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Universal Values and the Justification of Internationality

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Universal Values and the Justification of Internationality
Universal Values and the Justification of Internationality
By Shaya Aldosari

Introduction: Does cultural plurality deny any possibility of universal morality? Universality means, among many definitions, internationality. It also means the eternal validity of human ethics. Before the so-called postmodernism, humanity used to believe in transcendental values and ideas that hold good of everyone1, that is, every ‘animal rationale’ which according to Aristotle is the only animal who is capable of reason. Rationality is not merely a feature of cognition, it is also of practical usage: “Virtue […] is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it 2.” Rationality was, then, the basis of every human action. It also had brought about all universal categories regarding knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, theology,..etc. When Reason breaks down, they all would do so. Thus exactly what postmodernism contributes, i.e., it destroys the universal validity of Reason. In other words, it refutes the absolute normativity of reason. That might explain the well-known definition which Jean-François Lyotard gives to postmodernism: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives3.” The breakdown of absolute belief in reason, progression, God, metaphysics, and so on, which can be described under the rubric metanarratives, led towards slogans such as the death of man with Louis Althusser, the death of author with Roland Barthes, the death of Humanism with Heidegger, and the end of history with Francis Fukuyama. The American- Egyptian critic Ihab Hassan In his book The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature produces a list of differences between modernism and postmodernism as follows: Modernism
Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism
Pataphysics/Dadaism
Form



Cited: Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by Strachey, James. (Norton Company. New York. 1962) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time. Translated by Macquarrie, John & Robinson, Edward (Blackwell UK & USA 2001) Descartes, René, Discourse on Method and Meditations Hassan, Ihab Habib, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin 1982) Said, Edward, Representations of the Intellectual: the Reith lectures Nussbaum, Martha, Women and Human Development. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, .. 2000) Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Edited by John Drummond and others Frege, Gottlob, The Frege Reader. Edited by Beaney, Michael. ( Blackwell, UK, USA 1997) Husserl, Edmund, The Shorter Logical Investigations Husserl, Edmund, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. Translated by Kersten, F. (Kluwer Boston, USA 1983) Al-Farabi, Two Philosophical Treatises Hirsch, E. D., Validity in Interpretation. ( Yale University Press, New Haven, London 1967) Al-ghathami, A., Wmoen and Language Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method. Translated by Weinsheimer, Joel and Marshall, Donald G. ( Continuum, New York, London 2004) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Reason in History Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1983) Al-Jurjani, Ali, Definitions, An Arabic Edition

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