Postmodernism, ethics and European “success”

Postmodern ethics is often described in vague terms such as “openness,” “otherness'” and “fracture” and an “opposition to totalizing systems.” In this chapter, I aim to explain, in one way, why these terms are vague and why they have come to mean so much for postmodern thought. I also argue that postmodernism is first an ethical position before anything else.

Mary Midgley writes that

Midgley’s comment is clearly right about postmodernism: it is a “conceptual muddle” (just what does it mean?) and there is some form of “core element,” however expressed. She is also right that there is (more than) a tendency in western thought (but perhaps not a natural tendency) to reduce everything to a system. Is she also right that this tendency has failed to work and that the “sensible element” of postmodernism is the “realisation” of this failure?