Is Reality Real?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Vol. XXIV, No. 8, September 2011

 

 

"For the postmodernist, there is no truth, no knowledge, no objectivity, no reason, and ultimately, no reality. Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, nothing is transcendent. Everything is in a state of total relativity, and perennial flux. There is no correspondence between language and reality; indeed, there is no 'essential' reality. What appears to be real is illusory, deceptive, problematic, indeterminate. What appears to be true is nothing more than what the power structure, the 'hegemonic' authority in society, deems to be true.

"To those of you who have been happily spared this latest intellectual fashion, it may seem bizarre and improbable. I can only assure you that it is all too prevalent in all fields of the humanities.

"More important is the fact that even those who do not think of themselves as postmodernists often share the extreme relativism and subjectivism that now pervade the humanities as a whole. In the leading professional journals today, the words truth, objectivity, reason, and reality generally appear with quotation marks around them, suggesting how specious these concepts are.

 

[Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Revolution in the Library," reprinted from The American Scholar, Key Reporter, vol. 62 (Spring 1997), p. 4. Dr. Himmelfarb is Professor Emeritus of History at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.]