postmodernity.

Throughout the 20^th century the modern project has become untrustworthy. By the modern project I understand the belief in rationality, objectivity and universality as the fundament of both ethics and science. The doubt in the modern project is partly due to the horrors which occurred in the heart of the enlightened Europe throughout the history of the 20^th century: Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Soviet Communism, environmental crisis. The doubt in the modern project has also been strengthened by the critics of objectivity and metaphysics raised by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger amongst others. Today we find it impossible to believe in the modern project. We cannot believe in a linear historicity, in the objective truth, in the thought that the rationalization of society and technological advances will necessarily lead to the good society. In the slipstream of the dismissal of the modern project, postmodern philosophy has focused on the particular and the singular instead of the general or the universal. In postmodernity universality and objectivity have been replaced by pluralism and differing perspectives.

                      Nevertheless, the postmodern belief is not unproblematic. It has enormous consequences for the status of ethics and science. Without an ethic provided by either nature or God or reason, how can we then create a good society? If truth is not something we can discover, a riddle we can solve in the great book of nature, how are we to understand the role of science? On the basis of those problems some come to believe that pluralistic thinking implies a total nihilation of values. Indeed some of the thinkers who had in the first place accepted the postmodern critics of the modern endeavours to make objective descriptions and grasp universal norms, abandon the postmodern belief in particularity and pluralism because they conclude that ethics is no longer a possibility within the postmodern way of thinking. Here, I especially think of Richard Rorty and Slavoj Žižek, who both, but in different ways, end up by completing a cycle; suggesting that we are to universalise a particular ontology or ethic.

To reflect upon this problem of the postmodern: How is it possible at the same time to take the critique of universality and objectivity serious, and still believe in the value of ethics and science? To formulate a thinking of plurality that does not entail a – in Gianni Vattimos words – negative nihilism, where nothing has any value, where ethics and truth has been sucked out of the world. How is it possible to conceive ethics and science without unreserved confidence in rationality, objectivity and universality? How is it possible to hold a critical perspective without a universal and objective fundament?