technology. Furthermore, the first half of the 20th century witnessed the outbreak of two devastating World Wars which made a continuing belief in rationality or reason difficult if not impossible.
Both theories in the tradition of empiricism- positivism and rationalism attempted to accommodate the obvious irrationality of human behaviour by incorporating interdisciplinary methods and ideas such as the psychoanalysis.
After the end of the second World War the world became more and more diversified. The centre of the post- war world order was characterized by two antagonistic ideologies but at the periphery the emergence of new nation states most of which with strong ancient cultural traditions had far- reaching implications as well.
It became obvious that modern theories were incapable of providing sufficient and satisfying answers to these developments notwithstanding that they had also failed to evolve a theory with universal applicability. The final and decisive blow to the notion of objectivity in science came with an analysis of the processes of scientific theory- building by Thomas Kuhn.
According to him, a theory is developed according to certain patterns which originate from the social environment rather than from the principles of the scientific method. The majority of the scientific community will usually tend to adhere to the dominant paradigm prevailing at that time, thus reducing both the aspiration for a critical analysis of the dominant paradigm and the prospect of success for new theories.
There is however the possibility of a crisis which could occur because the dominant paradigm has become subject to challenge and revision.
The crisis phase is characterized by a great variety of opinions and debates but eventually a new dominant paradigm will emerge. The failure of modernist theories has provoked such a crisis and postmodernism is among the reactions although it has not yet become the new dominant paradigm. S E Sebastian Erckel Author. Add to cart. Table of Contents Introduction 1. Critical Postmodernism Conclusion Bibliography Introduction Few people would deny that they are living in an age of great transformational processes.
A Philosophical Approach to Postmodernism As the term postmodernism suggests it is a conceptual framework related in one way or another to modernism. Modernism Modernity is, simply speaking, the state of the present in its broadest sense.
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From the Blog. Pollution in Asia 18th November
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