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University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: February 8, 1999
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This tidbit is in response to Shannon's question at CSUDH (Juvenile Delinquency Class) on why Dear Habermas considers Habermas post-modern. Good question. We hope the answer is clear. Invitation to question us further where it is not. We mostly think about these things when you ask us. So you're welcome to ask.

At the risk of sounding heretical and eclectic, both of which seem to be academy sins, we want to explain what post-modern means for us. In the modern age the world changed, from one we could encompass with our minds, to one that holds us all at bay with a need to tolerate ambiguity, to know that we can never "know," for knowledge never ceases to grow and change. In the summer of 1998 we added the knowledge that neutrinos have mass, but we have yet to "know" whether they account for the "dark matter" of our universe.

If we "know" so little about our physical world, then how much more difficult to "know" precisely about our selves and our stories and our relationships with each other, and with the universe. We do not wish to join philosophers in deciding whether philosophy is dead, whether there is or is not a Heaven or a Hell or a Future, other than the ones we seem to so readily create for ourselves.

We do not need definitive answers. The answers that science could provide were the gift of modernism, the wonders we discovered and invented throughout the 20th Century. We do not know, nor do we need to know, whether there will be an ultimate "enlightenment," brought by either human understanding or God. "Enlightenment" was what the modern age sought, through its god of science and objectivity.

Post-modernism, post-whatever, has taken the position that the Modernists over-reached. That "man" is not to know. Much energy was spent on epistemology, on the science of how we know, and how we can know that we know. But in the end, there are limits to human knowledge. There are certainly limits to the human capacity for establishing and maintaining a tiny piece of the universe that will sustain our humanity and our children into the future.

The French school of post-modernists tends to be pessimistic, totally out of sorts with the corporate world of the turn of the century, for the corporate world is very certain that it knows what it knows. Sartre would call that ignorant bad faith, the sort of bad faith of someone who never learned to tell belief from knowledge. I believe because I believe because I believe . . .

Habermas, a German thinker, tends to be more optimistic. He believes that the system of law holds the ultimate possibility for us to hear and respect each other and to establish a system of governance that can sustain both peace and a future. He counts on public discourse, our ability to reason with one another. His hope that there is any "ultimate" anything may mark him as modern. But he clearly recognizes the irreversible growth to a global world in which there can be no single perspective privileged above all others. He seeks "legitimacy," which many would again claim, does not and cannot exist because of its tendency again to the "ultimate."

In Habermas' appeal to a good faith hearing for every validity claim, where every citizen has the right to voice that claim, he is post-modern. We make no pretense of being right, or having the authority to classify a thinker like Habermas. But we do claim to know that Habermas offers hope, hope that we can accomplish both peace and a future, and we find that that is enough for us to pass on that hope to our students, for we cannot teach despair.

I do not and cannot know if there is a "right" path, for that is belief, and as an educator I am to pass on knowledge, not belief. I do not and cannot know if Habermas is right. Nor can Habermas. But I can and do assure you that to the extent that humanity is going to continue well into the next century, we can and must not kill one another or the atmosphere in which we live, for we cannot know where such terror will lead . One way to maintain an earth on which humans can continue to live is to begin to hear one another in good faith. Habermas says this in far more complex terms than I can manage. But because he says it, I believe he fits my definition of post-modern.