Tradition and Truth in Postmodern Times: Everyday Life, the Academy, and Psychoanalysis

What the terms tradition and truth convey is far from simple and merits being examined in detail. They coincide in the ideal model of the rural, tradition-bound community, exemplified by Ferdinand Toennies's Gemeinschaft, where relationships are understood as a totality living in intimate coexistence. This is counterpoised to urban society as Gesellschaft, where individuals are essentially separate and isolated in spite of all uniting factors, and relationships take the nature of self-interested exchanges. Truth-as-affect in the Gemeinschaft can be compared to truth-as-transaction characterizing the Gesellschaft.

The Romantic movement brought into general use the term unconscious and the priority of the dream as privileged knowledge, as well as notions of truth-as-self-expression and truth-as-self-assertion. These latter notions differ sharply from the Freudian idea of truth-as-enquiry, and also from the Cartesian assumption of truth-as-certainty that plagues most current epistemologies. In late Romanticism, especially in Nietzsche, the primacy of the festival leads to an idea of truth-as-histrionics, which provides the link to the postmodernist abrogation of the idea of truth and finds ready expression in media culture. Finally, the impact of such developments is investigated by way of two clinical vignettes.