Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Ian Kluge, Postmodernism and the Baha'i Writings, bahai-library.com.
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Postm odernism and th e B ahá'í Writing s
Part One

Ian Kluge

1. Introduction
Postmodernism is a general name given to an extraordinarily
influential intellectual and artistic movement which in its
philosophical form, originated in France – though its
foundations are largely in the work of German philosophers
such as Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger1 – and successfully took
root and flourished in North American intellectual culture.
Over the last forty years, postmodernism’s influence has been
felt in a wide variety of subjects; however this paper will focus
on its philosophic aspects and leave aside its manifestations in
art, photography, theatre, architecture and creative literature.
Wherever postmodernism has appeared, the depth and breadth
of postmodernism’s impact is astounding. Some subjects, such
as literary studies, have been radically transformed by the
encounter to the point where ‘theory’ to swamp the subject of
literature itself. Philosophy has felt its very legitimacy and
usefulness as a subject challenged2 not to mention basic
concepts such as knowledge, rationality and truth as well as the
whole notion of metaphysics.3 History has been touched by,
among other things, the struggle over the whole notion of grand
narratives versus small or local narratives,4 the knowability of
the past, as well as the uses of history.5 Women’s Studies,
though not in themselves part of postmodernism, have been
affected by the entire deconstructionist project, by
postmodernism’s analysis of power relations and, more
controversially, by its antipathy to essentialism. Psychology
feels the influence of postmodern thinking in its handling of
gender and political science in discussions of marginalization
and the workings of power.6 Cultural Studies have opened new
vistas for exploration through the study of simulations and
simulacra.7 Postmodernism has also re-shaped and revised
Freudian psychoanalysis.8
62 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

The breadth and depth of postmodern philosophy’s influence
makes it necessary to examine the nature of its relationship to
the Bahá'í Writings in order to assess whether or not there are
points of agreement, their extent, and whether or not they are
superficial or fundamental.
The movement is so important and, in many respects, so
radical that thought systems and/or religions cannot avoid
taking a position in regards to its ideas. Such is the project
undertaken by this paper which will examine the major
philosophical issues covered by postmodern philosophy in
epistemology and the quest for knowledge especially in
literature, philosophy, history and cultural studies; in ontology;
in philosophical anthropology (theory of man) and in ethics.
This paper shall compare and contrast the positions taken by
major postmodern philosophers with those that are given
directly or implicitly in the Bahá'í Writings.
This inevitably leads to the question ‘Can a Bahá'í adhere to
some form of philosophical postmodernist without losing
intellectual consistency, and if so, in what way?’ This paper
concludes that the Bahá'í Writings and postmodernism share a
variety of ideas but on fundamental issues of ontology,
epistemology, philosophical anthropology (theory of man),
ethics and cultural theory, they are incompatible. Generally
speaking, postmodernism and the Bahá'í Writings do not share
the same or even a similar “Denkweg,”9 or way of thinking. This
is not to say there are no similarities between the two but that
the similarities are relatively superficial or accidental whereas
the differences are deep and foundational.
The plan of this paper is simple: in Part I, we shall survey the
major postmodern writers - in particular Nietzsche, Derrida,
Foucault, Lyotard, Rorty and Baudrillard who are “the major
philosophical figures in the post modern turn in philosophy.”10
In Part II, we shall compare what these philosophers say with
the Bahá'í Writings.

2. Th e Nature of Phil osophical Postmodernism
In its broadest sense, philosophical postmodernism is a
movement that challenges the most fundamental premises that
have guided the development of Western philosophy since the
time of Plato, and most particularly, the philosophical
foundations of the Enlightenment. Indeed, this theme of
opposition to the Enlightenment is so strong, some scholars see
postmodernism as a continuation of the “Counter-
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 63

Enlightenment”11 that began in Germany and France in the 18th
Century and found its most influential voice in Nietzsche. The
Counter-Enlightenment opposed the Enlightenment’s
proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of the
natural sciences based on observation as the sole reliable
method of knowledge and the consequent rejection of the
authority of revelation, sacred writings and their accepted
interpreters tradition, prescription and every form of
nonrational and transcendent sources of knowledge ...12
Thus we can see that the central feature of the “Counter-
Enlightenment” was to question and undermine the supremacy
of reason and empiricism in the quest for knowledge and to
make room for intuition and instinct, which we deemed to be
more natural and spiritual. This feature is clearly evident in the
following characterization of postmodernism distinguished by
an anti-(or post) epistemological standpoint; anti-
essentialism; anti-foundationalism; opposition to
transcendental arguments and transcendental standpoints;
rejection of the picture of knowledge as accurate
representation; rejection of truth as correspondence to
reality; rejection of the very idea of canonical
descriptions’ rejection of final vocabularies, i.e. rejection
of principles, distinctions, and descriptions that are
thought to be unconditionally binding for all times,
persons, and places; and a suspicion of grand narratives,
metanarratives of the sort perhaps best illustrated by
dialectical materialism.13
The specific meaning of this statement will become more
clear as we proceed through this paper. Postmodernism also
notably rejects the concept of reason, the rational subject, the
idea of progress, “epistemic certainty”14 and ‘truth,’ and all
manner of binary oppositions such as good and evil, nature and
culture, true and false and perhaps most surprisingly, writing
and speech.15 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, two of the best
known scholars on postmodernism write, that in addition to
rejecting representation, i.e. the belief that theories reflect
reality, it also
Rejects modern assumptions of social coherence and
notions of causality in favour of multiplicity, plurality,
fragmentation and indeterminancy. In addition,
postmodern theory; abandons the rational and unified
subject postulated by modern theory in favour of a
socially and linguistically decentered and fragmented
64 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

subject.16
Many (though not all) of these attributes can be encapsulated
by saying that postmodernism rejects the 18th Century European
Enlightenment and its intellectual culture of seeking certain
truth and “clear and distinct comprehension”17 that could not be
doubted. This goal received its most powerful early formulation
in the work of Descartes whose famous method led him to
reject anything which could possibly de doubted.18 In the last
analysis, he discovers, what cannot be doubted is his own
existence – to doubt it, he must exist! – and the power of reason
to deliver the truth if we reason correctly.19 Thus he established
on a firm philosophical basis, the primacy of the subject in the
quest for knowledge and the primacy of reason. These ideas
became foundational to Enlightenment, i.e. ‘modernist’
thinking which built on them and applied them to the
exploration of reality.
One of the most comprehensive summaries of Enlightenment
thought is presented by Jane Flax. Despite its length, it is worth
quoting in full.
1. The existence of a stable, coherent self. Distinctive
properties of this Enlightenment Self include a form of
reason capable of privileged insight into its own processes
and the “laws of nature.
2. Reason and its “science” – philosophy – can provide
objective, reliable, and universal foundation for
knowledge.
3. The knowledge acquired from the right use of reason will
be “true” – for example, such knowledge will represent
something real and unchanging (universal) about our minds
and the structure of the natural world.
4. Reason itself has transcendental and universal qualities. It
exists independently of the self’s contingent existence
(e.g., bodily, historical and social experiences do not
affect reason’s structure or its capacity to produce
atemporal knowledge).
5. There are complex connections between reason,
autonomy, and freedom. All claims to truth and rightful
authority are to be submitted to the tribunal of reason.
Freedom consists of obedience to laws that conform to
the necessary results of the right use of reason. (The rules
that are right for me as a rational being will necessarily be
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 65

right for all other such rational beings.) In obeying such
laws, I am obeying my own best transhistorical part
(reason) and hence am exercising my own autonomy and
ratifying my existence as a free being. In such acts, I
escape a determined or merely contingent existence.
6. By grounding claims to authority in reason, the conflicts
between truth, knowledge and power can be overcome.
Truth can serve power without distortion; in turn by
utilizing knowledge in the service of power, both freedom
and progress will be assured. Knowledge can be both
neutral (e.g. grounded in universal reason, not particular
“interests”) and also socially beneficial.
7. Science, as the exemplar of right use of reason, is also the
paradigm of all true knowledge. Science is neutral in its
methods and contents but socially beneficial in its results.
Through its process of discovery we can utilize the laws of
nature for the benefit of society. However, in order for
science to progress, scientists must be free follow the rules
of reason rather than pander to the interests arising from
outside rational discourse.
8. Language is in some sense transparent . Just as the right
use of reason can result in knowledge that represents the
real, so, too, language is merely the medium in and
through which such representation occurs. There is a
correspondence between word and thing (as between a
correct truth claim and the real). Objects are not
linguistically (or socially) constructed; they are merely
made present to consciousness by naming and the right use
of language.20
Directly or indirectly, Flax’s summary touches on almost all
of the Enlightenment beliefs against which the postmodernists
rebelled in their various ways, thereby revealing the “deep
irrationalism at the heart of postmodernism”21 This opposition
to the Enlightenment is also why postmodern philosophy is so
heavily indebted to Nietzsche and Heidegger, who were both
scathing critics of Enlightenment thought.
What postmodernism primarily offers in return for these
wide-ranging rejections is more room for heterogeneity, for
difference and the different, for the marginalized, for the
colonized, the silenced and the outcast, be they subversive ideas
or interpretations hidden in a text, a social class or group, the
conquered, dominated, suppressed, rejected and demeaned. It
66 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

also offers a new way to experience ourselves as subjects and a
new way of relating to reality which is regarded as a man-made
social construction. Finally, it offers freedom from being
enslaved to metanarratives or “grand narratives”22 which
threaten the independence and freedom of our lives. Thus, we
can see that postmodernism is, or sees itself, as an intellectual
liberation movement working for the freedom of oppressed
peoples and ideas. It is, therefore, at least to some extent
involved in the politics of knowledge, which means it
formulates theories with an eye to their usefulness and
suitability for its liberationist goals. It is not simply trying to
find truth but truth that makes free.
This oppositional attribute of postmodernism has been
observed by such scholars as Lloyd Spencer whose article bears
the telling title of “Postmodernism, Modernity and the
Tradition of Dissent”. Spencer writes, “postmodernism can be
seen as an extension of the critical, sceptical, dissenting – even
nihilistic – impulse of modernity.”23 This oppositional nature
fits in well with postmodernism’s liberationist agenda.
To the charge that this reduces it from a philosophy with a
disinterested quest for truth, to an ideology which seeks truth
that are useful to a particular end, the postmodern reply is that
whether conscious of it or not, all philosophy is ideology and is
working in the interests of someone or some group. A
disinterested quest for truth is a fiction to deceive others and
ourselves.

3. Th e Founda tion s of Postm oder nism: Kant
Whereas Descartes may be seen as the initiator of the
Enlightenment or modernism in philosophy, Kant (1724 – 1804)
is generally regarded as its towering philosophical intellect.
However, Kant’s role is ambiguous, because he may also be
understood as also having laid the basis for postmodernism.
Without question, Kant gave primacy to reason in the quest for
knowledge; indeed, rationality is our most important attribute
as human beings.24 At the same time, however, Kant put
limitations on reason, restricting its effective scope to the
phenomenal world of our daily experience. “I shall show that
neither on the one path, the empirical, nor on the other, the
transcendental, can reason achieve anything, and that it
stretches its wings in vain, if it tries to soar beyond the world
of sense by the mere power of speculation.”25 Therefore, he
rejects the belief that God, Who is obviously transcendental to
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 67

this phenomenal world, can be proved cosmologically, i.e. from
the contingent existence of phenomenal reality, we cannot
deduce the existence of a necessary and non-contingent being.26
The final result of Kant’s view is that human reason and
knowledge are confined to the phenomenal world; there is no
possibility of reasoning or obtaining knowledge about whatever
is transcendental.

According to Kant, the limitations of reason were also
demonstrated by the antinomies, that is, the equally possible but
rationally contradictory results which show “discord and
confusion produced by the conflict of the laws (antinomy) of
pure reason.”27 In other words, on some subjects – the
limitation of the universe in space and time; the concept of a
whole cosmos made of indivisible atoms; the problem of
freedom and causality; the existence of a necessarily existing
being – reason can come to opposite but equally rational
conclusions. There is simply no way to break the deadlock.
Thus, “reason makes us both believers and doubters at once”28
leaving us with grounds to believe and disbelieve in God and in
reason itself.

