This text may be freely used, with attribution, for non-profit purposes. As with most of my course pages, this document is open to change. This is not an exhaustive description. Life just is. We no longer look for a pattern.
Postmodernism goes different directions here.
This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of rationalism and of the ideology of the Enlightenment. This emphasis on the physicality of our being leads in several directions, including an emphasis on chance and contingency as fundamental conditions of our being and a positing of aesthetics rather than rationalism as guide to truth, hence ultimately as the ground for ethics.