One may have noticed something distinct about the title of this essay, namely that I have enclosed the word “truth” in quotations. The purpose is to bring focus to the question of its status, not because the concept itself is in doubt, but because it appears, at least in many postmodern circles, to have undergone a process of erosion. I am of course speaking to the crisis of “truth” in postmodernism, and, subsequently, the crisis of metaphysics. This issue, however, is not confined to abstract, or, as I would describe much of it today, bad philosophy. It extends into practical concerns, including contemporary debates about misinformation, rising prominence of conspiratorial thinking, and the role and status of ‘fact” in popular discourse. These discussions are inseparable from our understanding of “truth.”
I recently read an article on Bruno Latour’s revision of his postmodern challenge against “scientific certainty”. The article cites that recent reconsiderations by Latour have formed in the context of growing unease with the development of things like post-truth culture. It was intriguing, nonetheless, to read these words in relation to such a staunch postmodern thinker. It is an interesting attempt at a reversal, from systemically attempting to undermine the foundations of scientific fact, such as in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), such that one might not even think of microbes in the way a seasoned microbiologist would conceive of as quite basic, but the greater purpose of realising this “sociological deconstruction” of science is a type of sociological relativism.
Much of this is well-known by now, and readers can form their own opinions about Latour’s attempt at a reversal. On the whole, I see it as a deeper reflection of postmodernism’s broader shortcomings—a philosophical movement that, in my view, lacks merit and often relies on pseudo-intellectual posturing. It tends to present itself as if built on solid principles, promising profound insights, but instead offers layers of convoluted theories, dressed in intellectually imposing language, and leading to radically far-reaching conclusions. As someone who engages broadly in philosophy and approached postmodernism with an open mind, I genuinely sought to understand its arguments. Ironically, this openness ultimately deepened my conviction that postmodernism is not the insightful response to modernity it claims to be. In fact, it’s telling that much of the classical critical philosophy that emerged from modernity—and even inspired early postmodern thinkers—would likely offer a scathing critique of postmodernism’s development. But I digress- perhaps this is a topic for another essay.
Although there are many whose “theory” may be focused upon, Latour’s “theory” is as good as any (here I am using quotation marks to bring directly into doubt the merit of the word, as used in the present context). The trouble I have with Latour’s position – and, I suspect, with postmodernism as a whole – is that it seems to lay the foundation not just for irrationality but for unreason itself: a wholesale rejection of reason as a guiding principle.
Why? It begins with a misguided rejection of the object. There is often a conflation between the scientific study of objects – for example, mathematical objects or the objects of study in what used to be called natural philosophy – and the social epistemology of object reductionism, which is often framed as a site of ethical violation. This conflation muddles what should be clear distinctions and, in my view, undercuts the integrity of both scientific and philosophical inquiry. For Latour – and, again, I think this is general enough to be said about the broader postmodern view, including much of second generation critical theory – natural epistemology and social epistemology seem to be awkwardly conflated.
In epistemological terms, the objective side of the subject-object relation is often rejected outright, without sufficient examination of the essential role the object plays in shaping and orienting the subject. In a manner of speaking, this leaves the subject unanchored in the world. And this is not a trivial oversight. The interaction between subject and object is central to what is often referred to as the philosophy of the subject—a topic deeply rooted in the history of philosophy. One finds discussions of this theme stretching from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Sartre, Adorno, and so on. Even prominent scientists who also engaged philosophically, like Hooke, Newton, and Einstein, to name only a few, have spoke directly on or have implicitly detailed a view of the subject, and thus of subjectivity, as related to the natural world. Indeed, in that it intersects epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and empiricism, philosophy of the subject remains one of the most enduring and widely explored problems in Western philosophical thought.
What I would say is that, analogous to the violation of subject-object, Latour’s “flat ontology” in which all entities—humans, non-humans, objects, and concepts—are treated symmetrically as “actors within networks” is identity thinking at its extreme, and it comes with the violation of other important relations. There can be no privileged category or ontological hierarchy. He completely flattens the otherwise rich relation between identity and non-identity, process and substance, concept-object. Hence, too, by analogy, society-nature and science-politics are flattened into some horizontal plane where everything gets conflated and becomes relative.
This is pure subjectivism at its finest. The subject, severed from the object, can no longer say anything meaningful about the world other than the sociological and epistemological relativism of identity tantamount to total non-identity, because otherwise there would be conceptual hierarchy. Indeed, it doesn’t take much for one to see why Latour’s emphasis on the social construction of scientific facts and his refusal to privilege scientific knowledge over other forms of knowledge have been accused of fostering such relativism. In We Have Never Been Modern, by portraying science as just another “network of associations,” Latour completely undermines the ability to differentiate between credible scientific claims and pseudoscience. Thus, Latour, in his rejection of grand narratives and by emphasising localised networks and fragmented associations, there can be no overarching social structure tying anything together – and, certainly, there can be no notion of objectivity. One can only image what he then believes of nature and of scientific methodology in describing the structure of natural systems.
Latour’s “theory” is such a wonderful example of postmodern ineptitude. In the history of philosophy, rich and meaningful discussion on identity – the way thought imposes categories, names, and definitions onto objects – and non-identity – or process, referring to the excess, the remainder, the aspect of the object not yet fully captured by conceptual thought – go back to ancient Greece. Exploration of these important relations have revealed so much about human knowledge. But Latour, representative of the postmodern vacuum absent of the rationally intelligible, would simply throw the baby out with the bath water. The postmodernist – and poststructuralist – inability to grapple with the irreducibility of objects and their conceptualisation, simply out of zeal seek instead to dissolve distinctions. Ironically, though, on my reading it would seem Latour ends up affirming identity thinking rather than escaping it – indeed, he epitomises identity thinking at its ideological maximum.