Kant’s third contribution to the development of the
postmodern outlook is the theory of categories. In Kant’s view,
our perceptions of the world did not arrive in the form in which
we actually experience them. Rather they arrive as ‘raw data’
which the mind processes and shapes by means of the categories
which are the conditions on which having an experience
depends. “These categories therefore are also fundamental
concepts by which we think objects in general for the
phenomena, and have therefore a priori objective validity”29
These categories, which include organizing raw data according
to time, space, causality, necessity, contingency, subsistence and
accidence among other things, constitute, that is, create our
experience of the phenomenal world. Thus, our mind shapes the
raw data of our perceptions into a coherent world which
becomes the object of our experience. In Kant’s view, we have
no way of knowing what the raw data was like before it was
shaped into the phenomenal world by the categories of the
mind; that noumenal realm must remain forever beyond our
grasp and there is no point in speculating about this terra
incognita. It is also follows clearly from Kant’s views, that to
one extent or another, the perceiving subject cannot be taken as
a mirror reflecting a pre-existing reality, which is to say, the
subject cannot access reality and deliver accurate reports about
it. Indeed, the subject is “an obstacle to cognition”30 and cannot
68 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

be trusted.
Kant’s views laid the foundations for postmodern
constructivism, which asserts that our knowledge of reality, be
it natural, social or personal is constructed, not discovered.
Discovery is really construction as Kant’s theory of the data
organizing categories makes clear. We make the world or reality
we experience. As we shall see later, in postmodern theory, the
function of the categories is taken over by language and
culture. This means that there can be no objective knowledge or
representation of reality and that all we have are various
constructions or stories none of which is privileged over others
in terms of its truth value. (How, after all, could truth be
determined if we only have constructions and nothing to
compare our constructions against.?) Not only is external reality
hidden beneath our constructions, so is our individual self or
identity which becomes just another construction or story
among the rest. This is a profoundly different way of
experiencing oneself than the belief in an immortal soul
forming our essence. Indeed, in this view, things such as cats,
stars, species or individuals do not naturally have essences;
rather these so-called essences are constructed for our
convenience by selecting, more or less arbitrarily, a certain
number and/or kind of traits. Postmodernism as we shall see
drew the obvious lesson from Kant’s view: if reality, the world,
and the self can be constructed in one way, they can also be
constructed in another. The world and reality may be changed
by reconstructing it along new lines.
Kant also influenced postmodern thought by providing an
idea to react against, namely, the sharp division between the
perceiving (and organizing) subject and the object, the data
being organized. (Hegel, among others, already sought to
overcome this division in his philosophy) The postmodernists
want to see the subject and object as one di-polar complex, as a
self-in-the-world, as irrevocably embedded in a specific life-
situation with its unique perspective. Self and world are like
two sides of a coin, distinct but not separable from one
another.
Kant’s influence may also be felt in another area important
to postmodern thinking, namely, its rejection of metaphysical
investigation or speculation. According to Kant, it is impossible
for us to gain knowledge about anything that is not part of the
phenomenal world constituted by our mental categories. In
other words, we cannot know anything that is not organised in
accordance with the categories of time, space, causality,
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 69

necessity, subsistence and accidence among other things. The
nature of the raw data or reality – the noumenon – before it is
perceived and shaped by the categories is forever unknowable.
Human knowledge is limited to the phenomenal realm, i.e. that
which is shaped by the categories. For this reason, cosmological
proofs of God are impossible: they attempt to reason from the
nature of phenomena to the nature of an entity – God – Who is
beyond the phenomenal. We cannot apply reason – based on our
understanding of the phenomenal world shaped by the
categories – to that which has not been shaped by the categories.
Consequently, all metaphysical speculation about non-
phenomenal reality is pointless.
Finally, Allan Megill points out another area in which Kant’s
philosophy, perhaps inadvertently, influenced postmodern
thought, namely aesthetics. If nature, in Kant’s view, was the
realm of law and our actions were the realm of the good (we
always try and achieve what appears as a good to us) then
aesthetics may be seen as a realm of freedom from these
constraints, a realm in which beauty, pleasure and satisfaction
are the goals. Kant, was read as asserting that there was “an
autonomous realm of the aesthetic”31 In other words, there is a
realm where man is free to construct however he chooses, where
man is completely free. Moreover,
Kant’s insistence on the autonomy of aesthetic judgment
leads him to deny that art has ‘truth value ... At the same time,
however, some of his statements in the Critique of Judgment
can be read as contradicting this view. For he does hint that
while art cannot supply us with knowledge in any logical sense,
it can pout us into contact with something that cannot be fully
presented in experience or grasped through concepts. 32
The lesson to be drawn from this is that only through art and
through art-making or constructing can humankind ever attain
its full measure of freedom and learn whatever ‘truth’ it is able
to learn. Art, the aesthetic, has become the model and ideal of
existence.

4. The Foundations of Postmodernism: Nietzsche
Frederich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) had such an enormous
influence on postmodern thought that one might well consider
him to be the first postmodernist. According to Best and
Kellner, Nietzsche’s “assault on Western rationalism profoundly
influenced Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard and
other postmodern theorists.”33 According to Clayton Koelb,
70 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

“Nietzsche initiated many of the basic concepts which stand
behind the broad concept of postmodernism.”34
Many, if not all, postmodern themes are taken up in his
various works, from the early The Birth of Tragedy to his final,
posthumously collected notes in The Will to Power. Of these,
the distrust, indeed, dislike, for reason is clearly evident in one
of his earliest and most widely read works, The Birth of
Tragedy. Nietzsche relentlessly criticizes modern culture and its
(for him) archetypal character, Socrates.
Our whole modern world is entangled in the net of
Alexandrian culture. It proposes as its ideal the theoretical man
equipped with the greatest forces of knowledge, and laboring in
the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates.35
The “theoretical man” was Socrates, the champion of reason
and thought as the best means of discovering the truth about
ourselves and reality. In a similar vein, he writes in Twilight of
the Idols:
Today, conversely, precisely insofar as the prejudice of
reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence,
substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves
somehow caught in error, necessitated into error36
Socrates, the “theoretical man” has fallen prey to a profound
illusion... [an] unshakable faith that thought, using the thread
of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that
thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of
correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion accompanies
science as an instinct and leads science again and again to its
limits at which it must turn into art: which is really the aim of
this mechanism.37
Nietzsche calls Socrates a “mystagogue of science”38 with
whom originated “the spirit of science... the faith in the
explicability of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.”39
Despite claims to be seeking the truth, the mission of science is
really to comfort humankind by making existence appear
comprehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice,
myth had to come to their aid in the end—myth which I have
just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose, of
science40
Therefore, the mission of science – and the quest for
knowledge in general – is to provide comforting illusions such
as the notion that the universe is an orderly place and/or a place
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 71

we can understand. To do this, science has “first spread a
common net of thought [“myth”] over the whole globe, actually
holding out the prospect of the lawfulness of an entire solar
system.”41 However, Nietzsche is not hopeful that this strategy
will be successful: “But science, spurred by its powerful illusion,
speeds irresistibly towards its limits where its optimism,
concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck.”42
These passages explicitly and implicitly point to other
Nietzschean themes in addition to scepticism about knowledge
and science, logic and reason. For example, Nietzsche’s
scepticism about truth is plainly evident when he says, “Truth is
the kind of error without which a certain species of life could
not live. The value of life is ultimately decisive.”43 What is
essential about truth is not that it is true but that it serves life:
“[t]he criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the
feeling of power.”44 In other words, truth is not which is
actually the case but that which meets our needs in the struggles
of life – a view of truth that is highly subjective and which
allows there to be as many truths as there are individuals with
needs. When we think in existential terms, such might indeed be
the case – we all have our own personal truths – but it is
difficult to see how this could meaningfully apply to
mathematics, medicine, science or history. Elsewhere he says
that truth is “Inertia; that hypothesis which gives rise to
contentment; smallest expenditure of spiritual force.”45 In a
similar vein, he writes, “The biggest fable of all is the fable of
knowledge,”46 thereby expressing his doubts about the existence
of knowledge, something he had already done in The Birth of
Tragedy by calling science a myth.
Nietzsche also strikes several postmodern notes when he
writes:
Will to truth is a making firm, a making true and durable,
an abolition of the false character of things, a
reinterpretation of it into beings. “Truth” is therefore not
something there, that might be found or discovered – but
something that must be created and that gives a name to a
process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself
no end – introducing truth as a processus in infinitum, and
active determining – not a becoming conscious of
something that is itself firm and determined. It is a word
for the “will to power”.47
Nietzsche tells us that the “will to truth” is seen in acts of
will, in “making” things “true and durable;” it is an “active
72 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

determining.” Thus he identifies the “will to truth” with the
“will to power,” which implicitly rejects the notion that truth is
simply our discovery of what is the case. Indeed, he it clear that
truth is something we make, or create by an act of will, and that
this willing process goes on forever. Final truth is, in the last
analysis, unattainable. It is also a product of human creativity:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors,
metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of
human relations which have been enhanced, transposed,
and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which
after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a
people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten
that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out
and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their
pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as
coins.48
Truth, we might say, is an artistic human creation, a
convenient fiction.
This position has at least six consequences that bore fruit
among postmodern thinkers. First, if truth is man-made, then
humankind has no access to reality, only its own fabrications – a
theme we already saw in Kant’s division between the accessible
phenomenal world and the inaccessible noumenal realm. This
aesthetic theory of knowledge rules out any form of the
correspondence theory of truth. Second, we observe the clear
identification of the “will to truth” and the “will to power.” If
these two are the same, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that any claim to possessing truth is also a claim to power, i.e.
those who claim to have truth are really advancing power claims
over others. Third, truth is subjective insofar as it reflects what
we need and desire, and what we project or impose on ‘reality.’
It is obvious, of course, that in this situation it is difficult to
speak of reality at all, since there can be no one thing to which
that term refers. Fourth, since truths are artistic creations – “are
illusions” – there is no objective external standard by which to
judge among truth claims and we can embrace them all as
equally true or reject them all as equally false. In other words,
this view exemplifies a thorough-going relativism (if we accept
them all as somehow true) and scepticism (if we reject them all
as doubtful.) Fifth, is the aesthetizing of reality, i.e. presenting
it as a work of art, an idea that will later bear fruit with
postmodern thinkers treating the world like a text or, as in
Baudrillard’s case, quite literally as an artistic work. Sixth, the
Nietzschean concept of truth as an artistic creation makes it
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 73

clear that the concept of an ‘objective’, disinterested quest for
or contemplation of the truth is “conceptual nonsense.”49
Because the quest for knowledge is a manifestation of the will
to power, all truth is ‘interested’ truth, i.e. truth with an
agenda.50 This is also true because all truth is perspectival: “The
only seeing we have is seeing from a perspective; the only
knowledge we have is knowledge from a perspective,”51 a
position sometimes referred to as perspectivism.
According to Nietzsche’s perspectivism, all statements of any
kind represent only one particular and limited perspective
embedded in the concrete realities of a specific human existence
which has no more legitimate claim to being true than any other.
There is no neutral, ‘Archimedean point’ from which reality can
be ‘objectively observed.’ Speaking of philosophers, Nietzsche
writes,
Every one of them pretends that he has discovered and
reached his opinions through the self-development of cold,
pure, divinely untroubled dialectic ... whereas at bottom a
pre-conceived dogma, an “institution” or mostly a heart’s
desire made abstract and refined is defended by them with
arguments sought after the fact. hey are all lawyers ... and
for the most part quite sly defenders of their prejudices
which they christen “truths”... 52
The unbiased, objective quest for truth as such is a willow-
the-wisp; every claim to know truth is an expression of personal
interest, of the will-to-power. This claim has obvious logical
problem with self-reference: since it applies to Nietzsche’s view
as well, any universal truth value of his statement dissolves
itself – and we find ourselves trapped in the midst of an infinite
number of competing perspectives. Postmodernist philosophers,
however, have simply brushed this problem aside and adopted
Nietzsche’s perspectivism.
From this we can naturally draw the conclusion that what we
call ‘truth’ is only an interpretation; indeed, Nietzsche says,
“facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We
cannot establish any fact "in itself": perhaps it is folly to want
to do such a thing.”53 Nor do things have an essential nature
apart from our constructions and interpretations.54 Perhaps the
following quote may be used to sum up Nietzsche’s prevailing
attitude and beliefs: “There exists neither "spirit," nor reason,
nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth:
all are fictions that are of no use.”55
74 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

