# Postmodernism and the Baha'i Writings

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> 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.
> 76                               Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings
> 
> 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.
> 78                              Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings
> 
> 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.
> 80                              Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings
> 
> 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
> 82                              Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings
> 
> “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.
> 84                              Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings
> 
> 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
> 86                             Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings
> 
> “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,
> 92                              Postmodernism and the Bahá’í Writings
> 
> 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.
>
> — *Postmodernism and the Baha'i Writings (Used by permission of the curator)*