Postmodern Nihilism Research Articles

The Inspiration of the Lake Poetry from the Perspective of Ecological Literature and Art to Postmodern Dilemma: A Homeward Journey from Enlightenment to Enchantment

Modern technological development has brought about severe natural environmental problems, and the resulting train of global events such as the ecological crisis, nihilism, population problems and the nuclear threat has caused indelible damage to people in modern society. Traditional moral values have been subverted, a wave of capitalism has swept the world, and enlightenment has become a myth to paralyze modern man. Modern art and postmodern thought have failed to save people from sinking under nihilism. Nihilism has re-emerged in the 21st century as the most serious ideological dilemma of the post-modern era, disintegrating people's beliefs like a chronic disease, giving rise to ideas such as money worship and hedonism, causing human beings to hurt and isolate each other, eroding human civilisation and values, and generating anxiety and depression in society. The postmodern, as a splinter of modernity, is unable to face up to the weaknesses of modernity, and the spiritual dilemma of the postmodern seriously haunts everyone. By reviewing the poetry and thought of the Lake Poets during the first industrial revolution, the study unearths their life attitudes in the face of the dual impact of nature and spirituality and explores the solutions to the crisis of postmodern nihilism faced by people in the present society: use contemporary to avoid postmodern.

Review Essay: “Beyond Metaphor”: The Uncanny Precariousness of Being

Review Essay: “Beyond Metaphor”: The Uncanny Precariousness of Being

Reflections on law and impact in the light of Brexit

ABSTRACTThe impact agenda in academic research affords rich opportunities – to inform the media, policymakers and the general public; to co-produce research with third sector organisations. In the context of Brexit, the prevailing ignorance of politicians and other stakeholders has been so profound, and the falsehoods that have had popular purchase so baseless, as to make the need for impact and public engagement all the more acute. This is not simply about fact-checking, but about making the case for the very worth of expertise, and reasserting the basic, core scientific values that drive academic work – values that have been trashed by the precepts of a postmodern nihilism, in which all positions are equally (in)valid and only your own gut can be trusted. But challenging these precepts in public arenas has personal and professional costs: significant workload implications, the acquisition of new skills and often a torrent of abuse. As such, this work needs institutional support. Departments need to value it appropriately, to promote equal access to impact opportunities and to confront the discriminatory barriers to (and consequences of) taking up the impact gauntlet. Throughout the Brexit process, expertise and experts have been dismissed and denigrated. The task now is to restore public faith in the value of the pursuit of truth.

Fundamentos Teológicos da Política

Com este texto, buscamos explicitar o tema da política enquanto uma ação da subjetividade aquém e além da regulação do Estado secular, a partir da obra teológica de Carlos Mendoza Álvarez. Sem entrar no debate acerca da “teologia política”, descreve-se a constituição da ação política da subjetividade capaz de instaurar um mundo habitável para todas as pessoas, isto é, na capacitação humana para por fim à violência que ameaça o futuro da humanidade e do planeta. Na interseção do niilismo pós-moderno com o pensamento antissistêmico, propugna-se um caminho para a superação da violência intersubjetiva a partir da imanência da história. Com essa aproximação niilista e antissistêmica, acessa-se o “centro vazio” como fonte da ação política da subjetividade. Esse “centro vazio” designa aquele reduto de que ninguém pode apoderar-se sem se autodestruir, isto é, ele revela-se como Fonte Amorosa, origem e destino de toda subjetividade. Esse “centro vazio”, como fonte originária da ação política da subjetividade, aparece na História enlaçada à virtude da caridade, que se concretiza na vida dos justos e das vítimas perdoadoras como a única possibilidade de redenção em tempos pós-modernos. Descreve-se, assim, a teologia da imaginação capaz de habilitar a subjetividade a superar a inércia e a espera pelo resgate milagroso que a teologia clássica nos conduziu e, assim, cultivar a esperança ativa no coração da história.