To the suggestion that truth is more valuable than lies or
fictions no matter how convenient they are, Nietzsche answers:
“It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more
than semblance”56 and then asks, “Why couldn’t the world which
matters to us be a fiction?”57 Why not, indeed, since “the will to
know [is based on] the foundation of a much more forceful
will, namely the will to not-know, to uncertainty, to un-
truth!”58 Humankind wants – needs – its deceptions, and
therefore one should not struggle too much for truth since “it
stupefies, bestializes and brutalizes you.”59 The ‘truth-game’ is
not worth the candle:
The world with which you are concerned is false, i.e. it is
not a fact but a fable and `approximation on the basis of a
meagre sum of observations.; it is “in flux,” as something
in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but
never getting near the truth: for – there is no “truth.”60
Obviously, therefore, no eternal or absolute truths exist, and
that being the case, no so-called truths can serve as the
foundations of any system of metaphysics, ethics, philosophical
systems or, what postmodernism refers to as “grand
narratives.”61 Nietzsche’s rejection of truth is matched by his
equally firm rejection of God. Zarathustra tells his listeners,
“God is a conjecture; but I desire that your conjectures should
not reach beyond your creative will. Could you create a god?
Then do not speak to me of any gods.”62 In other words,
Zarathustra-Nietzsche rejects transcendence, i.e. anything that
is beyond the powers of the human will to create just as Kant
rejects anything beyond the power of the human mind to know.
Rather than wasting time with God, Zarathustra advises people
to turn their energies into overcoming their humanity, and thus
making way for the greater-than-man, the “overman” or
superman” as he is sometimes called: “But you could well create
the overman.”63 Later, Zarathustra says that “man is something
that must be overcome – that man is a bridge and no end.”64 We
should try to surpass our humanity and become something
greater, or, if we cannot, at least help clear the way for
something greater. In postmodernism this idea resurfaces as the
theme of the ‘death of man,’ which plays an especially
important role in the work of Michel Foucault.

5. The Foundations of Postmodernism: Heidegger
Though he is a highly controversial figure because of his one-
time open support of the Nazi party, Martin Heidegger (1990 –
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 75

1976), perhaps the pre-eminent, most quoted philosopher of the
20th Century, is second only to Nietzsche in terms of influence
on postmodern thought. Heidegger influenced postmodernism
in six main ways. First, he rejects the metaphysics of the entire
western philosophical tradition with the exception
Anaximander, one of the pre-Socratics. The western tradition’s
metaphysics and the resulting subject/object epistemology leads
to a utilitarian-scientific-technological world view that
impoverishes our lives. Second, he rejects calculative, utilitarian
view of reason as the sole source of legitimate knowledge and
the rejection of the correspondence theory of truth. Therefore,
the concept of ‘truth’ cannot be limited to rationalized
propositions about beings but must include knowledge of the
Being of beings. Third, he sees truth as aletheia, the disclosure
of the Being of beings; truth is not discovered by us but rather
discloses or reveals itself. He also recognises the fundamental
ambiguity of all knowledge. Fourth, he dismisses the notion of
absolute final truth. Fifth, he doubts the ability of verbal
propositions to mirror or reflect reality. Sixth, he sees the task
of art and especially poetry as the disclosure of the Being of
beings. Finally, in Heidegger’s view, language is not a
transparent medium and helps constitute our being-in-the-world
and our life-world.
For reasons uniquely his own, Heidegger, like Kant and
Nietzsche seeks to avoid or rather, “overcome”65 metaphysics
whereby he reinforces the anti-metaphysical trend already
evident in 20th Century philosophy. Postmodern philosophy as
we shall see is a part of this trend. Metaphysics – defined as “the
philosophical investigation of the nature, constitution and
structure of reality,”66 – has, according to Heidegger, gone
askew since the time of Anaximander and continuously
“misconstrues being”67 insofar as it forgets the “question of
Being”68 and replaces it with concern for particular beings.
Thus, Being, which is everywhere manifested in all things. and
which transcends all things, is falsely described as “the most
universal and the emptiest of concepts”69 and is ignored; it
ceases to be a subject of investigation in itself. No western
philosopher since Plato has sought to describe the nature of
Being as such. Instead, Being is replaced by interest in individual
beings.
Metaphysics does indeed represent beings in their being, and
so it also thinks the being of beings. But it does not think being
as such, does not think the difference between being and
beings70.
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Being and beings are confused with one another. Elsewhere,
Heidegger says, Metaphysics, insofar as it always represents
only beings as beings, does not recall Being itself. Philosophy
does not concentrate on its ground.71
According to Heidegger, this failure to deal with the Being of
beings, leads to metaphysics and science both of which depend
on a diminished understanding of truth: “ To metaphysics the
nature of truth always appears only in derivative form of the
truth of propositions. which formulate our knowledge.”72 In
short, we know a lot about things and stuff but have forgotten
Being itself.
To illustrate what he means, Heidegger compares Being to
color and to the Earth in statements that recall Wordsworth’s
passionate assertion,
Our meddling intellect
Mishapes the beauteous forms of things;
- We murder to dissect.73
In a similar vein, Heidegger writes,
Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyse it
in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone.
It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and
unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to
penetrate into it. it causes every merely calculating
importunity to turn to a destruction ... The earth appears
only cleared and as itself when it is perceived and
preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable ....”74
Our propositional knowledge and calculative or
technological reason tell us nothing about color as it makes
itself present (“presences” as a verb in Heidegger’s language) to
us, just as our knowledge of earth-science and technology
cannot makes us aware of the Being of the Earth. Technology
concerns itself not with the Being of things but “the imposition
of man’s will upon the world,”75 upon individual beings. It does
not care if it really knows a thing with which it co-dwells in the
world but only that it achieves mastery and dominion over it To
know the Being of the thing, we must open ourselves to its
Being just as we need to open ourselves to the experience of
color. In effect, we need what Wordsworth calls “a heart/ That
watches and receives.”76
Heidegger’s analysis and the conclusions he draws from it
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 77

have deeply influenced postmodern (and ecological) philosophy.
Immediately noticeable is that rational and scientific knowledge
(measurement) are limited in what they can tell us and do not
exhaust what can be known about a particular being. They are
merely one kind of knowledge from one particular perspective,
one interpretation about a thing and not knowledge per se; it is
quite possible for other thinkers or cultures with different
perspectives to have developed different kinds of equally valid
knowledge of specific beings. Therefore it is impossible to
claim that any one kind of knowledge of beings is privileged or
has priority over any other. No propositional knowledge is
absolute; it is all relative. As Heidegger says, “There is no
absolute truth across the incommensurable understandings of
being or world-disclosures.”77
This, inevitably, brings us to the question of the meaning of
‘truth’. According to Heidegger, the usual definition of truth
involves the idea of something or a state of affairs being
“actual,”78 of being “the correspondence of knowledge to the
matter,”79 or the correspondence of something “with the “
‘rational’ concept of its essence.”80 However, he disagrees with
this view: “Thus truth has by no means the structure of an
agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a
likening of one entity (the subject) to another (the Object).”81
In taking this position, Heidegger implicitly throws into
question the subject/object distinction and relationship that has
been the bedrock of western epistemology. If truth is not a
correspondence between subject and object of perception, what
could it be? In Heidegger’s view, the correspondence theory of
truth is also inadequate because it ignores our relationship to
Being, the interpretation or understanding of which influences
our self-understanding as human and thus our relationship to
the specific beings we encounter. Our usual propositions about
specific beings are made as though they were products of an
intellect that is independent of any relation to and
interpretation of Being.82
This, of course is false because conscious of it or not, all
beings have a relationship to Being. For this reason, “the
traditional assignment of truth exclusively to statements as the
sole essential locus of truth falls away. Truth does not originally
reside in the proposition.”83 It is important to note that truth
does nor arise “originally” in propositions, i.e. that there is a
deeper, more primordial original truth which manifests itself in
specific beings. Thus Heidegger does not think propositional
truth is fully adequate to reality.
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Furthermore, he also has doubts about the possibility of a
meaningful relation between propositions and things, which is
to say, he doubts that mere verbal propositions lacking proper
grounding in a relationship to Being can ever satisfactorily
correspond to real specific beings. In Being and Time, he asks,
“In what way is this relation [of correspondence] possible as a
relation between intellectus [mind/intellect] and res
[thing/object]?”84 From this question,
it becomes plain that to clarify the structure of a truth it
is not enough simply to presuppose this relational totality
[of complete correspondence between mind and object]
but we must go back and inquire into the context of Being
which provides the support for this totality as such.85
These passages also point out that our awareness of and
attitude towards Being i.e. our “comportment”86 towards Being
influences our self-understanding as human beings which in turn
influences our relationship to specific beings. We, may for
example, ignore Being, and ourselves as a place where Being
reveals itself, and see ourselves strictly as things whose existence
is limited to the superficial daily aspects being – purely
utilitarian considerations, getting, spending, dominating and
being dominated – and, as a consequence, develop a purely
calculative rational approach towards ourselves and the things
of this world. We may reduce things in our surroundings to
mere objects for use or domination, a fate from which artists
and especially poets must rescue them.87 Such objectifying leads
to the dominance of technology in our lives and relationship to
others and nature. Furthermore, Heidegger suggests that reason
is not independent of other factors in our lives which is to say,
is not transcendent i.e. objective or uninfluenced by our lives
and therefore cannot provide a transcending and universal
overview of reality that is uniform for all human viewpoints.
“[A]ll truth is relative to Dasein’s [man’s] Being.”88
According to Heidegger, truth is more than the mere
propositions of calculative reason or a correspondence between
a subject and object: truth, in the primary sense, is aletheia,
unconcealing or “disclosedness”89 of Being and the Being of
beings, of letting Being be, of having, as Wordsworth says, “a
heart/ That watches and receives.” Thus, for Heidegger,
existential truth is prior to propositional truth which implies
that the disclosure of Being depends on our comportment or
demeanour towards Being and the Being of beings including
ourselves. The willingness to let Being be, to let the Being of
things unconceal itself to us is man’s original way of knowing
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 79

and only later does he ‘fall’ into forgetfulness of Being to
satisfy himself with superficial, calculative, utilitarian reason
and metaphysical propositions.
However, there is a fundamental ambiguity to aletheia for
every unconcealing is also a concealing of Being and the Being
of beings. “The disclosure of beings as such is simultaneously
and intrinsically the concealing of being as a whole”90 because
[i]n the simultaneity of disclosure and concealing errancy
holds sway. Errancy and the concealing of what is
concealed belong to the primordial essence of truth.91
Thus, Being is always simultaneously disclosed and
undisclosed, because these two conditions, like truth and
untruth are not distinct absolutes but are correlates.
Precisely because letting be always lets beings be in a particular
comportment [mood,
stance, attitude] which relates to them and thus discloses
them, it conceals beings as a whole. 92
Because truth is always the truth of a particular being with a
particular comportment to Being as well as existing in a
particular situation, the whole of Being can never disclose itself
to us at any one time. Our availability to Being is always partial,
and therefore, the unconcealing of Being is also a concealing.
We are always faced with a ‘hidden dimension’ in our
encounters with all beings. Because of this, our knowledge of
the Being of things is unlimited; indeed, it is infinite, and for
that reason there can be no limit to our knowledge of the Being
of beings. This idea bore particular fruit in the work of Derrida,
whose deconstructionism posited that no one approach to or
reading of a text could possibly disclose the entirety of its
meaning. There was undisclosed discord between what was
revealed and what was concealed and this discord enable
virtually an endless number of readings just as artists and poets
could disclose endless aspects of the Being of beings. A final
disclosure or reading is an impossibility.
In Heidegger’s view, the arts, above all poetry and painting
disclose the Being of beings; the artist “speaks ... in a
nonsubjective, Being-attuned voice.”93 Art, has a deep
epistemological function, it “puts us in touch ... with a truth
that we cannot attain otherwise than through art.”94
The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings aletheia.
We say “truth” and think little enough in using this word.
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If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular
being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an
occurring, a happening of truth at work .. Some particular
entity ... comes in the work to stand in the light of its
being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of
its shining.95
Thus, the artist rather than the scientist is in a unique
position to lead us to the truth of Being. S/he is the one who
can “get men to think about the involvement of Being in human
nature.”96
However, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the poet
has primary status for Heidegger because of the role that
language plays in constituting man (Dasein): “discourse is
constitutive for Dasein’s existence”97 Language is not just a
clear medium for representing things or ideas. Rather,
[l]anguage is a totality of words – a totality in which
discourse has a ‘worldly’ Being of its own; and as an entity
within-the-world, this totality thus becomes something
which we may come across ready-to-hand.98
Because language is encountered like other beings in the
world, it has a “ ‘worldly’ Being of its own”, it can act on us and
shape i.e. ‘constitute’ our existence in a variety of ways.
Fulfilling this function makes it impossible that language is
merely representational of things or ideas, which in turn means
that language, as a medium with a character of its own, cannot
point us to any transcendental, absolute truths somehow apart
from this world. Here we can already observe the first rejection
of what postmodernists call “representationalism.” Failure to
appreciate this aspect of language leads to a “metaphysics of
presence” i.e. the belief that through the clear medium of
language we can attain and perceive the presence of thins as
they really are.

