Late Postmodernism

by Pedro Blas González (March 2025)

 

Late postmodernism has vitiated the hierarchy of values. Having originated in self-consuming skepticism, fueled by relativism, late postmodernity has settled into normalized nihilism. Few people suspect this. Consequently, one cannot have an intelligent and thoughtful understanding today of late postmodernism, if we do not begin with the realization that late postmodernism foments moral/spiritual anarchy.

 

The Felling of Reason and Essence.

Late postmodernism has chopped down reason and essence, turning these into splinters, leaving nihilism as the moral imperative of our age. It is not necessary to present a history of the Enlightenment, its propping up of rationalism and science as harbingers of a new paradigm, and secularism as a newly fangled approach to morality, to realize that the unrestrained optimism of the Enlightenment has delivered Western civilization to late postmodernism.

Why late postmodernism and not just postmodernism? First, we begin with the reality that late postmodern man, regardless of the overplayed secular bravado that we are immersed in, possesses many bloated and vociferous, yet empty notions about man, society, the world, and human reality, but next to zero knowledge and understanding about permanent and substantial human reality. This is partly the result of the naked, center-less sensualism of postmodernity.

Secondly, we must recognize that the dystopian world that postmodernity has created has largely come about through the force of personality of its many self-serving agents provocateurs, people who due to their personal dysfunctionality and moral/spiritual inadequacies, promote the destruction of the hierarchy of values. Marx and Freud are good examples of this. The massive scale and pace of destruction of objective values that postmodernism has ushered is not the result of organic moral corruption and decay.

By negating objective values that transcend personal preferences and prejudices, late postmodernity has opened a Pandora’s Box of contradictions and immorality. One effect of this is the removal of free will as the human person’s agency in appropriating the demands of human contingencies.

Another component of the takeover of late postmodern nihilism, of all aspects of human reality, is the aggressive promotion of philosophical materialism to the forefront of the human psyche. The negation of man’s quest to cultivate the hierarchy of values has vanquished the possibility of attaining constructive values that signal permanence. Man is lost without the possibility of embracing permanence and certainty.

The mostly self-serving agent provocateurs that are responsible for nihilism in late postmodernity have much to gain from doing so. This is one reason why progressive postmodern critics and writers throughout the twentieth century  focused their hatred and vitriol on the Victorian Age and Christianity. As a result, late postmodern man has been conditioned to believe that the new and timely, that is, the contemporary world, has released us from the alleged shackles of the past. This is a powerful illusion that pretends that the timely and new, what the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset calls the ‘height of the times,’ best describes human reality. The ‘new is better, the past is dead’ can serve as an apt moniker to describe emancipated late postmodern man.

 

Forms of Life: The Illusions of a Hollow Plurality

Late postmodernity has ushered untold forms of life.

Debasing and relegating morality to the wastebasket of history, postmodernity creates the illusion that time began ‘today,’ with the advent of the latest academic theories and chic immoral dysfunction. Any present moment will do, as far as the belief that human life has no rhyme or reason; this is the deeply rooted agenda of late postmodernity. This wispy, dystopian world of illusion that late postmodernity has created—life in the matrix—as some young people refer to this is life as the sitting-duck recipient of deterministic material forces that late postmodern man is incapable of recognizing. That is the legacy of nihilism’s strong- arm destruction of values and man’s incapacity to foster and exercise free will.

Consequently, the destruction of free will as a moderator of human reality has been appropriated by radical ideology. This has compounded the problem of late postmodern man’s crisis of values. Ideology is the raison d’être of late postmodernity. This makes it easier to control the collective, herd agenda that late postmodern radical ideology demands.

The idea that life is lived only once—which in itself is a truism—has become an abrasive and corrosive neurosis that makes the practitioners of that half-baked idea anxiously look over their shoulders, as if expecting orders from the crafty trendsetters who officiate over our age of collective groupthink.

Any age that dispenses with the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom that the past has garnered is an age that will suffer fools gladly. Even in a ‘dark’ age that has little memory of distant or recent past, if left to their own devices, people in such a dark age will naturally long to understand, if not reflect, on what men and women in a previous age looked like, how they lived and what ideas they possessed about life and death. Through curiosity of the past, even a dark age can shed light on itself.

Curiosity is necessary to safeguard man from becoming the slave of sensation, for curiosity can deliver people in a morally/spiritually healthy age to reflect on the sublime and transcendent, what can be described as the other-than-me.

Late postmodernity has created a vacuous and misleading conception of plurality. What late postmodernity refers to as diversity, an alleged plurality to be celebrated, is nothing more than plurality of degree, not of kind. Late postmodern ideological posturing has destroyed man’s ability to cultivate authentic individualism. Thus, people in late postmodernity are rarely individuals, lacking personality and strength of convictions, given that there is little regard for essential qualitative differences.

 

Why Late Postmodernism?

