Final answer:
Postmodernists critique the Enlightenment project broadly, challenging its rationalist ideals across French, British, and German traditions. They promote the idea of multiple realities and the constructed nature of truth, abandoning the pursuit of objective, universal truths for a focus on individual perspective and context.
Step-by-step explanation:
Postmodernism, as an intellectual movement critical of the Enlightenment project, broadly challenges the ideas stemming from the European Enlightenment. Specifically, postmodern thinkers critique not just a single national tradition but the entire rationalist project that is at the heart of the Enlightenment from any of the major centers, be it French, British, or German. They reject the idea that human reason can achieve ultimate truths. For example, French post-structuralists like Foucault and Derrida question the structured way of understanding the world and place emphasis on how power and knowledge frameworks shape our perspective.
Post-structuralism further develops this by suggesting that language plays a vital role in our apprehension of meaning and reality, thus asserting that there are no absolute truths. Critical theory, another derivative of postmodern thought, adapts Hegelian dialectics to a more contextually aware framework, as seen in Habermas's notion of communicative action. Postmodern philosophy is characterized by its skepticism towards meta-narratives and grand theories that claim universal validity, promoting instead a view that reality and truth are constructed from individual perspectives and experiences.
The Enlightenment is commonly associated with the promotion of reason, progress, and universal truths, and postmodern criticism extends to the Enlightenment's conceptualization and valorization of knowledge, reason, and objective reality, irrespective of the geographical variant.