6. Jean -Fran cois Lyotar d
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924 – 1998), one of the premier
philosophers of the postmodern movement, is best known for
his book The Postmodern Condition which first brought the
term ‘postmodern’ into common usage. This book, containing
in seminal form most of the later developments of his thought,
provides on of the most frequently quoted definitions of
postmodernism: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward
metanarratives.”99 By “metanarratives,” (also called “grand
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 81

narrative[s]”100), Lyotard means those ‘stories’ or intellectual
frameworks by which we interpret the world and our activities
and thereby provide meaning for the whole and give certain data
the status of being facts, truths or real knowledge. For example,
Marxism supplied revolutionaries around the world with a
metanarrative encompassing the behavior of matter i.e.
dialectical materialism, as well as the nature, direction and
future outcome of human history, i.e. historical materialism.
The Enlightenment metanarrative concerned the gradual
triumph of reason over irrationality and the progress of
humankind not only in scientific knowledge but also in the
progress towards rational freedom and a tolerant society. The
Christian metanarrative tells the story of humankind’s fall from
grace and its redemption by Christ Whose word must be spread
throughout the world.

All of these metanarratives offer a complete or total vision
by which all possible human action may be interpreted and/or
judged and for this reason Lyotard describes them as a “project
of totalization.”101 The connotation of ‘totalitarian’ is fully
intended by Lyotard who even describes metanarratives as
“terrorist”102 because they can be used to “eliminate[] or
threaten[] to eliminate, a player [point of view, culture] from
the language game one shares with them.”103 From another
perspective we might say that one of the tasks of a
metanarrative is the “legitimation of knowledge,”104 which is to
say that the metanarrative provides the foundational principles
by which to distinguish ‘real knowledge’ from error, folklore,
myth or the babblings of the insane. Thus, the metanarrative
becomes the gatekeeper of knowledge – and, by extension, the
guardian of crucial binary oppositions necessary for a system of
thought or social system to maintain itself. Examples of such
binary oppositions are order / disorder; sane / insane; noumenal
/ phenomenal; true / untrue; competent / incompetent;
knowledge / superstition; rational / irrational and primitive /
civilized. By means of these oppositions, metanarratives take on
a prescriptive function not only for individuals but for entire
societies who must conduct themselves personally and/or
collectively to its standards which are enforced not just by
institutions but by all those who accept the metanarrative.
Lyotard (like Foucault) of course believes this prescriptive
function imprisons us and the “incredulity toward
metanarratives”105 is a means of freeing ourselves from their
rule. For Lyotard, this means freeing ourselves from modernity
which “is identified with modern reason, Enlightenment,
totalizing thought and philosophies of history.”106 Lyotard
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“rejects notions of universalist and foundational theory as well
as claims that one method or set of concepts has privileged
status.”107
In The Post Modern Condition Lyotard also explains his
views in terms of “language games”108 i.e. systems of discourse
or utterance working on the basis of certain rules that “are the
objects of a contract, explicit or not, between the players.”109
Without these rules (which may have been inherited) there is no
game. In the language game every utterance is a “move.”110 Each
metanarrative, each culture and subculture plays its own
language game; indeed, “language games are the minimum
relation required for society to exist”111 – a statement indicating
that societies and language games are absolute correlatives.
Concepts and statements only have meaning within the context
of a particular game and each game must “privilege certain
classes of statements ... whose predominance characterizes the
discourse of the particular institution.”112 The postmodern
“incredulity towards metanarrative” in favour of the “little
narrative [petit recit]”113 i.e. the limited narrative without
universal claims or implications, leads inevitably to the
fragmentation of language games and the elimination of
metanarratives. In the words of critic and philosopher Terry
Eagleton, “Postmodernism, then, is wary of History but
enthusiastic on the whole about history.”114
Lyotard takes particular aim at the metanarrative of science
which he portrays as one language game among others without
any special or privileged status in the quest for knowledge:
“[t]he game of science is ... put on par with the others.”115 In his
view, both science and “non-scientific (narrative) knowledge”116
i.e. rationality and narrative operate on the basis of different
rules, and what is a good “move” in one game is not necessarily
“good” in the other. Consequently
[i]t is therefore impossible to judge the existence or
validity of narrative knowledge. On the basis of scientific
knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are
different. All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the
diversity of discursive species ... 117
Elsewhere he says, “science plays its own game; it is incapable
of legitimating other language games”118; indeed, it cannot even
legitimate itself since like any other language game it cannot
demonstrate the truth of its own ground rules which are simply
“the object of consensus.”119 The rules are accepted not because
they are true but because we happen to agree on them. Very
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 83

clearly, Lyotard does not privilege rationality in the quest for
knowledge.

7. Jacq ues Derrida
Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004) is the originator of
deconstructionism, perhaps the most influential version of
postmodernist philosophy developed so far. According to
Jonathan Culler, one of deconstruction’s foremost expositors
To deconstruct a discourse [text] is to show how it
undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical
oppositions on which it relies by identifying in the text the
rhetorical operations that produce the supposed ground of
argument, the key concept or premise.120
In other words, in some way, every text undermines or
subverts itself and thus destabilises any attempt to find in it a
final, fixed, permanent meaning It is important to note that this
subversion occurs from within. As Derrida says,
The movements of deconstruction do not destroy
structures from the outside. They are not possible and
effective nor can they take accurate aim except by
inhabiting those structures ... Operating necessarily from
the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic
resources of subversion from the old structure ... 121
The text subverts or works against itself through its choice
of words and phrases, the ambiguity of some words and phrases,
rhetorical devices and/or imagery. Perhaps the best known
example of this procedure is “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in which
Derrida explores Plato’s “”Phaedrus”:
The word pharmakon [remedy] is caught in a chain of
significations. The play of that chain seems systematic.
But the system here is not, simply, that of the intentions
of an author who goes by the name of Plato.122
However, as Derrida points out, pharmakon means not only
‘remedy’ but also ‘poison’ not to mention ‘spell’ or ‘drug’ (as in
hallucinogen) and this “chain of significations” serves to
destabilise any simplistic interpretation of the text. Writing,
which Thoth had introduced as a remedy for humankind’s poor
memory, is also a ‘poison’ that weakens memory, and may cast a
‘spell’ over us by making us think we have understood an idea
when we have not.
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If the pharmakon is “ambivalent,” it is because it
constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed,
the movement and the play that links them among
themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over
into the other (body/soul, good/evil, inside/outside,
memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc)... The
pharmakon is the movement, the locus and the play: (the
production of) difference.123
Each reading of ‘pharmacy’ evokes another, often contrary
meaning; we recognize the difference between ‘remedy’ and
‘poison’ and in choosing one, even if only for a moment, we
‘defer’ the other meanings which, despite being deferred, help
complete our understanding of the text. These other meanings
are referred to as ‘supplements,’ (Derrida who is very inventive
in coining new terms for his concepts and often has several
terms for identical concepts.) This process of recognizing
difference and deferring Derrida calls “difference” (note the
spelling) and in his view every text is an endless play of
‘differance’ as we defer, or temporarily push into the
background, the meanings of various words. Each of these
deferred meanings helps complete the full meaning of a word
and for that reason, “The play of the supplement is
indefinite.”124 Derrida makes the same point by stating that
“writing structurally carries within itself (counts-discounts) the
process of its own erasure and annulation...”125 By “erasure”
Derrida does not mean that one meaning of a word is absolutely
excluded but rather that we read a word with awareness of all its
other potential meanings instead of privileging one, usually
conventional, meaning over all the others. We read the word
with all of its meanings, aware of the ambiguity this causes in
our understanding of the text itself.
To the objection that such supplementation is simply an
arbitrary and extraneous addition to what is clearly the author’s
intention, Derrida replies
Certain forces of association unite – at diverse distances,
with different strengths and according to disparate paths –
the words “actually present” in a discourse with all the
other words in the lexical system whether or not they
appears as “words ...126
This claim is based on Derrida’s belief – derived from
Saussure – that meanings of words are not given by
“transcendental”, i.e. extra-linguistic reference to the outside
world but only by their relationship to other words. The
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 85

signifier does not receive its meaning from the external or
‘transcendental’ signified; there is no longer a direct relationship
between them and we can no longer claim that signifier = the
signified. Instead of referring to an external, ‘transcendental’
signified, the signifier refers us – endlessly as it turns out – to
other words in the linguistic system. Thus, language, statements,
propositions are not reflections of an external or transcendental
reality but only reflect the various “plays” of meaning within a
linguistic system. After all, each word is, ultimately related to
every other word and its meaning depends on the “play of
differences within that system.”127 The meaning of each word is
“inter-textualized”128 with all the others so that each bears a
“trace” of all other words. For that reason there is no inside our
outside of a text: “We do not believe that there exists, in all
rigor, a Platonic text closed upon itself complete with its inside
and its outside.”129 Simply using words that are part of a
language system ensures that the text is in some way influenced
by all these other meanings and that these other meanings may
play some role in the understanding of the text. This presence
yet simultaneous absence of these other meanings is called the
“trace”. The scope of these traces is endless, for which reason
Derrida says, “There is nothing outside of the text”130

beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed
as [a] text, there has never been anything but writing;
there have never been anything but supplements,
substitutive significations, which could only come forth in
a chain of differential references, the “real” supervening,
and being added only while taking on meaning from the
trace and from an invocation of the supplement etc. And
thus to infinity.”131

Derrida also approaches the subject of endless
supplementation from the perspective of “play” by which he
means a word’s ‘give’ or tolerance for variation of meanings
and suggestions: “Play is always the play of absence and
presence”132 of all possible traces (of other meanings) which he
also describes as a “field of infinite substitutions.”133 In
addition, Derrida defines play as “the absence of the
transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say, as
the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of
presence.”134 This simply means that there is no pre-existing
essential meaning in a text i.e. no “transcendental signified”,
that waits us to perceive and understand it, that exists before us
and even without us, and that becomes ‘present’ to us when we
think ‘correctly.’ This pre-existing, unconstructed
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“transcendental signified” can also be referred to as “an
invariable presence – eidos, arche, telos, energia, ousia (essence,
existence, substance, subject) aletheia [disclosure, revelation of
truth], transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so
forth.”135 The “metaphysics of presence” and “ontotheology” are
the product of thinking in terms of such pre-existent, invariable
and self-sufficient essences. Such thinking is deceptive because
it fails to take into account the ambiguities of meaning revealed
by the “play” of substitutions, supplements and traces which
makes the existence of such independent and self-sufficient
meanings (and entities) a chimera. It leads to the dangerous
delusion that some of us actually know the complete and final
truth about something, have privileged knowledge, are
privileged knowers or have privileged methods of accessing
certain knowledge. This, in turn, leads us to marginalise,
disregard or even oppress other kinds of knowledge and other
ways of knowing. Such is already the case with western
philosophy vis-à-vis non-western philosophy.136 Finally, it
should be noted that in this view, a text has no meaning before
anyone has interpreted it.137 There is no truth outside of or
transcendental to, the interpretation and telling.