Theoretical Confusion Meets Willful Blindness: A Response to Drescher and Wake

In my response to Dr. Jack Drescher and Professor Naoko Wake, I reiterate my claim that a purported case history by Sullivan exemplifies the psychoanalytic genre of disguised autobiography. I assert that I have adduced the testimony of multiple independent and credible witnesses to establish how the 35-year-old psychiatrist began his long-term domestic relationship with 14-year-old Jimmie Inscoe. I critique Drescher for failing to take a clear ethical stand on a case of child abuse and Wake for adhering to a postmodern nihilism that negates the possibility of ever arriving at any historical truth. Both commentators ignore the copious evidence I present. I suggest that a willful blindness to contemplating unwelcome information requiring a paradigm shift in our understanding of an iconic figure lies behind their attitudes.

International legal structuralism: a primer

International legal structuralism arrived on the shores of international thought in the 1980s. The arrival was not well received, perhaps in part, because it was not well understood. This essay aims to reintroduce legal structuralism and hopefully pave the way for new, and more positive, receptions and understandings. This reintroduction is organized around two claims regarding the broader encounter between international lawyers and critical theory in the 1980s. The first was a jurisprudential claim about how the critics sought to show how international law was nothing more than a continuation of international politics by other means. The second was a historical claim about how the critics wanted to show that international law had never been anything but politics, and that it always would be. In the view of this essay, both of these claims about international legal structuralism were wrong, and they are still wrong today. For despite the tendency to think of it as a cover for postmodern nihilism or relentless deconstruction or both, legal structuralism offers international theorists an enriching and edifying method for rethinking the relation between law and politics on the one hand, and law and history on the other. It is in the effort to carry a brief for a reawakened legal structuralism that the essay brings focus to some of the early works of Koskenniemi and Kennedy, identifies the semiotic foundations of that work, and ultimately suggests the possibility of a second generation of international legal structuralism.

Apotheosis of the Hungry God: Nihilism and the Contours of Scholarship

The modern university is a demoralizing institution, largely devoted to the propagation of nihilism and liberation of desire. The apotheosis of this hungry god of the untrammeled will has taken more than 200 years, but the slow ascent has given humanistic scholarship its basic shape. The ascent of ‘reason’ over tradition and religion, at the end of the eighteenth century, caused conservative thought to emerge, reluctantly, and frame rational defenses of natural (i.e. spontaneously evolved) social institutions and belief systems. This has always been handicapped by the need to fight rationalism with reason. This same ascent inspired revolutionary theorists to frame their ringing denunciations and inspiring panaceas, most of which proved purely destructive because of the tragic inability of revolutionary practice to produce the promised and indispensable metanoia. Partly due to the limited success of conservative thought and revolutionary theory, untrammeled will has, more recently, ascended over reason, tradition, and religion, to give us the postmodern nihilism of Luciferian scholars.

Paranoia and Christianity in Maurice Dantec’s Crime Fiction

Maurice Dantec is “a prophet, a mystic, a Christian soldier, Zionist and pro-American, anti-secular and militantly counter-revolutionary. In short, the last scandal of French literature,” according to his editor David Kersan. Dantec’s brand of punk neo-Christian literary activism may feel somehow out of place in a literary milieu still beholden to the existentialism of Sartre and the revolutionary ethos of the 1960s. But Dantec’s “disgust” (of Old Europe, the creeping menace of Islam and the rampant march of secularization) bears witness to a larger malaise. Along with Michel Houellebecq and Peter Sloterdijk, he testifies to the opening of a new chapter in the culture wars, to the rise of a new group of “écrivains maudits” who have decided to vehemently question postmodern nihilism and economic globalization. Finally, Dantec’s fiction makes a case for the need for faith in a Godless world. This essay is concerned with Dantec’s paranoid politics as they appear in his fiction, and most notably in his latest Christian futuristic trilogy. It is also concerned with the relevance of conservative Christian dogma in his work, both formally and rhetorically.

