“Whither is God,” he [the madman] cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? . . . Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? . . . Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? . . . I come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man.”
IN A BRILLIANT PARABLE written over a hundred years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche saw it all.1 A culture cannot lose its philosophic center without the most serious of consequences, not just to the philosophy on which it was based but to the whole superstructure of culture and even each person’s notion of who he or she is. Everything changes. When God dies, both the substance and the value of everything else die too.
The acknowledgment of the death of God is the beginning of postmodern wisdom. It is also the end of postmodern wisdom. For, in the final analysis, postmodernism is not “post” anything; it is the last move of the modern, the result of the modern taking its own commitments seriously and seeing that they fail to stand the test of analysis.2
As I commented earlier, Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong.3 For a naturalist it is the examined life that is not worth living. Now, over a hundred years after Nietzsche, the news of God’s death has finally reached “the ears of man.” The horizon defining the limits of our world has been wiped away. The center holding us in place has vanished. Our age, which more and more is coming to be called postmodern, finds itself afloat in a pluralism of perspectives, a plethora of philosophical possibilities, but with no dominant notion of where to go or how to get there. A near future of cultural anarchy seems inevitable.
Enough gloomy talk. This book is supposed to be a catalog of worldviews. Catalogs should be dispassionate. Get a grip!
THE PROBLEM OF DEFINITION
Getting a grip is hard. How does one define the indefinite? Certainly the term that now fits is postmodernism.4 But what does it mean? It is used by so many people to focus on so many different facets of cultural and intellectual life that its meaning is often fuzzy, not just around the edges but at the center as well (as if a term defining a worldview without a center could have a center).
Though literature professor Ihab Hassan was one of the first scholars to write about postmodernism, he confesses, “I know less about postmodernism today than I did thirty years ago [1971], when I began to write about it. . . . [Still today] no consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means.” After being locked in a room for a week of discussion, he says, the major scholars writing about it would reach no agreement, “but a trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.” Still he notes some common elements: “fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp.”5 Mark Lilla makes a similar claim about “academic postmodernism,” describing it as “a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines like cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies, and postcolonial theory.” It “borrows freely,” he says, “from a host of works (in translation) by such scholars as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard.” Then he adds, “Given the impossibility of imposing logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these, postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument.”6
The term postmodernism is usually thought to have arisen first in reference to architecture, as architects moved away from unadorned, impersonal boxes of concrete, glass, and steel to complex shapes and forms, drawing motifs from the past without regard to their original purpose or function.7 But when French sociologist Jean-François Lyotard used the term postmodern to signal a shift in cultural legitimation, the term became a key word in cultural analysis.
In short, Lyotard defined postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”8 No longer is there a single story, a metanarrative (in our terms a worldview), that holds Western culture together. It is not just that there have long been many stories, each of which gives its binding power to the social group that takes it as its own. The naturalists have their story, the pantheists theirs, the Christians theirs, ad infinitum. With postmodernism no story can have any more credibility than any other. All stories are equally valid, being so validated by the community that lives by them.
I cannot catalog postmodernism as I have earlier worldviews. Even more than existentialism, postmodernism is both more than and less than a worldview. In major part this is due to the origin of the term within the discipline of sociology rather than philosophy. Sociologists are concerned with how people behave as part of society. They do not use categories of being (metaphysics) or knowing (epistemology) or ethics; that is, they do not ask what is true about reality, but how notions of being and knowing and ethics arise and function in society. To understand postmodernism, therefore, we will have to ask and answer not simply the eight worldview questions posed in chapter one but a question about the questions themselves.
But first let us get one thing clear. Postmodernism has influenced religious understanding, including that characteristic of Christian theism, but it accepts the foundation at the heart of naturalism: Matter exists eternally; God does not exist.
THE FIRST THING: BEING TO KNOWING
I have apologized before for approaching an explanation by first making a summary statement that seems opaque. I will do so again in hope that the ensuing explanation will clarify the vision.
1. A Worldview Question About Worldview Questions: The first question postmodernism addresses is not what is there or how we know what is there but how language functions to construct meaning. In other words, there has been a shift in “first things” from being to knowing to constructing meaning.