Another important aspect of Derrida’s deconstructionism is
what he calls “logocentrism,”138 a complex word rooted in the
Greek ‘logos’ which means not only ‘word’ but also ‘truth’ or
‘reason.’ According to Derrida, all philosophy since the time of
Plato has been the “epoch of the logos”139 and one project of
deconstruction is to undermine the domination of logocentrism
in western thought. In its simplest terms, logocentrism assumes
that at the centre of any concept is a meaning or essence that
exists before the construction of its meaning and is
undeconstructible in itself. This unconstructed and
undeconstructible essence, is ‘transcendent’ to its embodiment
in language, i.e. is not dependent on its linguistic embodiment
for its meaning, i.e. is self-sufficient and complete in what it
means. Our understanding of a concept is true insofar as it
corresponds to this “transcendental signified” which “in and of
itself, in its essence, would refer to no signifier [word in the
linguistic system], would exceed the chain of signs and would
no longer as itself function as a signifier.”140 This
“transcendental signified” also serves as a guarantee for the
fixed meanings of the words we employ. Derrida states that he
has “identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as
the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for
such a signified.”141 The “metaphysics presence” is that
philosophical thinking which is interested in defining the
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 87

ultimate self-sufficient meanings of terms such as God, Reality,
Truth, Matter, Mind, Consciousness, Time and Self and resists
the conclusion that these, like all other words, are undecidable.
These, like the Biblical “Logos”142 precede any human perception
of their meaning, and the aim of the metaphysics of presence is
to make their true meaning present to us through language.
However, for deconstructionism this is a hopeless quest because
the meaning of these words is undecidable: “meaning cannot be
held in any individual sign since it is always deferred due to the
fact that every sign is a signifier whose signified is another
signifier.”143 As Derrida puts it, “The play of differences
supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any
moment or in any sense that a simple element [meaning] be
present in and of itself, referring only to itself.”144
Derrida also rejects logocentrism and the metaphysics of
presence for their dependence on oppositional binaries which
privilege one side over the other. Examples of such oppositional
binaries are God/creation; Truth/untruth; Good/evil;
Justice/injustice; rational/irrational; Being/nothingness;
Mind/matter and Self/not-self.145 Since the meanings of these
binaries are, in the last analysis, undecidable, there is no
justification for privileging one of the pair and marginalising
the other.
Derrida maintains that logocentrism and the metaphysics of
presence have an enormously negative impact on culture and
human behavior. Nowhere is this made more clear than in his
essay “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of
Emmanuel Levinas.”
Although ostensibly about Levinas’ philosophy, the essay also
serves to outline Derrida’s views about problems with
phenomenology146 and ontology147 both of which are largely
concerned with the essences of things, that is, those necessary
qualities which a thing must have to be the kind of thing it is.
Thus, they focus on kinds more than on individuals, for which
reason Derrida says, Incapable of respecting the Being and
meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be
philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical
tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common
cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the
same.148
In short, metaphysics does not respect the other as other but
seeks to incorporate or appropriate it in some way, forgetting
that “[t]he infinitely-other cannot be bound by a concept.”149
88 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

The other can never be reduced to common denominators or
subsumed by a general concept of ‘essence’: “the other is the
other only if his alterity is absolutely irreducible.”150 Reducing
the other to a common essence is a form of violence that
inevitably breeds a violent frame of mind and violent discourse
and finally physical violence.

8. Michel Foucault
Like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) has been
enormously influential in fields outside of his specialities of
philosophy and social history. His writings cover such diverse
topics as the social construction of madness151 and sexuality152,
methods in historiography153, penology154, the nature of power
and discourse. He has had an incalculable effect on cultural
studies, political theory, feminism and sociology.155 It should be
noted that there is a certain amount of debate over whether or
not Foucault is a postmodernist but it is our view that he shares
so many relevant fundamental characteristics with Kant,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lyotard and Derrida, that his own refusal
of the label notwithstanding, he is a part of this movement.156
Like Lyotard, Foucault rejects the concept of “grand
narratives”, i.e. he does not believe that it is possible to write
generalized histories that covers all aspects of a particular
civilization. He spells this out clearly in The Archaeology of
Knowledge:
the theme and possibility of a total history begins to
disappear ... The project of a total history is one that seeks
to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the
principle – material or spiritual – of a society, the
significance common to all the phenomena of a period, the
law that accounts for their cohesion ...157
Rather, he proposes what he calls “the new history”158 which
pays more attention to “discontinuity”159, to the “series,
divisions, limits, differences of level, shifts, chronological
specificities, particular forms of rehandling, possible types of
relation.”160 Just as Derrida proclaims the necessity of
subverting any authoritative reading of a text, Foucault believes
that “the tranquility with which they [the usual historical
narratives driven by grand themes] are received must be
disturbed”161 by renounc[ing] all those themes whose function is
to ensure infinite continuity of discourse.”162 Historical
discourse must be broken up into what Lyotard calls “little
narratives” or petits recits because only when previously glossed
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 89

over differences become apparent will new fields of research be
visible and available for investigation. We will become aware of
discrepancies and differences that have been covered up by large
sweeping unifying concepts and no longer lose sight of subtle
but important shifts in meaning and usage. Each concept,
person and event must be understood in terms of its exact
specificity in time, place and culture.
Thus, Foucault’s historiography not only stresses breaks and
discontinuities rather than grand similarities, changes in ideas
and practices rather than extended homogeneities, but also what
he calls the “epistemes” in which knowledge, envisaged apart
from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its
objective forms grounds its positivity , and thereby manifests a
history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather
that of its conditions of possibility ... such an enterprise is not
so much a history, in the traditional meaning of the word, as an
‘archaeology.’163
In other words, the episteme is the ‘soil’ from which
‘vegetation’ of ideas, behaviors, experiences, customs and
beliefs grows; it makes all these things possible and, at the same
time, establishes their character and limitations. Epistemes are
“the fundamental codes of a culture.”164 According to Foucault,
an episteme
in a given period delimits in the totality of the experience
a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the
objects that appear in the field, provides man’s everyday
perception with theoretical powers, and defines the
conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things
that is recognised to be true.165
Thus, an episteme determines truth, meaning, identity, value
and reality at a specific time and place. People need not even be
consciously aware of the episteme or its power in their lives
even though it creates the environment or context in which
individuals think, feel, evaluate, behave and speak; it controls
what can be said and understood as meaningful. Great social,
cultural and intellectual changes are the result of changes in the
underlying episteme. Archaeologies study these epistemes
strictly for themselves but cannot draw any universal
conclusions about ‘humankind’ or other epistemes from such
examinations. This limitation is necessary because there is a
sharp break or caesura between epistemes, i.e. “caeseuralism.”
That is why, according to Foucault, archaeologies are more
accurate accounts of studying the past: they are not “not
90 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

seduced by the mythology of a prevailing narrative”167 or “grand
narrative” that purports to provide a single overview of
developments across several epistemes. Nor do archaeologies
assume there are bridges of influence between epistemes, which
is why, according to Foucault, “Archaeology does not seek to
rediscover the continuous, insensible transition that relates
discourses [epistemes].”168 This view also makes any notion of
progress impossible because there is no universal standard by
which to measure such ‘progress.’ If epistemes and their
products are not comparable, we can only say that one episteme
is different from another, but not more advanced. Foucault
makes this rejection of progress clear when he writes, “The
history of sciences is not the history of the true, of its slow
epiphany; it cannot hope to recount the gradual discovery of a
truth.”169
Changes in an episteme or changes from one episteme to
another result in a revolution in perception and understanding:
“ ‘things simply cease, all of a sudden, to be ‘perceived,
described, expressed, characterised, classified and known in the
same way as before.’ ”170 It is as if we were transplanted into a
wholly new world which bears no significant comparison to the
old. This why there are no bridges between epistemes.171 To
highlight the revolutionary and world-altering changes between
epistemes, Foucault often makes such startling statements as
“man is only a recent invention”172 and
[b]efore the end of the eighteenth century, man did not
exist ... He is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge
of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two
hundred years ago: but he has grown so quickly that it has
been only too easy to imagine that he has been waiting for
thousands of years in the darkness for that moment in
which he would be known.173
What he means is that the way ‘man’ or humankind is
conceived of in the modern episteme is not the same as the
conception of man in the ancient Greek or Renaissance or
Classical (Enlightenment) episteme. Each of these epistemes
constituted ‘man’ in its own way. In Foucault’s view, ‘man’
appears only at the beginning of the nineteenth century (at the
end of the Classical age) with the full realization of human
finitude in its physical and contingent existence, as well as the
realization that ‘man’ is part of an episteme in which the
primary category is dynamic history and development rather
than static order.174 Modernity discovers “man’ in his
finitude,”175 which is to say,
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 91

Modernity begins when the human being begins to exist
within his organism, inside the shell of his head, the
armature of his limbs,, and the whole structure of his
physiology; when he begins to exist at the centre of a
labour by whose principles he is governed ...176
What is obvious here is that the transcendent dimension has
been stripped from life in modernity and this throws an
ominous light on man’s discovery of his “finitude.” He finds
himself “dominated by life, history and language”177 instead of
by transcendents like God, spirit, immortality and eternity, as
was the case with Renaissance humanism and Classical
rationalism. Enclosed in worldly existence, and more forcefully
than ever before, man becomes aware of “the threatening
rumble of his non-existence”178 and discovers both within and
outside himself “an element of darkness,”179 as a kind of Other,
the “unthought”180 that is an inescapable twin to his being.
To know man boiled down to grasping the determinations
of concrete human existence in the facts of life, labour
and language, all of which mould man even before his
birth as an individual.181
Furthermore, this immersion in the empirical and material
had a problem, namely that it was impossible to have empirical
knowledge without recognising that reason is, at least to a
certain degree, transcendent to the empirical facts. If it were
not, how could it serve as a standard to supply and apply
criteria of judgment, distinguish truth from error and the
rational from the irrational? Thus, modern man appears divided
between the empirical and the transcendent i.e. is an “empirico-
transcendent doublet.”182 This is why man in the modern
episteme is subject to deep self-misunderstanding, always torn
between two poles of his being.
In addition to the archaeology of knowledge which concerned
itself with systems of discourse, Foucault also developed a
method called “genealogy” whose purpose was to explain how
changes occurred within an episteme and how one episteme
changed into another. However, while archaeology focussed on
the ruling or dominant episteme, the genealogy also looked to
marginalised knowledge or knowledge about marginalised
subjects that were often in conflict with the ruling episteme.
Genealogies up-set (or as Derrida says, “subvert”) the
established hierarchies and show how this marginalised or
subjugated knowledge interacts with and influences the ruling
episteme. It also pays special attention to the accidents,
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coincidences, tricks, mistakes, unforeseen “eruptions” and
arbitrary actions that have effected the history of an idea or
episteme in order to show that development is never simply a
smooth, orderly development:
The forces operating in history do not obey destiny or
regulative mechanism, but the luck of the battle.
[Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II, 12] They do not
manifest the successive forms of a primordial intention
and their attention is not always that of a conclusion, for
they always appear through the singular randomness of
events ... the world of effective history knows only one
kingdom, without providence or final cause where there is
only “the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of
chance” ... Effective history, on the other hand shortens
its vision to those things nearest to it – the body, the
nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies; it
unearths decadence ... [history] should become a
differential knowledge of energies, failings, heights and
degenerations, poisons and antidotes.... The final trait of
effective history is its affirmation of perspectival
knowledge ...183
This quotation makes four things clear. First, Foucault does
not believe that there is any dominant pattern, intentionality
(divine or otherwise), plan, “final cause,” order or logic to
history. Second, chance and the “randomness of events” are the
‘reasons’ various historical developments take place. This makes
the whole notion of progress problematical.184 Indeed, as already
indicated, Foucault does not believe in progress from one
episteme to another but only in their succession. Third,
Foucault sees history as influenced by seemingly insignificant or
even ‘shameful’ actions and events, by our physiological
attributes which is to say by the ‘marginal’, shunted aside as
unworthy. Fourth, our knowledge of history is perspectival, i.e.
always based on our own position in our own native episteme;
this means that an ‘objective’ view is unattainable.
A fundamental question about Foucault’s epistemes is
whether or not they can admit the actual existence of ‘things’
prior to discourse in an episteme? In terms we have already used
for Derrida, can things be external to or transcendental to the
episteme in which they are constituted?
Is there a ‘God’, or a ‘soul’ that exists prior to and
independently of a word/concept with a place in an episteme or
are all these things human constructions? In Kantian terms,
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 93

