John Caputo

A pós-modernidade sublinha o papel produtivo da diferença, em oposição à predilecção "moderna" ou do Iluminismo pela universalidade, comunalidade, consenso, bem como por aquilo que os modernos chamam "racionalidade". Segundo o autor do artigo, existem duas variedades distintas desta filosofia da diferença, dependendo de qual predecessor do século XIX – Nietzsche ou Kierkegaard – se prefere, de modo que o artigo distingue entre um pós-modernismo "dionisíaco" e outro de carácter mais "profético". A maioria das objecções que se fazem contra o pós-modernismo têm em conta a versão dionisíaca do mesmo, falhando em larga medida a sua visão, ou dimensão, profética. A linha de objecções levantada contra os pós-modernistas - relativismo, subjectivismo, cepticismo, anarquismo, antinomianismo, anti-institucionalismo, niilismo e desespero - deriva fundamentalmente da versão do pós-modernismo de inspiração nietzschiana. Segundo o autor, se todas ou a maioria destas objecções fossem válidas, o pós-modernismo deveria ser denunciado como inimigo de Deus e da religião. Assim, muito embora estas queixas possam ser pertinentes no que se refere à versão dionisíaca do pós-modernismo, no que se refere à sua versão profética, elas são falsas e ignoram a sua proveniência religiosa e até bíblica. /// Postmodernism emphasizes the productive role of difference, as opposed to the "modern" or Enlightenment predilection for universality, commonality, consensus, and what modernists call "rationality" There are two different varieties of this philosophy of difference, depending on which of its two nineteenth century predecessors – Nietzsche or Kierkegaard – one favors, which I call "Dionysian" and "prophetic" postmodernism. Most of the objections that are made against postmodernism have in mind the Dionysian version, but they fall wide of the mark of the prophetic version. The line of objections raised against postmodernists – relativism, subjectivism, scepticism, anarchism, antinomianism, anti-institutionalism, nihilism, and despair – takes its lead from the Nietzscheanized version of postmodernism. Clearly, were all or most of these objections valid it would be as rightly denounced as inimical to God and religion. These complaints may hold of its Dionysian version; they are, as regards the second or prophetic version, false and ignore its religious and even biblical provenance.

HEIDEGGER COULD NEVER RESIST A GOOD STORY. He could never resist giving what he had discovered about alëtheia and the oblivion of Being a narrative form. In Being and Time we were promised a story--which was to be written backwards--of the "destruction of the history of ontology." Beginning at the end, with Kant, it was to feel its way back through the tradition in a deconstructive gesture, looking for what had all along been blocking the discovery of the temporal meaning of Being which had at last begun to emerge in Kant. In the later works this story is considerably recast. Again, the vantage point is the end, but now the end is the age of the Gestell, the enframing, the "end of philosophy," which holds us all in its grip. The end is not conceived as a modern breakthrough but as an eschaton, a dead end into which the West has run. The task of thought is to make its way back into the primordial "Beginning" in order to recapture that fleeting moment which will make it possible for us today to begin anew, to make the present into an "authentic" end, which means a transition to another beginning.