Tags / 8 quotes from 1 source
#postmodernism
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Postmodernism and the fragmented self
One of the most fashionable drivers behind the idea that we should all think of ourselves as multiple rather than singular is postmodernism. The nature of ‘postmodernism’ is hard to pin down, not least because it is in part a denial of the apparently old-fashioned idea that any…
Postmodernism rejects essentialism
This is not fragmentation for fragmentation’s sake, however. Underlying it is an intellectual rejection of various kinds of essentialism or realism. Before postmodernism, so we are told, most dominant modes of thought took reality to have a single, real essence.
The rejection of meta-narratives
Postmodernism rejected all that. The world has no real essence that is just waiting for us to describe. Reality is constituted by our understanding of it. History is created by the stories we tell about the past, and there are innumerable different such stories we can tell…
The self constructed like a fiction
In their place we need a multiplicity of narratives, ones which capture the different, contradictory perspectives that people in different times and places have of the world. This analysis applies to the self as much as it does to anything else. The self has no immutable…
Postmodernists as intellectual dipsomaniacs
However, with this comes the promise of a liberation. If the self is constructed, then may we now take over the task of construction for ourselves? We can create ourselves, become the authors of our identities, writing as many of them as we want, not limiting ourselves to a…
No fixed essence does not mean infinite narratives
it is true that the self has no fixed essence, that it is in part a construction and that the autobiographical narratives we tell ourselves invent an order and cohesion that real lives lack. But it is not good enough to revel in this in a kind of Dionysian frenzy. You have to…
Against the hyperbole of hyper-malleability
The hyperbole of hyper-malleability is refuted by the simple observation that human beings, postmodernists included, display a remarkable amount of continuity and unity, even though they have no fixed essence.
Some ways of carving up the world are better
shows how the postmodernists were right: there is nothing inevitable about the way we think about the world. We can carve it up in many different ways. What they fail to stress, though, is that some carvings-up are better and more truthful than others. We can indeed think…