Universal Values and the Justification of Internationality
Universal Values and the Justification of Internationality
By Shaya Aldosari
Introduction: Does cultural plurality deny any possibility of universal morality? Universality means, among many definitions, internationality. It also means the eternal validity of human ethics. Before the so-called postmodernism, humanity used to believe in transcendental values and ideas that hold good of everyone1, that is, every ‘animal rationale’ which according to Aristotle is the only animal who is capable of reason. Rationality is not merely a feature of cognition, it is also of practical usage: “Virtue […] is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it 2.” Rationality was, then, the basis of every human action. It also had brought about all universal categories regarding knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, theology,..etc. When Reason breaks down, they all would do so. Thus exactly what postmodernism contributes, i.e., it destroys the universal validity of Reason. In other words, it refutes the absolute normativity of reason. That might explain the well-known definition which Jean-François Lyotard gives to postmodernism: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives3.” The breakdown of absolute belief in reason, progression, God, metaphysics, and so on, which can be described under the rubric metanarratives, led towards slogans such as the death of man with Louis Althusser, the death of author with Roland Barthes, the death of Humanism with Heidegger, and the end of history with Francis Fukuyama. The American- Egyptian critic Ihab Hassan In his book The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature produces a list of differences between modernism and postmodernism as follows: Modernism
Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism
Pataphysics/Dadaism
Form
By Shaya Aldosari
Introduction: Does cultural plurality deny any possibility of universal morality? Universality means, among many definitions, internationality. It also means the eternal validity of human ethics. Before the so-called postmodernism, humanity used to believe in transcendental values and ideas that hold good of everyone1, that is, every ‘animal rationale’ which according to Aristotle is the only animal who is capable of reason. Rationality is not merely a feature of cognition, it is also of practical usage: “Virtue […] is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it 2.” Rationality was, then, the basis of every human action. It also had brought about all universal categories regarding knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, theology,..etc. When Reason breaks down, they all would do so. Thus exactly what postmodernism contributes, i.e., it destroys the universal validity of Reason. In other words, it refutes the absolute normativity of reason. That might explain the well-known definition which Jean-François Lyotard gives to postmodernism: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives3.” The breakdown of absolute belief in reason, progression, God, metaphysics, and so on, which can be described under the rubric metanarratives, led towards slogans such as the death of man with Louis Althusser, the death of author with Roland Barthes, the death of Humanism with Heidegger, and the end of history with Francis Fukuyama. The American- Egyptian critic Ihab Hassan In his book The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature produces a list of differences between modernism and postmodernism as follows: Modernism
Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism
Pataphysics/Dadaism
Form
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