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For Latour, “the opposite of [social] relativism is totalitarianism” (square brackets mine). I take this to represent the general postmodern view. However, I’m not convinced that this is true – that social relativism is somehow “good” or anti-totalitarian. Saying so feels similar to asserting that diversity or pluralism is inherently good. These are not moral truths – they do not by themselves carry moral weight. They are concepts onto which one projects an external moral framework, which is not guaranteed to be “good”. The assumption that that relativism inherently prevents totalitarianism seems like a gross oversimplification, ignoring examples where relativistic or pluralistic frameworks have failed to prevent oppressive or authoritarian systems.
One could certainly argue pluralism has, in general, often fostered social stability and mutual respect in diverse societies, while rigid racial and cultural dogmatism has frequently led to exclusion or oppression. One could also argue that what Latour has in mind might not be that relativism guarantees anti-totalitarian outcomes, but that it creates conditions less hospitable to dogma and authoritarian control. However, in either case, these require much more of a nuanced, unbiased analysis than what Latour has proven capable.
It seems to me that the postmodern view is more of a social projection on metaphysics than an actual genuine statement about metaphysics. The same is true for history. I again think it comes down to the epistemological framework from which is constructing the “theory”. This is not about facts, or evidenced-based policy making, or even, in the mildest sense, grounding “theory” in some empirical foundation. This is because, as a framework, it only allows itself to have access to subjective truths, whatever those may be. It therefore seems to me to be much more about projecting an ideology, than about wanting to actually understand the world, social systems, and human behaviour.
The same seems true of Latour’s, and the general postmodern approach, to metaphysics. I struggle to see how it is logically sufficient to extend social critique into metaphysics. The fact that the social world produces patterns of dogma—patterns that may or may not create conditions for tyranny—does not imply that the very notion of objective reality and truth is inherently despotic. To conflate the two seems deeply misguided.
Moreover, the idea that the concepts of fact and truth are easily manipulated or epistemologically convoluted in social contexts, and that this experience can then be extrapolated into a general metaphysical claim—where truth as a whole becomes subject to Foucault’s notion of power, for example—strikes me as grossly simplistic.
Social truth contexts and scientific truth contexts, I would argue, are fundamentally different; they do not share the same epistemological grounding. While overlaps can occur in social science, conflating these epistemologies absent a clear scientific foundation is a profound error.
But this is precisely what seems to happen in postmodernism. In the postmodern view, the object, severed from the subject, becomes epistemologically and methodologically inaccessible. What begins as a philosophy of subjectivism, motivated by the desire to do justice to the subject, ultimately ends up violating it.
Postmodern philosophy, rejecting any claims of objective reality, attempts to respond to modernity by arguing for the primacy of the subject. In some instances, it even suggests that human beings are prisoners of language, trapped within socially constructed systems of meaning. From this perspective, facts are not discovered but entirely constructed. Through the lens of such cultural theory, objects do not exist in any meaningful sense, since facts do not exist “out there,” waiting to be uncovered. This is the quintessential postmodern trope—the very essence of postmodern philosophy. At its core, it seems less like a profound philosophical stance and more like fashionable nonsense.
Instead of working through the subject-object relation, Latour seems to dismiss the idea altogether and instead substitute a different antinomy: human disinvestment-investment. What’s striking about this distinction, from what I can tell, is that it effectively sidesteps any substantive discussion about objects in-themselves, including the objects of myth. In the broader context, as this substitution creates fertile ground for relativism, exceptionalism, and even mysticism to thrive, “truth” is not only deconstructed entirely on some questionable metaphysical level – without any systematic distinction between different types of truth – but the very notion of reason is gradually eroded. This, it seems, lies at the heart of the conflict between postmodernism and the Enlightenment. And while postmodernism positions itself within the tradition of critical theory – a tradition originally aimed at defending Enlightenment ideals – I fail to see how postmodernism possesses the conceptual tools necessary to meaningfully address the problems of knowledge it seeks to evoke.
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On the contrary, I believe it is philosophically self-evident that the mediation between subject and object, process and substance, is fundamental. I think it is a lesson of science, and much of Western philosophy, that the interaction between concepts and objects, the subject and the world, is always mediated. In matters of epistemology and the philosophy of science, I would argue that it is on the basis of this mediation, to whatever extent, that allows for the scientific method in the first place. The success of scientific epistemology – what makes scientific methodology the most reliable tool at our disposal -lies in its capacity to approximate a rational conception of identity and non-identity.
What, then, of objects? Completely contrary to Latour and the average postmodern philosopher I’ve come across that speak on such matters, the idea that natural scientists reduce everything in the world to static objects seems to me an overstated myth. The objects of science might be plants in botany, fundamental particles in physics, or distant phenomena in astronomy. An object can also be a system. In most cases, the object of scientific study requires persistent investigation and refinement. Ask any botanist, physicist, or medical scientist, and they will affirm this that it by constant encircling, study, and observation that one learns about natural phenomena. This persistence is not only due to the complexity of nature and natural systems but also because, in practice, the phenomena themselves rarely cease to reveal new and interesting insights about their underlying identity and nature.
The pure subjectivism of the subject, severed from the object, cannot even enter into the realm of recognition of this reflection.
