Postmodernism Rejects the Project That Makes Criticism Possible

Stephen Hicks identifies what may be the single most clarifying distinction in the Modernism-postmodernism debate: the difference lies not in the content of criticisms but in their intended function. The Enlightenment project was designed to be self-correcting. Bacon's empiricism, Descartes' methodological doubt, Locke's epistemology — all presupposed that hypotheses would fail and theories would require revision. Criticism was constitutive of the enterprise, not evidence against it. When a postmodern thinker mounts a genuinely incisive critique of naive empiricism or a particular philosophy of science, the modernist absorbs it as productive feedback. The postmodernist treats it as a death certificate for the entire project. The criticism is identical; the philosophical stance toward it is categorically different.

This distinction carries a devastating logical implication. Lyotard's incredulity toward meta-narratives, Foucault's genealogical reduction of knowledge to power-regimes, Rorty's pragmatist dissolution of truth — these are not refinements of the critical apparatus. They are arguments that the search for truth is itself a form of domination. But if all truth-claims are power plays, then postmodern criticism cannot exempt itself from its own diagnosis. The framework is self-undermining: it destroys the epistemic ground on which any claim, including its own, could be adjudicated as correct.

Hicks reinforces this philosophical point with a political genealogy. The first two generations of postmodern thinkers were not disinterested analysts who reluctantly concluded modernity had failed. They were committed from the outset to anti-capitalist, anti-industrial positions, encountering modernity already opposed to its institutional expressions. This prior commitment created systematic motivation to amplify negatives and suppress positives — explaining why postmodern critique never finds anything redeemable in the Enlightenment legacy. The pressing question this raises is whether any successor framework, including metamodernism, can credibly claim immunity from the same motivated reasoning.