Two major shifts in perspective have occurred over the past centuries: one is the move from the “premodern” (characteristic of the Western world prior to the seventeenth century) to the “modern” (beginning with Descartes); the second is the move from the “modern” to the “postmodern” (whose first major exponent was Friedrich Nietzsche in the last quarter of the nineteenth century). Take the following as an example of these shifts, others of which we will see below. There has been a movement from (1) a “premodern” concern for a just society based on revelation from a just God to (2) a “modern” attempt to use universal reason as the guide to justice to (3) a “postmodern” despair of any universal standard for justice. Society then moves from medieval hierarchy to Enlightenment, universal democracy to postmodern privileging of the self-defining values of individuals and communities. This is a formula for anarchy. It is hard to think of this as progress, but then progress is a “modern” notion. The “premodern” Christian had too clear a view of human depravity, and the “postmodern” mind has too dim a view of any universal truth.
One of the ways to understand these shifts is to reflect on our reflecting.9 For us that means to identify the preconceptions on which this book’s analysis so far has been based.
Some readers of earlier editions of this book have challenged the way I posed the worldview questions of chapter one. Their concern is whether a set of seven questions (now eight) commits this particular worldview analysis to the confines of one worldview.10 This is an astute observation.
The heart of the issue is the order of the questions. I placed question 1 (What is prime reality—the really real?) first for a good reason. I take metaphysics (or ontology) to be the foundation of all worldviews. Being is prior to knowing. If nothing is there, then nothing can be known. So, in defining theism, I began with God, defined as infinite and personal (triune), transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign, and good.11 All else in theism stems from this commitment to a specific notion of what is fundamentally there. Question 2 asked about the nature of the external universe, and questions 3 and 4 about the nature of human beings and their destiny. It was not till question 5 that “how we know” was dealt with. Then came ethics—how we should behave—in question 6, and finally an overall question about our human historical significance in question 7. Now question 8 focuses on the end toward which we live our lives.
The fact is that this order of questions is premodern in general and theistic in particular. Theism puts being before knowing. Enlightenment naturalism puts knowing before being.12 The shift came early in the seventeenth century with Descartes. Descartes is seen as the first modern philosopher, not least because he was more interested in how one knows than in what one knows. For his philosophic approach—and the approach of almost every major philosopher from his time on—knowing is prior to being.13 Descartes was not rejecting the theistic notion of God. Quite the contrary, he held a notion of God essentially the same as that of Thomas Aquinas.14 But his interest in being certain about this notion had major consequences.
Descartes’s approach to knowing is legendary. He wanted to be completely certain that what he thought he knew was actually true. So he took the method of doubt almost (but not quite) to the limit. What can I doubt? he asked himself in the quietness of his study. He concluded that he could doubt everything except that he was doubting (doubting is thinking). So he concluded, “I think, therefore I am.” He then further considered whether there was anything other than his own existence that he could be sure of. After a series of arguments he eventually wrote,
I do not now admit anything which is not necessarily true: to speak accurately, I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing and really exist; what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks.15
Here is the essence of the modern: the autonomy of human reason. One individual, Descartes, declares on the foundation of his own judgment that he knows with philosophic certainty that he is a thinking thing. From this foundation Descartes goes on to argue that God necessarily exists and that reality is dual—matter and mind.
The notion of the autonomy of human reason liberated the human mind from the authority of the ancients. Scientific and technical progress came not from notions revealed in Scripture but from the assumption that human reason could indeed find its way toward the truth. Such knowledge was power, instrumental power, power over nature, power to get us what we want. In science, the results were stellar. In philosophy, however, the move from being to knowing, from the primacy of God who creates and reveals to the primacy of the self that knows on its own, was fatal. It both set the agenda for modern philosophy from Locke to Kant and sparked as well the recoil of postmodern philosophy from Nietzsche to Derrida as humanistic optimism flirted with despair.
THE FIRST THING: KNOWING TO MEANING
As knowing became the focus, knowing how one knew became a major issue. David Hume (1711–1776) cast into doubt the existence of cause and effect as objective reality. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to answer Hume but ended by both exalting the knowing self to the position of “creating” reality and removing from it the ability to know things in themselves.16 Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and, for a brief period of optimism, the German Idealists exalted the human self to almost divine dimensions. Finally Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) delivered the coup de grâce to the modern self-confidence that what we think we know we really do know. Apart from New Age enthusiasts, today there is little hope that any optimism about the human condition can be sustained.
