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Pluralistic humanism has run its course. What may have encouraged individual growth and intellectual diversity for some components of the culture is now producing a laissez-faire attitude that truncates the debate over cultural values through nonjudgmental or" undecidability" postures. 1 As Gerald Graff has trenchantly suggested," real disagreement has become rare, for the multiplicity of tongues leads not to confrontation but to incommensurability and talking at crosspurposes"(190). Pluralism has never included everybody, but has always established the parameters of acceptable difference:" our cultural discourse is a totality which does not contain everything—did not, for example, contain women, who were decisively not only the relative creatures the culture had imagined them to be"(Tarantelli, 180; see Marini, 150).

The various cataclysms of the twentieth century that dethroned the idealist humanism that posited the linear progression of western civilization did not dethrone the anthropocentrism of religious and secular humanism, nor did they disrupt the androcentrism that arises from the patriarchal base of Western culture. Similarly, the theoretical projects that arose to challenge humanism have produced an energetic skepticism and a shifting of foci of theoretical and critical attention, but they have not promoted a worldview that enables any kind of affirmation of new values or a praxis that enables the application of such values in the physical world. In marked contrast to critical maladies of enervated humanism, solipsistic skepticism, and paralytic undecidability, a triad of (re) perceptions has appeared, which, if integrated, can lead toward an …