Stephen Hicks in Explaining postmodernism

Showing that a movement leads to nihilism is an important part of understanding it, as is showing how a failing and nihilistic movement can still be dangerous. Tracing postmodernism’s roots (...) explains how all of its elements came to be woven together. Yet identifying postmodernism’s roots and connecting them to contemporary bad consequences does not refute postmodernism.

What is still needed is a refutation of those historical premises, and an identification and defense of the alternatives to them. The Enlightenment was based on premises opposite to those of postmodernism, but while the Enlightenment was able to create a magnificent world on the basis of those premises, it articulated and defended them only incompletely. That weakness is the sole source of postmodernism’s power against it. Completing the articulation and defense of those premises is therefore essential to maintaining the forward progress of the Enlightenment vision and shielding it against postmodern strategies.

The names of the postmodern vanguard are now familiar: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. They are its leading strategists.

Members of this elite group set the direction and tone for the postmodern intellectual world.

Michel Foucault has identified the major targets: “All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.” Such necessities must be swept aside as baggage from the past: “It is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.”

Richard Rorty has elaborated on that theme, explaining that that is not to say that postmodernism is true or that it offers knowledge. Such assertions would be self-contradictory, so postmodernists must use language “ironically.”

Against this Kantian ethics postulates:

1. Moral dignitarianism, the anti-egoistic, anti-utilitarian, and anti-relativistic universalist ethical idea that every rational human animal possesses dignity, i.e., an absolute, non-denumerably infinite, intrinsic, objective value or worth, beyond every merely hedonistic, self-interested, instrumental, economic, or utilitarian value, which entails that we always and everywhere ought to treat everyone as persons and never as mere means or mere things, and therefore always and everywhere with sufficient respect for their dignity, no matter what merely prudential reasons there are to do otherwise.

2.  Political dignitarianism, the anti-despotic, anti-totalitarian, and anti-Hobbesian- liberal yet also liberationist, radically enlightened idea that all social institutions based on coercion and authoritarianism, whether democratic or not-so- democratic, are rationally unjustified and immoral, and that in resisting, devolving, and/or transforming all such social institutions, we ought to create and sustain a worldwide or cosmopolitan ethical community beyond all borders and nation-States, consisting of people who who think, care, and act for themselves and also mutually sufficiently respect the dignity of others and themselves, no matter what their race, sex, ethnicity, language, age, economic status, or abilities.

Husserl:

 Whatever is true, is absolutely, intrinsically true: truth is one and the same whether men or non-men, angels or gods apprehend and judge it. Logical laws speak of truth in this ideal unity, set over against the real multiplicity of races, individuals and experiences, and it is of this ideal unity that we all speak when we are not confused by relativism.  

P. Tichý (Foundations of Frege's Logic):

Fate has not been kind to Gottlob Frege and his work. His logical achievement, which dwarfed anything done by logicians over the preceding two thousand years, remained all but ignored by his contemporaries. He liberated logic from the straight-jacket of psychologism only to see others claim credit for it. He expounded his theory in a monumental two-volume work, only to find an insidious error in the very foundations of the system. He successfully challenged the rise of Hilbert-style formalism in logic only to see everybody follow in the footsteps of those who had lost the argument. Ideas can live with lack of recognition. Even ignored and rejected, they are still there ready to engage the minds of those who find their own way to them. They are in danger of obliteration, however, if they are enlisted to serve conceptions and purposes incompatible with them. This is what has been happening to Frege's theoretical bequest in recent decades. Frege has become, belatedly, something of a philosophical hero. But those who have elevated him to this status are the intellectual heirs of Frege's Hilbertian adversaries, hostile to all the main principles underlying Frege's philosophy. They are hostile to Frege's platonism, the view that over and above material objects, there are also functions, concepts, truth-values, and thoughts. They are hostile to Frege's realism, the idea that thoughts are independent of their expression in any language and that each of them is true or false in its own right. They are hostile to the view that logic, just like arithmetic and geometry, treats of a specific range of extra-linguistic entities given prior to any axiomatization, and that of two alternative logics—as of two alternative geometries—only one can be correct. And they are no less hostile to Frege's view that the purpose of inference is to enhance our knowledge and that it therefore makes little sense to infer conclusions from premises which are not known to be true. We thus see Frege lionized by exponents of a directly opposing theoretical outlook.