According to a quip by Maxim Gorky, you don’t have to have been in a frying pan to write about a schnitzel. Of course, there are things that can only be described from the first-person perspective, and of course some things are easier to describe if you have your own background of experience. But does it follow that truth and objectivity are fundamentally social constructions, and ones that subtly exert power?
This was the mainstream of postmodern thought and its philosophical predecessors from Nietzsche to Feyerabend. Their aim was to “deconstruct” seemingly objective descriptions and to uncover the underlying influences and power mechanisms. This has deepened our understanding of truth and knowledge, but at the same time has often thrown the baby out with the bathwater, leading us into the dead end of relativistic positions that undermine their own claim to validity.
Some postmodern authors, like Bruno Latour, later changed their minds, but the legacy of postmodern thinking can still be found today not only in right-wing, but also in left-wing, justice-oriented concepts: in parts of gender studies, postcolonial ones theories or in critical race theory. There, the validity claims of statements are sometimes derived from concrete experiences of discrimination or membership in a victim group and are positioned as a privileged cognitive position against other people’s participation and thinking.
Philosopher Susan Neiman calls this “tribal thinking.” She rejects the idea that such tribal thinking is modern left-wing thinking: Left is not woke, Hanser Verlag, Berlin, 175 pages, 22 euros. A 7-line review to “tease” you.
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For further reading:
• Amartya Sen: The Identity Trap. Why there is no war of civilizations. Munich 2007.
• Paul Boghossian: Fear of the truth. Frankfurt 2013.
• Omri Boehm: Radical Universalism. Berlin 2022.
• Bruno Latour: Misery of criticism. Zurich/Berlin 2007.
• Thomas Nagel: The view from nowhere. Frankfurt 1992.