Jean Baudrillard
1929-2007 · Postmodernism · Prominent
Baudrillard was a French theorist of late capitalist culture, which he argued has gone hyperreal. A themed restaurant, a war watched on television, a map with no territory under it: copies have replaced the things they copy, and signs now point at other signs all the way down. The image has swallowed what it once stood for, he claimed, and he set the case out in Simulacra and Simulation.
Signature
The position Baudrillard is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Identity
- leans Changing
- Perception
- Symbolic Forms
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Constructed (25 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (25 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Opposition
- leans Sublation (17 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Baudrillard refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Other
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Other
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Social Invention
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Symbolic Forms
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Power-Knowledge
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Other
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Social Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Language
- False Consciousness
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Law
- Other
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Annihilation / Other
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Socially Constructed
What is human nature?