Did President Clinton's defense of his testimony in the Lewinsky matter employ postmodern modes of interpretation?
We have all heard some variation of the phrase, "That may be true for you but not for me." We may hear it coming from multiculturalists, pro-choice advocates and members of other ideologically driven movements. Its use, however, is not limited to such circles. It has been adopted by the public at large and become perhaps the central moral principle of our age. The underlying philosophy beneath such ethical rhetoric is known as postmodernism.
Early modern philosophers differed from previous Christian thinkers in that they did not believe in revelation or an afterlife. These moderns shared a confidence in modern science to discover the truth, or at least verifiable certainty, about the natural and political world. Postmodern thinkers, on the other hand, replaced the professed objectivity of the moderns with radical subjectivity: truth is not discovered, but created. In short, postmodernism does not offer a new method of finding universal truths, but rather dismisses them altogether to usher in a whole new era of 'Constructivism' (you need to deconstruct it first though!).
2 comments:
your essay towards the end requires a deconstruction also,in that it becomes quite ambiguous, in that case writing about postmodernism then becomes postmodern writing...
am i right?
Well...the point here is to relate the seemingly ambiguous issues of post-modernism into a comprehensive framework of everyday lives. Philosophy or metaphysics is a scientific approach to the ephimeral and intangible aspects of existence, yet it has amazing views and perspectives that any other branch of science or knowledge is unable to give. So the deconstructions are applied to argue the post-hoc reasoning that may have been employed to present a case. The cross examination in the court room by the prosecutors is a very good example of this deconstruction! Thanks for your comments.
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