which readily spring to mind here, are there noumena which our
epistemes (or transcendental egos) constitute as phenomenal
reality? According to Darren Hynes, “For Foucault, any word-
referent has no concreteness, nor is there a reality which
precedes discourse and reveals itself to discursive
perception.”185 Here, too, Foucault agrees with Derrida. Indeed,
how could Foucault concern himself with anything which exists
prior to its place in the discursive structure of an episteme?
How would one be able to speak about it? Furthermore, if such
transcendent entities existed, they would threaten one of the
fundamental principles of archaeological and genealogical
analysis, namely, that no episteme, no viewpoint is privileged
over any other. If there is a transcendent reference – be it God,
or an a-historical essence which is endures through successive
epistemes – then it follows that the signifiers of some epistemes
will correspond more accurately in some way than others to the
original, transcendent signified. Not only would this violate his
goal of providing a non-hierarchical view of different
epistemes, but it would also violate the principle that
comparisons across epistemes are not possible. As well, it means
that there exists, even if only in principle, an ‘Archimedean
standpoint’ – for example God’s viewpoint as revealed through
His Manifestations - outside of the various epistemes from
which we can obtain objective knowledge, i.e. knowledge free
of all epistemes. In a word, the existence of things before their
‘naming’ in an episteme would be a revival of essentialism – a
belief in independently existing (transcendental) entities with
unchanging, historically unconditioned essences – a concept
impossible for Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies to
accommodate.

Any attempt to write or speak about the nature [essence]
of things is made from within a rule-governed linguistic
framework, an ‘episteme’ that pre-determines what kinds
of statements are true or meaningful ... There is no
absolute, unconditioned, transcendental stance from
which to grasp what is good, right or true. Foucault
refuses to specify what is true because there are no
objective grounds for knowledge ... 186

Foucault’s suspicion of the concept of an inherent nature or
essence is also evident when he says history teaches us that
“behind things [there is] not a timeless essential secret but the
secret that they have no essence.”187 This is emphasised by his
statement that he is “suspicious of the notion of liberation”188
because “it runs the risk of falling back on the idea that there
94 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

exists a human nature”189 which somehow exists ‘apart’ from us
and which we can rediscover and regain. He rejects the existence
of any such essence or nature. For Foucault, it makes no sense
to talk of anything outside of or ‘underneath’ or transcendent
to an episteme, which is to say that until a thing is constituted
by human beings, it makes no sense to talk of it as ‘existing.’
Indeed, his goal is
[t]o define these objects without reference to the ground,
the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body
of rules that enable them to form objects of discourse and
thus constitute the conditions of their historical
appearance.”190
Elsewhere he says that the object “does not pre-exist
itself,”191 which is to say, it does not exist before discourse. This
even applies to the human subject who does not transcend the
episteme in which s/he dwells; s/he is a product of the episteme
as much as anything else.
The radical nature of this rejection of natures or essences
prior to being constituted becomes apparent when applied to
gender, race, health, sanity or even human life.192 All essentialist
definitions of these terms are pure historical constructs valid
for a particular episteme but have no universal validity. In the
field of gender this means that there is no universal definition
of what constitutes a woman or man and all such definitions
should be resisted as unjustly imprisoning us. This rejection of a
‘human nature’ or essence extends to the ‘self.’ According to
Foucault’s philosophy, what we mean by ‘self’ or ‘subject’
varies from one episteme to another, which is to say that the
‘self’ is historically contingent product and no one analysis of
the self can lead to universal conclusions. In other words, all
concepts of self are context-bound and there simply is no
stable, universal ‘core’ or essence constituting the self. Like
everything else, the self is merely “a passing historical
invention”193 and is no more stable than concepts of male and
female, justice, race, rationality or beauty. In the words of
Danaher, Schirato and Webb,
Rather than being the free and active organisers of society,
we are the products of discourses and power relations, and take
on different characteristics according to the range of subject
positions that are possible in our socio-historical context.194
We are products of the “games of truth”195 that constitute
any given episteme also compose the self and from this it
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 95

follows that the self cannot pre-exist the episteme or society of
which it is a part. For this reason, the self “is not a substance. It
is a form and this form is not primarily or always identical to
itself.”196 This statement makes two noteworthy points. First,
that the self is not a substance means that there is no persisting
essence to which the concept refers and which it can reflect.
Second, even within itself, the self constantly changes in regards
to itself as it engages in different activities and relationships. As
a “political subject”197 at a meeting or in the voting booth we
relate to ourselves in a different form than we do as a caring
spouse or parent. One might well describe this self as ‘de-
centered’ because there does not seem to be anything – no
essence, no substance, no transcendent soul – to focus the
various relationships and holding them together other than the
contingencies of time and place. At most it is “a form” but
what such a form that is not even “identical to itself” is
supposed to be is not at all clear.

From this it is clear that Foucault’s concept of the self is not
the single, unitary self that we find in the philosophy of
Descartes or in Kant’s transcendental subject of unity of
apperception which is the basis of our personal consciousness,
that which allows us to say ‘I’. One might also say that Foucault
rejects the “idea of the self-governing subject”198 since the self
is constituted and controlled by the varying discourses and
“games of truth” making up the episteme it inhabits. “We are
the products of discourses and power relations, and take on
different characteristics according to the range of subject
positions that are possible in our socio-historical context.”199
Obviously there is no special need for consistency in such a
concept of self. Best and Kellner sum up this aspect of
Foucault’s thought by saying that “Foucault rejects the active
subject and welcomes the emerging postmodern era as a positive
event where the denuding of agency occurs and new forms of
thought can emerge.”200

Another consequence of Foucault’s archaeology and
genealogy is epistemological relativism which follows from his
belief that epistemes are compartmentalized and that we cannot
make evaluations and judgments across differing epistemes.
Their discourse is too different; appearances of similarity
notwithstanding, there are inevitably important breaks and
dislocations of meaning that cannot simply be glossed over. We
have no way of asserting the universal validity of any so-called
truth because there is no universal standard by which to make
any judgments about the truth or untruth of propositions
96 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

found in various epistemes. How could such a standard exist
when all such standards are themselves bound to some particular
episteme? All we can do instead of making judgments is to note
differences and changes, and express our own preferences or
even try to enforce them. In this situation, there cannot, as
already noted, be any notion of progress through a succession
of epistemes. Nor can there be any question of a universally
valid hierarchy of ethical actions with some being preferable to
others since there can be no universal standard by which to
make such decisions.
Foucault’s epistemological relativism is reinforced by his
suspicion of the Enlightenment and reason. According to
Foucault, his ethos “implies, first, the refusal of what I like to
call the ‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment.”201 As Best and
Kellner inform us, “Foucault draws upon an anti-Enlightenment
tradition that rejects the equation of reason, emancipation, and
progress.”202 Reason cannot be taken as a guide to universal
knowledge because reason itself is simply one particular kind of
discourse with a particular – western – episteme; it is an
invention like all the others and no more or less reliable than
any other.
I do not believe in a kind of founding act whereby reason,
in its essence, was discovered or established ... I think, in
fact, that reason is self-created, which is why I have tried
to analyse forms of rationality: different foundations, dif-
ferent creations, different modifications in which rational-
ities engender one another, oppose and pursue one another203
In short, reason is thoroughly historical:
What reason perceives as its necessity or, rather, what
different forms of rationality offer as necessary being can
perfectly well be shown to have a history; and the network
of contingencies from which it emerges can be traced.204
That is why “no given form of rationality is actually reason.”205
From this view it follows that reason cannot provide universally
valid knowledge. One might argue that it is difficult even to
know what the words ‘reason’ or ‘knowledge’ can mean in
Foucault’s philosophy since both refer only to what the
episteme has constituted or constructed, and thus, could
conceivably mean anything at all. Foucault mitigates this
argument somewhat by stating that their meaning is based on
human practice throughout history – but he does admit “that
since these things have been made, they can be unmade as long
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 97

as we know how it was they were made.”206 In other words, in
the last analysis, there are few limits on the future development
of the concept of reason showing that the original critique has
some force.
For Foucault, the analysis of reason is closely tied to the
subjects of truth or knowledge and power. Truth may differ
from one episteme to another, but within each episteme each
truth is part of a system of power:
[T]ruth isn’t outside power or lacking power ... truth isn’t
the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude
... Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by
virtue of multiple forms of constraint ... Each society has
its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth – that is,
the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as
true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to
distinguish true and false statements; the means by which
each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded
value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who
are charged with saying what counts as true.207
This quotation, which encapsulates much of Foucault’s
thought on this subject, shows that truth is closely linked to the
power to control the discourse of a particular episteme by
distinguishing true from false, acceptable from unacceptable
evidence, high status from low status and legitimate from
illegitimate methods of gathering truth. This makes it clear that
all concepts of truth are exclusionary and marginalising, and
violent by nature because they can dominate other versions of
truth under a particular “regime of truth.” In other words, truth
is a matter of cultural and epistemological politics not merely a
matter of objective discovery and rational evaluation.
Moreover, because the social status of those who determine
truth is high, truth tends to become the property of a particular
class and can be manipulated to serve its interests.
Another important aspect of truth or knowledge is that they
are linked to the will-to-power, i.e. and the will-to-truth and the
will-to-power are closely correlated which is why Foucault says
that we cannot liberate truth from systems of power: “truth is
already power.”208 As J.G. Merquior writes, for Foucault, “all
will to truth is already a will-to-power.”209 This is because for a
claim to be recognised as ‘true’ means that it has already
triumphed over its rivals and excluded them or marginalised
them as ‘untrue’ or ‘mythology’ or ‘superstition’. Foucault
himself states the matter even more sharply:
98 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge
[vouleur-savior] reveals that all knowledge [connaissance]
rests upon injustice (that there is no right, not even in the
act of knowing truth, to truth or a foundation for truth.),
and the instinct for knowledge malicious ( something
murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).210
Elsewhere he even claims that knowledge “creates a
progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence.”211
Foucault’s beliefs lead to the conclusion that the claim to know
the truth is also, in effect, a claim to power, i.e. a claim to
domination over others and competing truth claims. Best and
Kellner summarise Foucault’s beliefs by writing,
Against modern theories that see knowledge as neutral and
objective (positivism) or emancipatory (Marxism),
Foucault emphasizes that knowledge is in dissociable from
from regimes of power. His concept of
‘power/knowledge’ is symptomatic of the postmodern
suspicion of reason and the emancipatory schemes
advanced in its name.212
Foucault believes that knowledge “has the power to make
itself true”213 insofar as it constrains and regulates our thoughts,
feelings, actions and even laws. What is certainly clear is that
for Foucault the notion of a disinterested, objective, neutral
and pure truth is at best a naïve fiction but more likely a ruse to
trick one’s rivals into quitting the contest for power.