Marxist critics of capitalism allege that late capitalism is doomed to failure and that it is ‘on its last legs.’ This is the hope of Marxists beginning with the German Marxist Werner Sombart (1863-1941). The phrase ‘late capitalism’ (Spätkapitalismus) picked up steam with Marxist theorists after World War II.

Though we can debunk the idea of late capitalism as a misguided attempt to understand what I refer to as the economics of being—man’s ability to provide sustenance and shelter for himself and others—the failed Marxist attempt at economics, can serve as a metaphor to distinguish modernity from late postmodernity.

Because the purveyors of late postmodernity have an axe to grind against traditional values and Christianity, disregarding immemorial and time-proven values that ascertain common sense and practical results, late postmodern radicalism does not mind ‘taking out an eye in order to see another person blind.’ Scorched earth ideological radicalism makes late postmodernism exhaust itself in pangs of nihilism; much like a spoiled child eventually must learn to adjust to reality, or else grow up maladjusted and malcontented.

The effects of late postmodern nihilism prove that, circa 2025, late postmodernism’s destruction of the hierarchy of values is unsustainable. This is why we must refer to postmodernism as late postmodernity. As much as radical, late postmodern ideology, which is Marxist and/or Marxist-inspired, concerns itself with now trite and cliché notions of the people, its agenda is precisely the enslavement of the people to centralized, one-world rule. To achieve this end, late postmodernism must annihilate any semblance of the hierarchy of values that define the human person.

Late postmodernism has delivered man to dystopia. The problem with dystopia is that people are conditioned to accept it, or at least, get used to it. This conditioning of the human person, a form of vulgar behaviorism, is the heart of late postmodernity. One thing that late-postmodern dystopia is not, is organic.

 

Metaphysical Man

Human life is metaphysical.

Given man’s consciousness, ability for self-reflection, moral compass, capacity to reason and uncover essences through logical engagement with himself and reality, and poetic sensibility, human life demonstrates that it is metaphysical. Whether through reasoning or man’s innate ability to decipher and appropriate aspects of human reality, man reflects not for sport, but out of necessity—for survival. This entails that man must safeguard his being through diverse means, not least of which is self-reflection.

Metaphysical man finds it necessary to create, for one of the things that define the human person is creative fidelity, in light of the contingencies of human existence. This means the creation of science, art, and literature. A fundamental component of metaphysical man is contemplation of transcendence and the sublime. One manner of attaining to the latter is religious sentiment and belief, which along with reason, and man’s moral compass, serves as the foundation of morality.

The human person finds itself, as Ortega y Gasset suggests, shipwrecked in an existentially strange, even surreal, predicament. Posing the question of who we are as differentiated persons in a universe of frigid objectivity, man’s unique metaphysical condition is made viable through the degree of our existential capacity to engage with reality. There is nothing the slightest bit abstract or theoretical about self-reflection. Even the critics of man as a metaphysical being must recognize that their negation of this is itself a form of answering the question, what is man?

Any age that attempts to strip mankind of its metaphysical nature is a posivistic age that establishes and maintains power through social-engineering. Thus, the destruction of the human person, as the seat of subjectivity, seeks to create a hollow man, mere silhouettes that lack the capacity for self reflection. The absence of self reflection makes man a vacuous, zombie entity that can be conditioned at will by the retailers of an anti-metaphysical age.

 

A Non-Ideological Future Age

Only a non-ideological form of thinking can combat the Marxist ideology that has infiltrated all aspects of human life in late postmodernity. One reason that radical ideologues and nihilists are able to condition man through social-engineering in late-postmodernity is because man has been stripped of his metaphysical condition.

To combat the social-engineering agenda of a posivistic age, as is late-postmodernity, we must return to an anthropological rendition of man that cultivates the human person as a metaphysical being whose nature, thus essence, cannot be tampered with without destroying itself.

While late postmodernism has vanquished man as a metaphysical entity, it attempts to supplant human nature with a malleable, gutted being that only responds to the here-and-now.  Late postmodern man, to a great extent, even people who recognize late postmodernity as a nihilistic age, cannot shake off the moral/spiritual and metaphysical/existential shackles that our positivistic age has placed on them. Late postmodern nihilism has a stealthy way of spreading its talons and corrupting the unsuspecting, thus conditioning man to create aberrant forms of life.

 

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Pedro Blas González is Professor of Philosophy in Florida. He earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at DePaul University in 1995. Dr. González has published extensively on leading Spanish philosophers, such as Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno. His books have included Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay, Ortega’s ‘Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man, Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega’s Philosophy of Subjectivity. He also published a translation and introduction of José Ortega y Gasset’s last work to appear in English, “Medio siglo de Filosofia” (1951) in Philosophy Today Vol. 42 Issue 2 (Summer 1998). His most recent book is Philosophical Perspective on Cinema.

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