Minute with a Muslim #061 – What Is Post Modern Philosophy

Somebody asked what is post modernism or what is postmodern philosophy, and it's beyond our ability to cover this in a short video exhaustively. But I think people have an overly narrow understanding in popular culture as to what is post modernism. And it gets a very bad rap as it should to be honest with you. But that's often people are reacting to a certain strain of, or a certain result from postmodern philosophy, they assume that all of it is, you know, represented by that. So you can understand post modernism as something that was responding to modernism, right, because it's, it's post, so modernism, you can very briefly sort of understand it, or think about it as the project of

the Enlightenment, okay, so trying to believe that there is such a thing as universal reason, reason is just one thing, trying to create a universal human culture, and even a universal kind of religion or morality based off of reason, one particular tradition of reason, believing in progress, believing in a certain understanding of time that it's linear, and that there's touches of positivism in there, where we believe that we can go out and understand everything, you know, we can figure it all out, if we just apply our reason correctly. And these sorts of things. It's also tied up with understandings of the self, you know, the autonomous individual, the morally autonomous

individual, we define ourselves, we express ourselves, these are all tied to modernism. And again, this is that's a big topic post modernism is responding to that. And post modernism is basically putting into question how much we can really know if you're claiming that reason is universal. And reason is something that, you know, we it's equal access, it's everywhere you go through all time, and it can figure out everything post modernism is saying, Hold up a sec, not really, you know, some of the excesses of post modernism, or what are some particular strains of it have taken that to the point of relativism and nihilism. Basically, we can't understand anything or we can't know anything,

right, that doesn't exhaustively account for everything that that, you know, could be grouped under post modernism. And that's where it gets a lot of flack because then you have, you know, we have certain developments in popular culture, people saying that they can change their genders, people saying that there is no objective truth, people saying that, you know, everybody can just has their own truth. And this is kind of in the wake of a certain strain of postmodern thought. However, there are other strains of postmodern thought, or at the very least, we could say that postmodern thought has some very important critiques of modernism that Muslims have to take very seriously and Hallak

actually, well halacha in his book, The Impossible state in passing references that there is a commonality between postmodern criticisms of modernity and Islamic criticisms of modernity. As Muslims, we don't have the same sense of progressive time or the doctrine of progress that modernity or modernism subscribes to, we believe in an eschatological time, we believe that things are going to get worse, before they're gonna get better, right, there's whole end of times chaos, the spread of corruption, all this sort of stuff. We don't believe in the sort of just like linear march of progress. And we're just getting more and more free and more and more enlightened, actually, we

believe as part of our faith as part of a slam that we're going more and more astray as a species. And that makes sense, especially because now we've been sort of excluded from receiving a new profit. And so of course, we're going to go more and more astray. And actually morality is going to get worse and worse and worse, or creation is going to become more and more immoral until the big correction, which is the the Day of Judgment is kind of established. So and there's others there's other aspects of postmodern critique of modernity that I think Muslims need to take very seriously without necessarily falling into the excesses or certain strains of post modernism and postmodern

theory that, that level everything and say that there is no truth or objective truth and that we know we can't really know anything and you have your truth and my have, I have my truth and things are all just fluid and indefinable. We don't have to go to those extremes. So to be brief, I think that's the, that's the takeaway for the app. That's some of the most important takeaways for the average Muslim. So I mean, part of the idea and the appeal of universal reason to enlightenment philosophers, and to modernists was their trauma from Christianity, right? Religion had become tainted in a very large way, or at least organized religion. You know, that's a whole other topic, I

have become tainted people had lost faith in its ability to solve people's problems, or to arrive conclusively at sort of an objective truth. And so reason became kind of the new god, you could say, or, or the new, you know, method of sort of attempting to find this, this thing and that, you know, you have all the internecine wars and the religious wars that you're went through. And so that was sort of their partly their response to that, of course, you know, they didn't realize they were assuming that all religion was like Christianity, they didn't realize that Islam was the actual truth is the objective truth, and it's out there. And if they had an opportunity, and perhaps less

prejudice towards Islam, maybe they wouldn't have turned to modernism or the Enlightened enlightenment project would have unfolded differently, they wouldn't have necessarily felt this fundamental antagonism between faith and reason. And so it's a shame, but that's what Islam stands to benefit the world by by being an objective truth, a moral regime that is truly universal. Right. And a lot of times throughout history, you see this kind of interesting thing unfold where people are reaching for a universe

So, but they reach to a false universal sometimes they do it with reason such as the enlightenment or sometimes they do it through a false religious tradition such as perennialism, right or any other type of like syncretic religion that tries to assume the position of a super religion above all other religions, right. This is grasping at a false universal, whereas the true universal and the true universally valid regime of truth, I guess we could say is a slap