Do you agree more with modernity/The Enlightenment view of the world, or postmodernism?

I’m a huge fan of the Enlightenment; its advances in philosophy, science, economics – Reason in general – gave rise to the world I live in today.

I think post-modernism is often just code for nihilism.

Well if it weren’t for the enlightment.. we wouldn’t be where we are today.

The world of the Enlightenment was reductionistic and viewed the universe as being much more tidy and orderly than it really is. The real world is a much stranger place. Relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos theory are more in tune with postmodernism than the Enlightenment.

@LostInParadise I’m pretty sure that on a practical level, the world does not function post-modernly.

Postmodern. Or rather, definitely not modern.

But maybe it would be useful to have a description and/or definition of both modernism and postmodernism, and the various ideals associated with them before discussing them?

The Enlightenment made possible the lives of luxury that so many of us enjoy today. From a practical point of view it has been very successful. From a philosophical point of view it has been far less successful and as its ideas have developed their limitations have become apparent. The ideas of the Enlightenment will never lead to ultimate truth but that doesn’t mean they are without value.

Post modernism is the realisation that the Enlightenment can never live up to the high expectations we had of it. It is as empty and dull as its name suggests whereas the Enlightenment was full of hope.

It’s sort of an unanswerable question. I’m not sure modernism and postmodernism qualify as ‘view[s] of the world’ because, really, they are just large collections of views of the world. I mean post/modernism itself is not a description of the world that can be agreed with or disagreed with. It’s just the box that contains such descriptions.

The box’s depth is limitless, though, so maybe ‘postmodernism’ is not so much a hypernym now as it is a semantic black hole into which we can conveniently dump, ad infinitum, all the complicated, jargoned cultural critiques that our bored and tenured professors insist on producing.

And one may disagree with some of the things in the box or black hole, like particular critics or scholastic trends, but that doesn’t mean one also necessarily ‘disagrees’ with all post/modern readings, of which there are so many that one is bound to find something at least inoffensive. Nor does it mean that, by disagreeing, one can avoid participating in post/modern discourse and what is called, for better or worse, the postmodern world.

You might disagree with Baudrillard, for example, and argue accurately enough that he is too much a fatalist, a nihilist, and a Luddite, and in turn you might advocate the trenchant criticism made by Alan Sokal, but regardless of your position you end up being sucked into the black hole, as Baudrillard and Sokal both were. Sokal’s method of undermining postmodern social criticism was itself an exercise in postmodernity. It was clever. But the fact that it was necessary is a problem, because if the only way to critique postmodernism is with more postmodern irony, then point and counterpoint are both just going to be absorbed by those dangerous morphemes of postmodernism.

Yes, I would rename it post-ism.

I haven’t had my coffee yet so I’m sure I’ll reread this later and laugh at myself but, anyway, there is a rant for you! Hope it was at least enjoyable.

Neither. I prefer the philosophia perennis, modified by a healthy dose of American pragmatism.

There’s no such thing as “postmodernism.” There are many postmodernisms, some of which are continuations of modernism with a few twists due to contemporary considerations (e.g., concerning the necessity of emotion for logical reasoning). I’m not going to throw my lot in with any -ism that I take to be poorly defined.