Methodological guidelines of postmodernism: from poetic thinking to poetic rationality

Abstract

The object of this article is identification of the key methodological principles of postmodernism (deconstruction, rhizomaticity, nomadic thought etc.), which affect the formation of poetic thinking and poetic rationality, provision of substantial features of these phenomena. The focus of postmodern attention is an allegorically rich text that is read through the rest of the text. Postmodernism involves poetic thinking to the analysis of reality. Poetic thinking is a way of thinking based on the presumption of the principal understatement and metaphoricity. Poetic rationality is also a way of new understanding of the person and the world. Through poetic rationality the person is considered as included in the cosmic being, overcomes division of soul and body, speculative and sensory, physical and mental. By means of poetic rationality, new forms of the authenticity of knowledge, aesthetic understanding of the truth are searched for. The truth is seen as an ontological quality of the person, as the truth of its own existence and it is implemented in the desire. According to poetic rationality, the person becomes the author and creator of its own relationship with the world. That is why the value-willed attitude to life is valued more that moral-willed qualities. Postmodernism offers its own type of rationality, different from the previous ones, that explains the world and person’s attitude to the world through the intuitive, emotional, valuable, metaphorical, personal, poetic. In postmodernism there is a slow transition from poetic thinking to poetic rationality, which revives the mythic and poetic attitude to the world, where the person is in full harmony with nature and is included in the cosmic being. One of the theoretical foundations for the emergence of poetic rationality is metaphoricity of the thinking. Not only the use of the metaphor, but also its interpretation is a manifestation of creativity, imagination and fantasy allowing for the creation of a new look, new approach to any problem. Postmodernism in the poetic rationality manifests its main methodological guidelines: deconstructive and nomadological methodologies, rhizomaticity in the understanding of reality, pluralistic vision of the world, discursivity and intertextuality.