Nothing: A User's Manual

In introducing this enigmatic topic, I often begin with a riddle that points to its elusive, mobile character: What is greater than God, more powerful than evil, the rich have it, the poor need it, and if you eat it, you die? -Nothing. In the multiple contexts in which I've navigated the topic of nothing (course, conference, collection of essays, special issue), it has proved a subject that provokes mirth, irony, and skepticism. When I have told colleagues that I'm teaching A Course About the responses I get range from Oh...it must have a short reading list, to Well, I'm going to teach my class now-at least it's about something, to Uhhuh or just Huh. (I have a slight preference for huh because it is linked to nothing through its palindromic symmetry (h-u-h), plus it is resolutely noncommittal; it says nothing.) And when I sent out a Call for Papers for this special several people thought it was a hoax; I received many responses that said, Dear Dr. Harris, please find below my submission for your journal issue, with the rest left blank. Still others wondered whether the topic of Nothing could lead to anything but more postmodern nihilism or empty intellectual solipsisms. Finally, on a pragmatic, pedagogical level, in setting out to investigate Nothing, one faces fundamental questions regarding both the utility and the futility of the topic. On the one hand, of what use could it be to pursue Nothing? And on the other, how can any search for it, any attempt to define or capture it, end up in anything but futility? While I have obviously not found definitive answers to these queries, I would maintain that a preliminary way of responding to them has emerged from teaching a class on Nothing. The use of Nothing lies in the simple fact that reading and thinking and talking about it leads down paths one would otherwise never traverse, and in following these lines of thought, one begins to develop a different way of thinking. This mode of reflection strives to avoid approaching Nothing from a standpoint grounded in the world of Being, where Presence and Something are presupposed to exist, and Nothing is seen as nothing but nonbeing. It is

Abstract: Scenario Planning, Art or Science?

This article will argue that there is a science of scenario planning; or at least a logos, a logic, a scenariology. Scenario planning is not predictive. But a good set of scenarios, scientifically developed, can reliably and predictably change minds. Scenario planning is both art and science. In joining the club of the sciences, scenario planning calls for a new kind of membership, or a new kind of science, one that, following Stuart Kauffman, relies on the importance of story. Hegel tells us that all stories, all narratives include a conflict between desire and the law, intention, and necessity. Scenarios provide a way for communities to frame their intentions. They thereby effect “downward causality” on the present in order to project the present toward a preferred future. In fulfilling the promise of this new kind of science, scenario planning breaks with positivistic science, but without falling into a postmodern nihilism. Without setting out to do so, the discipline of scenario planning introduces us to a new epistemology, a new way of knowing the truth. Drawing on pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty, this article reaches the conclusion that, for scenario planners, the future replaces objectivity as the horizon for justification. What is true? We'll see.

The Embodiment of Learning

This paper offers an introduction to the philosophy and science of embodied learning, conceived as both the stabilizing and expansionary process that sustains order and novelty within learners’ worlds enacted through observing and describing. Embodied learning acknowledges stability and change as the purposeful conjoined characteristics that sustain learners. It is, in many respects, a composite theory that represents work from various disciplines. This ‘naturalized epistemology’ ( ) conceives a world of fact inevitably imbued with the values that our own structural histories guarantee us observers, whether acknowledged or not within our reflective awareness. These values, however, are not simple sets of preferences, for they are constituted in our individual learning histories that, for good or bad, influence the course of future learning. This conservational element of our condition is only half the story, however. The more radical aspect resides in the expansionary capacity of embodied observers to change, to enact worlds that are not pre‐given ( ) but, rather, brought forth by learners as observers and describers. Furthermore, embodied learning seeks a grounding for understanding in the often‐unexplored epistemological terrain between positivist absolutism or its mirrored polar opposite, postmodern nihilism. Its epistemological stance derives from its ontology, which is grounded in the profound obviousness that ‘everything said is said by someone’ ( , p. 27).

