Postmodernism in philosophy is the most controversial phenomenon in the entire history of human thought. He has his own prophets, adherents and theorists. Exactly the same number of opponents and those who disagree with his ideas. This philosophy is scandalous and non-standard, so it finds either its fans or ardent haters. It is difficult to understand, it has a lot of interesting and controversial. She is like a smile of a Cheshire cat, which can be perceived or ignored, based on their own beliefs and moods.
The term "postmodernism" is equally used to refer to the state and philosophy, and culture of the Western world of the second half of the 20th century. Among the most striking figures, thanks to whom postmodernism in philosophy got its appearance, we can name Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Isak Derrida, Michel Foucault and others. Among the theorists called the names of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Heidegger. The term itself was fixed for the phenomenon thanks to the works of J. Lyotard.
A complex phenomenon characterized by similarly ambiguous manifestations in the culture and way of thinking is the philosophy of postmodernism. The main ideas of this trend are as follows.
First of all, this is the “loss of the subject" of philosophy, an appeal to everyone and to nobody at the same time. The prophets of this movement play with styles, mix the meanings of previous eras, sort out quotes, confusing their audience in their complex production. This philosophy blurs the line between forms, structures, institutions, and generally all determinations. Postmodernism claims to be the invention of “new thinking and ideology”, the purpose of which is to break the foundations, traditions, get rid of classics, and revise values and philosophy as such.
Postmodernism is a philosophy that preaches the rejection of old ideals, but does not create new ones, but, on the contrary, calls for abandoning them in principle, as ideas that distract from real life. Its ideologists strive to create a fundamentally new, “life-creating culture” radically different from everything known until now, in which a person must find absolutely complete, unlimited (including the framework of rationality and conscience) freedom. They want to replace the order in culture with chaos, so that there will be a great many cultures, in the same way political systems should become diverse, between which there should also be no boundaries.
How does postmodernism see a person? For new prophets, people must cease to be judged through the prism of their individuality, the boundaries between geniuses and mediocrity, heroes and the crowd must be completely destroyed.
Postmodernism in philosophy tries to prove the crisis of humanism, believing that the mind can only create a culture that standardizes a person. Philosophers abandon an optimistic and progressive view of history. They undermine logical schemes, power structures, the cultivation of ideals, the search for uniformity as obsolete and not leading to progress.
If in modernist philosophy the orientation was on human life, now an emphasis is placed on the resistance of the world to man and his unreasonable impact on this world.
According to the majority of researchers, postmodernism in philosophy owes its popularity not to its achievements (because there are none at all), but to an unprecedented avalanche of criticism that has fallen on its preachers. Postmodernism does not make any sense in its philosophy, does not reflect, but merely plays discourses - that’s all he could offer the world. The game is the main rule. And what kind of game, a game of what - no one knows. There is no goal, no rules, no meaning. This is a game for the sake of the game, emptiness, "simulacrum", "copy copy".
Man, postmodernists claim, is only a puppet of the “stream of Desires” and “discursive practices”. With such an attitude, it is difficult to generate anything positive and progressive. Postmodernism in philosophy is a decline of thought, if you like, self-destruction of philosophy. Since there are no edges, then there is no good, nor evil, nor truth, nor falsehood. This trend is very dangerous for the culture.