1 - Culture

Summary

Cultural Particularism

‘Cultural particularism’ is a central feature of postmodernism. It refers to the position that claims that understanding and interaction with the world are contingent upon one's culture. According to radical cultural particularism, there is no objective reality whatsoever, only multiple different perspectives based on local perceptions and interpretations, each anchored in a specific cultural context. Furthermore, the notion of objectivity is a figment of one’s philosophical imagination, itself conceived through the lenses of one's particular culture. An introduction to the concepts discussed in this chapter should start with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is widely considered the founder of several contemporary philosophical movements— notably analytic, post-liberal, and postmodern philosophy (at least according to his later works). Common threads run between these movements, most obviously the rejection of a universal, objective sphere. According to Wittgenstein, a set of given beliefs is meaningful only to the group which understands them from its particular perspective:

The ideal, as we think of it, is unshakable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe—where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off … we think we are perceiving a state of affairs of the highest generality.

The ‘pair of glasses’ Wittgenstein describes tricks us into a false sense of knowledge, as they purport to provide an objective vision of reality. In line with this observation, postmodernists claim that much of modernist epistemology produces a false impression of objectivity and that reality is, as a matter of fact, only ever comprehended from within a specific cultural confine.

Wittgenstein's later writings were further developed by two broad movements, each taking his observations in a different direction. The first includes continental postmodern theorists, in particular Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida; the second comprises Anglo-American constructivist philosophers, such as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. Both groups have dismissed the pre-eminence of the individual, proclaiming the collapse of the famous ‘cogito’ at the heart of Cartesian philosophy.