Beyond the institutional site and the ethos of the void: the relevance of Gabriel Marcel's Creative Fidelity

The article addresses ethical issues concerning spectatorship and art practices. It explores an alternative to both modern institutional authority and postmodern nihilism by referring to the concept of ‘creative fidelity’ developed by the French ‘existentialist’ philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Contemporary radical reactions against the excesses of modernity in the western world have led to profound mistrust in the idea of subject/object, and have as a result favoured attitudes which tend to dissolve such a dichotomy. These attitudes, by expressing the contingency, indeterminacy, or groundlessness of meaning, have triggered the disappearance of the self, authorship, authenticity and insight. In art, both spectators and practitioners have left the modern cage of institutional ‘sitedness’ to behave like nomads in the jungle. The question therefore becomes: How is it possible to perceive, make, or even teach art in a meaningful manner without imposing frameworks, closures, boundaries or perspectives? This, it is argued, can be achieved by understanding the vital complementary relationship between innovation and faith, creativity and fidelity, renewal and availability.

Schooling for Democracy: Toward a Critical Utopianism

ions; to living together in harmony rather than gregariousness; to dialogue rather than mutism; to praxis rather than law and order; to men who organize themselves reflectively for action rather than men who are organized for passivity; to creative and communicative language rather than prescriptive signals; to reflective challenges rather than domesticating slogans; and to values that are lived rather than myths that are imposed. (cited in Giroux and McLaren 1997: 150) What unifies Bloch and Freire in their difficult challenge of transforming schools into more democratic spaces is their active refusal to link hope to a past eschatological event or to a finite historical moment. Hope for changes, improvements, solidarity, and social justice is the guiding force, a force that is grasped a pulsating latency of possibility contained in the unity of the immanent and transcendent. As such, hope is to be conscripted by social agents in order to contest the gangsterism of the spirit so common in this era of consumer capitalism, and to fill the empty space of postmodern nihilism (Giroux and McLaren 1997: 157). We understand utopias, after Freire and Bloch, as providing the conceptual horizon for the development of democratic schooling. This horizon of possibility could also be described as a educational In the next section we examine a recent educational reform effort in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, read against this concept of critical educational utopia. Critical Educational Utopias of the Concrete: Porto Alegre, Brazil: EscoLa

A Social Theory for the 21st Century?

The purpose of this article is to examine the impacts and consequences of postmodern nihilism and neoliberalism on the development of social theory in the closing decades of this century. In the predominant cultural atmosphere the whole enterprise of constructing social theory appears as an anachronistic and useless concern. The different factors that explain the origins and scop of this veritable `anti-theoretical' rebellion are examined at length. The central thesis is that the much required refoundation of social theory requires the definitive abandonment of the `disciplinary' and fragmented perspectives of the postivistic tradition and their replacement by a totalizing and unifying theoretical proposal.

The Creationist and the Sociobiologist: Two Stories about Illiberal Education

In a liberal culture, it is a great rhetorical advantage to appear in a dispute as the champion of free speech against the forces of repression. The has held this advantage for a long time. The student revolt of the 1960s opened with a Free Speech Movement, and the bumper sticker that directs us to Question Authority implies that the left's politics is a matter of raising questions rather than imposing answers. Recently, however, academic traditionalists like Dinesh D'Souza have seized the moral high ground by describing a left-imposed atmosphere of correctness in the universities that leads to illiberal education. In effect, they have captured the bumper sticker and turned its message around. The PC left under attack is post-Marxist, and its philosophy is post-Modernist. A brief pause for definitions is necessary. In postMarxism, racial minorities, feminists, and gays have assumed the mantle of the proletariat; the oppressor class is heterosexist white males rather than the bourgeoisie; and the struggle is for control of the terms of discourse rather than the means of production. Post-Modernism challenges the objective validity of academic traditions by starting from the premise that knowledge comes in texts whose meaning and value are determined by communities of interpreters. According to certain cultural critics (post-Liberals?), post-Modern nihilism and post-Marxist political fanati-