9. Richard R orty (1931 - 2007)
Although he prefers to call himself a pragmatist,214 the
American philosopher (or ‘anti-philosopher’ as he is sometimes
called) Richard Rorty is generally regarded as having developed
an American version of postmodernist philosophy.215 Reading
his work leaves little doubt that he shares many of
postmodernism’s principles and beliefs: the rejection of
representationalism, of realism, of “grand narratives,” and of
‘truth, rationality, essentialism, objectivity, foundationalism
and metaphysics. He would replace what is usually called
‘philosophy’ with an edifying216 conversation and an exchange
of descriptions of the world among those whose only goal is to
keep the conversation going.217 The purpose of the edifying
conversation is certainly not to find truth or rational
justification of truth since Rorty’s goal is to “radically
undermine the very basis of the dominant rationalist
approach.”218
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 99

Rorty’s undermining of the rationalist tradition based on
Socrates and Plato begins with his rejection of the principle that
the human mind and language are mirrors whose task is to
accurately reflect or represent a pre-existent reality. The goal of
rational inquirers is to make their representations as objective
as possible, i.e. to make them correspond to reality. In this way,
we would find or discover the truth about the real world. Rorty
unambiguously rejects this referential thinking as well as its
consequences. For example, he writes,
My suggestion that the desire for objectivity is in part a
disguised form of the fear of death echoes Nietzsche’s
charge that the philosophical tradition which stems from
Plato is an attempt to avoid facing up to contingency, to
escape from time and chance.219
He sees no value in objectivity which he dismisses as wanting a
“sky-hook provided by some contemporary yet-to-be-developed
science”220 to free us from the biases of being culture-bound
because he does not think we can ever escape being imprisoned
in our cultures. Therefore,
[t]hose who wish to reduce objectivity to solidarity – call
them “pragmatists” – do not require either a metaphysics
or an epistemology. They view truths as, in William James’
phrase, what is good for us to believe. So they do not need
an account of a relation between beliefs and objects called
‘correspondence’ nor an account of human cognitive
abilities which ensures that our species is capable of
entering into that relation ...For pragmatists, the
desire for objectivity is not the desire to escape the
limitations of one’s community but simply the desire to
for as much intersubjective agreement as possible 221
In other words, Rorty has given up the quest for scientific
objectivity which he regards as an impossible effort to
transcend our cultural boundaries and settles for a ‘political’
goal, i.e. solidarity, i.e. he lets epistemology go for the politics
of knowledge. That is why he can say we do not “require either a
metaphysics or an epistemology.” Elsewhere he claims that the
positivists were right in seeking to “extirpate metaphysics when
‘metaphysics’ means the attempt to give knowledge of what
science cannot know,”222 i.e. knowledge that transcends
particular scientific facts – although these latter are also thrown
into question by Rorty’s views about the incommensurability of
different vocabularies or “truth games” and the need for
solidarity. The latter is also why he gives up on the
100 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

correspondence theory of knowledge which leads to arguments
because it maintains that some knowledge is natural “and not
merely local”223 and that some methods of justification are
natural and not merely social or cultural. Thus, it is impossible
for him to say that some knowledge is truer or reflects reality
better than other. “We must get the visual and in particular the
mirroring metaphors out of our speech altogether.”224 Making
this rejection of correspondence even more clear, he insists that
we admit that sentences are only “connected with other
sentences rather than with the world.”225 That being the case, it
follows that his pragmatism “views knowledge not as a relation
between mind and object but, roughly, as the ability to get
agreement by using persuasion rather than force.”226 If we
cannot appeal to the facts of reality for support, and if, as we
shall see, reason is only another “platitude,” then, unless we
wish to use force, we have only persuasion left.

Rorty describes himself as an “ironist”227 which is to say, he
doubts that his own particular language or vocabulary can
adequately attain truth and objectivity; he recognises that his
current philosophical language cannot resolve these doubts. He
does not think his language is closer to the truth or reality than
anyone else’s. For this reason, ironists repudiate the whole
concept of representationalism, i.e. the concept that our verbal
or mathematical descriptions of reality really represent what is
‘out there.’ Furthermore, because they realise that their
descriptions of reality are limited in descriptive capacity,
contingent and subject to constant change and or more in touch
with reality than others, ironists are “never quite able to take
themselves seriously.”228 Ironists are also people who “do not
hope to have their doubts about their final vocabularies settled
by something larger than themselves.”229 They do not look to
God or revelation nor to a supposedly universal reason or logic
nor a grand narrative to resolve their doubts. Instead, they
possess a great deal of what the poet John Keats called
“negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason.”230 As well, ironists are nominalists, they
think “nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence,”231 that is
what it is independently of human observation and
attribution.232 All alleged attributes are human constructions,
the products of our cultural and historical positioning and the
discourse we employ and for that reason there are no universal
characteristics of anything including human nature.233 There is
simply no way to transcend our language and culture and
compare it with ‘reality’ from some ‘Archimedean point’ to
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 101

obtain a ‘God’s eye view’ on the world. We should simply
recognise that we cannot “come up with a single set of criteria
which everybody in all times and places can accept, invent a
single language game which can somehow take over all jobs
previously done by all the language-games ever played.”234
Rather, our particular culture and language construct what we
appear to perceive and we are locked into these constructions, a
view which was already pre-figured by Kant. Hence any
attempts to use so-called essential attributes as the basis of
universal statements are doomed; knowing this, ironists do
not take the point of discursive thought to be knowing, in
any sense that can be explicated by notions like “reality,”
“real essence,” “objective point of view,” and the
“correspondence of language of [sic] reality.” They do not
think its point is to find a vocabulary which accurately
represents something, a transparent meaning.235
At this point it comes as no surprise that Rorty describes
reason as a faculty that “can now be dispensed with – and should
be dispensed with”236 because for ironists criteria of reason, like
other criteria used for judging among descriptions of the world
“are never more than platitudes which contextually define the
terms of the final vocabulary in use.”237 These criteria are valid,
if at all, only within the language or language game in which
they are being used. Indeed, philosophy is so language and
culture dependent that according to Rorty there is no legitimate
use of the distinction “between logic and rhetoric, or between
philosophy and literature, or between rational and nonrational
methods of changing other people’s minds.”238 In this vein,
Rorty writes, On a pragmatist view, rationality is not the
exercise of a faculty called ‘reason’ – a faculty which stands in
some determinate relationship to reality, Nor is the use of a
method. It is simply a matter of being open and curious and
relying on persuasion rather than force.239
In short, ‘rational’ only means ‘persuasive.’ It is time to
realize that the Enlightenment has been “discredited.”240 There
are no necessary ‘logical’ or reasonable connections between
sentences or propositions that can require us to admit anything
we prefer not to.
On Rorty’s view, philosophy cannot be a quest for ‘truth’ or
‘true understanding’ since the most we can do is redescribe
things to our individual and/or collective liking and discuss our
various descriptions. In other words, the purpose of philosophy
is to be edifying: “I shall is ‘edification’ to stand for this project
102 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

of finding new, better, more interesting more fruitful ways of
speaking.”241 Edifying philosophy “takes its point of departure
from suspicion about the pretensions of epistemology,”242
which is to say that edifying philosophy is not longer interested
in attaining truth.243 Thus, rather than take part in an inquiry
for the ‘knowledge,’ “we just might be saying something”244
simply in order to “keep the conversation going rather than to
find objective truth.”245 This, for Rorty is “a sufficient aim of
philosophy.”246 At most we can strive for solidarity for in the
post-Auschwitz age: “What can there be except human
solidarity, our recognition of one another’s common
humanity.”?247 (It is, of course highly ironic that Rorty appeals
to our “common humanity” after having repudiated ‘essences’
and the possibility of cross-cultural universal statements.)
Given Rorty’s views, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
philosophy is just pleasant talk, in itself of no great
consequence and remember that we can always change the
subject with no great harm done.248
Rorty emphatically rejects the notion of a “core self,”249 i.e.
the rejection of the claim that there is a human essence either
for the individual or for the species. In his view, “there is no
self distinct from this self-reweaving web”250 of muscles,
movements, beliefs and states of mind. In reflecting on these
weaving and reweaving patterns, we must
avoid taking common speech as committing one to the
view that there is, after all, such a thing as a “True Self,”
the inner core of one’s being which remains what it is
independent of changes in one’s beliefs and desires. There
is no more a center to the self than there is to the brain.251
We must not let our ordinary usage of pronouns such as ‘I’
or ‘me’ fool us into thinking there is any substantive entity that
actually corresponds to these words. All thoughts about a ‘True
Self’ or soul are delusional. We should “avoid the self-deception
of thinking that we possess a deep, hidden, metaphysically
significant nature which makes us ‘irreducibly’ different from
inkwells or atoms.”252

10. Baudrillar d (1929 – 2007)
Jean Baudrillard, who has attained “guru status throughout
the English-speaking world “as a high priest of the new
epoch,”253 is in some respects the most controversial of the five
contemporary postmodernists we shall examine. Baudrillard
embodied his postmodern philosophy in socio-cultural,
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 103

economic and political analyses that were distinguished not only
by his challenging insights but also by his flair for startling
turns of phrase and outrageous assertions. For example, in The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place he claims that the 2001 Gulf War
was more a matter of events on TV and radar screens than a real
war in the traditional sense, that it was more a virtual war than
anything else. Elsewhere he writes, “Disneyland is there to
conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’
America, which is Disneyland.”254 When we look into or beneath
Baudrillard’s multifarious analyses, we find that he shares many
if not all of the same themes and views as the postmodernists we
have examined previously.

The keys to Baudrillard’s thought are the twin concepts of
simulations and simulacra. In Simulations, Baudrillard briefly
retells a Borges story of a map that is so detailed in every
respect that it covers the entire territory it is supposed to
represent and is indistinguishable from it. The map and the
territory have become one, the distinction between ‘real’ and
‘unreal’ has been blurred as has the distinction between original
and copy, natural and artificial and signifier and signified.
What, if anything, we may ask, does the map represent? And
which is the map and which is the territory when “[s]imulation is
no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a
substance.”?255 Obviously, the whole notion of representation is
no longer tenable. We must also recognise that “simulation
threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’, between
‘real’ and ‘imaginary’.”256 How could one distinguish between
them? Other threatened binaries are cause/effect,
active/passive, subject/object and ends/means.257 The essential
natures of these categories no longer exist because they have all
been melded into one another. They have, to use Derrida’s term,
been deconstructed, i.e. it has been shown that the old notion
of distinct and stable essences making up the binary oppositions
of signifier/signified, map/territory, real/imaginary, true/false,
original/copy, appearance/reality, the ideal/real and
essential/nonessential are no longer functional with each part of
the pair blending into the other. Furthermore, if all these
essential differences no longer exist, it is impossible to be
rational since rationality depends on clear and distinct
oppositional binaries or categories of thought that allow us to
attain clear and decisive answers.

Metaphysics is also impossible according to Baudrillard. In
the first place, “truth, reference and objective causes have
ceased to exist.”258 If these three are not clearly identifiable,
104 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

metaphysics, which requires clearly identified causal
relationships in its study of the structure and nature of reality,
become impossible. Secondly, if our propositions are no longer
referential and do not refer to reality, we cannot discuss reality
at all let alone decide which propositions are true; as Baudrillard
puts it: “All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a
circular Moebian compulsion259 and thus deprive reason of the
“clear and distinct ideas”260 it needs. Consequently, we can no
longer distinguish real from unreal, or appearance from reality
and with this situation
goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and
appearances, of the real and its concept ... It [the real] no
longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured
against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more
than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped
by an imaginary [ideal], it is no longer real at all. It is
hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of
combinatory in a hyperspace without atmosphere.261
Finally, without reason or logic metaphysics is also
impossible because reason provides the rules by means of which
our propositions about reality lead to conclusions. Eventually,
Baudrillard replaced metaphysics with the satirical ‘pataphysics,’
a term borrowed from the surrealist movement, to illustrate
what happens to thought when distinctions among categories
disappear. This is why “for pataphysics all phenomena are
absolutely gaseous.”262
According to Baudrillard, the “blurring of distinctions
between the real and the unreal”263 is the “hyperreal,” which is “a
condition whereby the models replace the real, as exemplified in
such phenomena as the ideal home in women’s or lifestyle
magazines, ideal sex ... ideal fashion.”264 In each of these, the
model, the simulation determines what is regarded as real and
thus, ultimately, the simulations constitute reality. For that
reason, the power relationship between the real and unreal
simulation has been reversed, with the unreal now so much in
control that we can say that real understood in the traditional,
i.e. pre-postmodern sense no longer exists: “there is no real.”265
Because we live in such a hyperreality where the simulation
constitutes reality, Baudrillard is able to say that Disneyland is
the real America and that the 2001 Gulf War never happened
except as a television event. To our usual way of thinking this
makes no sense because the original ‘real thing’ always has
ontological priority over the any simulation but as Baudrillard
tells us, “The contradictory process of true and false, of real
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 105

and the imaginary is abolished in this hyperreal logic of
montage.”266 By the “logic of montage” he means the ‘logic’ of
concepts or realities which overlap and impinge on and melt
into one another, losing thereby their distinct boundaries and
with that loss, their usual rules of combination or exclusion.
Oppositional binaries such as original/copy, prior/secondary
and this/that no longer hold. “The hyperreal represents a much
more advanced phase [than modernist realism] in the sense that
even this contradiction between the real world and the
imaginary is effaced.”267 Baudrillard calls this development “the
collapse of reality into hyperrealism.”268 This development
changes our relationship to reality because “it is reality itself
that disappears utterly in the game of reality.”269 Reality
disappears in its simulations because similitude is ultimately
equivalent to the murder of the original, a nullification of
original’s unique ontological status as prior in the order of time
and logic.270
The dominance of the hyperreal has the effect of collapsing
the difference between art and reality and thus mingling the two
so that reality itself becomes a work of art:
And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart
of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical
transcendence [difference from reality] is gone but
because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic
which is inseparable from its own structure, has been
confused with its own image.271
From this it follows that the binary opposition of work/play
has also been dissolved. Indeed, because of the collapse of all
binary differences, the postmodern condition “is for Baudrillard
a play with all forms of sexuality, art, and politics, combining
and recombining forms and possibilities, moving into the ‘the
time of transvestism.’ ”272 This “combining and recombining” of
concepts, categories, styles and content liberates things from
their former limits and hyperbolizes existence, for which reason
he also refers to the “post-orgy state of things.”273

Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity; Steven Best and Douglas Keller,
Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations.
Rorty
Derrida Of Grammatology.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.
Foucault, Madness and Civilization;
106 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

Foucault
Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra.
Lacan; Deleuze and Guattrari
Heidegger’s term.
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “The Postmodern Turn in Philosophy:
Theoretical Provocations and Normative Devices.”
Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, p. 1.
The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 2, p. 100.
Robert Audi, editor, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.
“Postmodernism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ ; See also, Concise
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical
Interpretations, p. 4-5.
Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation V. See also
Regulae by Descartes.
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation 1, para.2.
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation IV.
Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations” in Linda J Nicholson,
ed., Feminism /Postmodernism, p. 41-42.
Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, p.11
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition .
Lloyd Spencer, “Postmodernism, Modernity and the Tradition of Dissent”
in Stuart Sim ed. The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, p.
161.
See Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason which is entirely based on the
premise of humankind’s rational nature: “we have no knowledge of any
other rational beings beside man.” (Preface). It is interesting to note that
the Bahá'í Writings posit man’s “rational soul” (Some Answered
Questions, 208.)
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason , Book I, Chp. 3, Section III.
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason , Book I, Chp. 3, Section V.
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason , Book I, Chp. 2.
Ammittai F. Aviram, “Asking the Question: Kant and Postmodernism?”
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason , Book I, Chp. 2, Section II, Subsection
IV.
Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, p. 37.
Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity, p.12.
Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity, p. 12
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “The Postmodern Turn in Philosophy:
Theoretical Provocations and Normative Devices.”
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 107

Clayton Koelb (ed.), Nietzsche as Postmodernists, Essays Pro and Contra,
p.5.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section 18.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Reason in Philosophy”, # 6.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section 15.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section 15.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section 17.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section 15.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section 15.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section 15.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #493.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #534.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #537.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #555.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, # 552; emphasis added.
Nietzsche, Of Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, paragraph 12; also
The Will to Power, # 481.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, # 480: “knowledge works as a tool of
power.”
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, paragraph 12.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #5.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, # 481.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, # 560; see also # 583.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, # 480.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #34.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #34.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #24.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #24.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #616.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Upon the Happy Isles”, p. 85.
Ibid. 85.
Ibid. 196.
Martin Heidegger, “Existence and Being.”
www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heideg
g2.htm
Robert Audi, editor, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, p. 563.
Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 26.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , p.2.; in other works, Heidegger spells
108 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

it ‘being’ without the capital.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , p.2.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later
Philosophy, p. 26; italics added.
Heidegger, “Existence and Being.”
Heidegger, “Existence and Being”
William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned.” Heidegger would fully agree
with this poem.
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 47.
Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity, p. 178.
Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned.”
Cristine Lafont, “Precis of ‘Heidegger, Language and World-Disclosure’”
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth”. evans-
experientialism.freewebspace.com/heidegger6a.htm
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth”.
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth”.
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 261.
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth.”
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth.”
Heidegger, Being and Time, p.259.
Heidegger, Being and Time, p.259; italics added.
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth.”
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p.130.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 270.
Heidegger, “Existence and Being.”
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth.”
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth.”
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth.”
Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity, p.161.
Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity, p.161.
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p.36.
Heidegger, “Existence and Being.”
Heidegger, Being and Time, p.204.
Heidegger, Being and Time, p.204.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.xxiv.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.xxiii.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.34.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.63.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.63.
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 109

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.31.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.xxiv.
Best and Kellner, “The Postmodern Turn in Philosophy: Theoretical
Provocations and Normative Deficits”
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p.146.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.9.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.10.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.10.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.15,
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.17.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.60.
Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, p.32.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.40.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.26.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.26.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , p.40.
ibid. 43; Rorty develops this concept of consensus further.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction , p.86; italics added.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 24; italics added.
Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Disseminations, p. 95.
Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Disseminations, p. 127.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.298; also p.281.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, p.58.
Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Disseminations, p.129-130.
Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary, p.144.
Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary, p.144.
Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Disseminations, p.130.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.158; also p.163..
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.158.
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play” in Writing and Difference, p.
292.
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play” in Writing and Difference, p.
291.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 50.
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play” in Writing and Difference,
p.280.
Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology” in Margins of Philosophy, p.207.
Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary, p.71.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.12.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.12.
110 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

Jacques Derrida, Positions, p.19.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 49.
John, 1: 1-2.
Sorcha Fogarty, “Logocentrism,” in The Literary Encyclopedia.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, 23.
Of special concern to Derrida is the binary Speech/writing which he tries
to overturn by showing how writing, i.e. arche-writing as the play of
differences and supplements, precedes speech which itself depends on
that play of differences.
Phenomenology studies our experience of an object and seeks to extract
the essential features of what we experience.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics focusing on the study of being and
beings.
Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference,
p. 91.
Ibid. 95.
Ibid. p. 104.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of
Knowledge.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
Andrew Thacker, “Michel Foucault”, The Literary Encyclopedia.
Scott H. More, “Christian History, Providence and Foucault”, Fides et
Historia, XXIX:1 (Winter/Spring 1997): 5-14.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.10.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.11.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.23.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.11.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.28; emphasis added.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.28.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.xxii; emphasis added.
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theories: Critical Interrogations, p.41.
Michel Foucault, interview in La Quinzaine Literature, quoted in J.G.
Merquior, Foucault, p.36.
J.G. Merquior, Foucault, p.61.
Charles Sherpherdson, “History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan ”
www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.195/shepherd.195
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 155.
Michel Foucault, “Life, Experience and Science,” in The Essential
Foucault, p.11.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, in J.G.Merquior, Foucault, p.61.
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 111

J.G Merquior, Foucault, p.50.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.xxiii
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.308.
J.G. Merquior, Foucault, p.52.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.319.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.318.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.335.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.308.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.326..
Foucault’s term, J.G. Merquior, Foucault, p. 55.
J.G. Merquior, Foucault, p.53.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.322.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Essential
Foucault, p.361.
J.G. Merquior, Foucault, p. 60-61.
Darren Hynes, “Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge .”
www.mun.ca/phil/codgito/vol4/v4doc1.html
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “The Postmodern Turn in Philosophy:
Theoretical Provocations and Normative Devices.”
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Essential
Foucault, p.353.
Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of Concern for the Self” in The Essential
Foucault, p.76.
Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of Concern for the Self” in The Essential
Foucault, p.76.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.53.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.49.
James Williams, Understanding Poststructuralism, p.122.
Jorge Garcia, “Are Categories Invented or Discovered? A Response to
Foucault.”Review of Metaphysics, 55.1: 3-20.
Danaher, Schirato, Webb, Understanding Foucault, p.118.
Danaher, Schirato, Webb, Understanding Foucault, p.40.
Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self” in The Essential
Foucault, p.33.
ibid.33.
Danaher, Schirato, Webb, Understanding Foucault, p.31.
Danaher, Schirato, Webb, Understanding Foucault, p.118.
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p.51.
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Essential Foucault,
p.51.
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p.34.
112 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” in The Essential
Foucault, p.89.
ibid. 94.
Ibid..93.
ibid.94.
Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” in The Essential Foucault, p.316.
Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” in The Essential Foucault, p.317.
J.G.Merquior, Foucault, p. 108.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Essential
Foucault, p.366.
Michel Foucault, “Homage to Jean Hippolyte ” in Sheridan, Michel
Foucault: The Will to Truth, p.120.
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p. 50.
Moya K Mason, “Foucault.” www.moyak.com/researcher/resume/
papers/Foucault.html
Dean Guerras, “Richard Rorty and the Postmodern Rejection of Absolute
Truth.”
On the other hand, his understanding of pragmatist philosophy has been
scathingly called into question by no less an authority than Susan Haack
in “Vulgar Rortyism.” newcriterion.com:81/archive/16/
nov97/menand.htm
Rorty’s term; see Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.360.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.378.
Chantal Mouffe editor, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p.1.
Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity” in Objectivity, Relativism and
Truth, p. 32.
Ibid. 13.
Ibid. 22 – 23.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.384.
Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity” in Objectivity, Relativism and
Truth, p. 22.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.371.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.372.
Richard Rorty, “Texts and Lumps” in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth,
p.98.
Richard Rorty, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” in Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity, p.73.
ibid.73; also 89.
Richard Rorty, “Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,” in Contingency,
Irony and Solidarity, p.97.
John Keats, Letter, Sunday [21 Dec. 1817]
academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/keatsltr.html
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Nine 113

Richard Rorty, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” in Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity, p.74.
Richard Rorty, “Inquiry as Recontextualization ” in Objectivity,
Relativism and Truth, p.99.
Richard Rorty, “Solidarity” in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p.192.
Richard Rorty, “Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation” in Objectivity,
Relativism and Truth, p.218.
Richard Rorty, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” in Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity, p.75.
Richard Rorty, “Solidarity” in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p.194.
Richard Rorty, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope ” in Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity, p.75.
ibid. 75.
Richard Rorty, “Is Natural Science a Natural Kind?” in Objectivity,
Relativism and Truth, p.62.
ibid.176.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.360.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.366.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.370.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.371.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.377.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.378.
Richard Rorty, “Solidarity” in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p.189.
Richard Rorty, “The Contingency of Community” in Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity, p.44.
Richard Rorty, “Solidarity” in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p.189.
Richard Rorty, “Inquiry as Recontextualization ” in Objectivity,
Relativism and Truth, p.93
Richard Rorty, “Non-reductive Physicalism” in Objectivity, Relativism
and Truth, p.123.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.373.
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p.111.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.25.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.2.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.5.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.55.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.6.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.35.
Rene Descartes, Sixth Meditation.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.3.
Jean Baudrillard, “Pataphysics,” trans. by Drew Burk.
114 Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings

www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=569
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p.119.
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p.119.
Jean Baudrillard, “Holograms,” trans. by Sheila Glaser.
www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-
simulation-11-holograms.html
Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.122.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.142.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.141.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.148.
Jean Baudrillard, “Holograms,” trans. by Sheila Glaser.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra” in Simulations, p.151 – 152.
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p.137.
Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p.137.

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