The larger story of modern philosophy can be read in many places.17 We are concerned with a single but central theme: the shift from knowing to meaning. It is in Nietzsche that this is first most evident. Nietzsche completed what Descartes started; he took doubt beyond Descartes, rejecting his argument for certitude about the existence of the self.
Look again at Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” What if it is the thinking that creates or causes the I rather than the I that creates or causes the thinking? What if the activity of thinking does not require an agent but produces only the illusion of an agent?18 What if there is only thinking—a fluid flow of language without discernible origin, determinate meaning, or direction?
Regardless of whether Nietzsche’s specific critique is a fair analysis of Descartes’s search for certitude, Nietzsche’s more radical doubt does radical damage to human certitude. After Nietzsche, no thoughtful person should have been able to secure easy confidence in the objectivity of human reason. But as Nietzsche pointed out in the parable of the madman, it takes a long time for ideas to sink into culture. The madman says he came too soon. The deed had been done, but in the 1880s the news was still on the way. By the 1950s and 1960s it was beginning to be heard in the voices of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. By the 1990s everyone in the Western world and much of the East came to see that confidence in human reason is almost dead. True, most philosophers have not capitulated, not perhaps because they have the most to lose but because they have everything to lose.19 Many scientists and technologists continue in their confidence that science gives sure knowledge, but they seem to be the last part of the intellectual world to do so.
THE DEATH OF TRUTH
Knowing itself comes under fire, especially the notion that there are any truths of correspondence. Conceptual relativism, discussed in the previous chapter, now serves not just religious experience but all aspects of reality.20
2. Worldview Question 5 (knowledge): The truth about the reality itself is forever hidden from us. All we can do is tell stories.
If we begin with the seemingly knowing self and follow the implications, we are left first with a solitary self (solipsism) and then not even that. Literary theorist Edward Said put it this way:
No longer a coherent cogito [thinking thing], man now inhabits the interstices, “the vacant interstellar spaces,” not as an object, still less as a subject; rather man is the structure, the generality of relationships among those words and ideas that we call the humanistic, as opposed to the pure, or natural sciences.21
Of course, we still tell personal stories about our lives, where we have been and where we intend to go. And we tell larger stories too. Some of us—say, Christians, optimistic naturalists, secular humanists, chemists, for example—may cling to our metanarratives, but they are just wishful thinking. The language we use to tell our stories, as Nietzsche put it, is “a mobile army of metaphors.”
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”
We have a continued “urge for truth,” but now “to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.”22
Those who hang on to their metanarrative as if it really were the master story, encompassing or explaining all other stories, are under an illusion. We can have meaning, for all these stories are more or less meaningful, but we cannot have truth.
According to postmodernism, nothing we think we know can be checked against reality as such. Now we must not think that postmodernists believe that there is no reality outside our language. We are not to abandon our ordinary perception that a bus is coming down the street and we’d better get out of the way. Our language about there being a “bus” that is “coming down” a “street” is useful. It has survival value! But apart from our linguistic systems we can know nothing. All language is a human construct. We can’t determine the “truthfulness” of the language, only the usefulness.
This basic notion has many varied expressions, depending on the postmodern theorist. Richard Rorty will serve as an illustration.
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. . . . Languages are made rather than found, and . . . truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences.23
Truth is whatever we can get our colleagues (our community) to agree to. If we can get them to use our language, then—like the “strong poets” Moses, Jesus, Plato, Freud—our story is as true as any story will ever get.
Of course if our story doesn’t “work,” if we fail to have a language that allows us safely to “cross a street when a bus is coming,” few of us will be around long in a modern city. Some languages will pass out of existence because the language framers did not survive long enough to have children to whom they taught it. But since many languages—from Hindi to Mandarin to Swahili—keep us alive in the cities, they have all the truth value needed to keep us from being hit by a bus.
Philosopher Willard Quine compares the language of modern science to Homer’s stories of the gods:
For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural deposits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.24
In short, the only kind of truth there is is pragmatic truth. There is no truth of correspondence.
It is easy to see how this notion, when applied to religious claims, triggers a radical relativism.25 No one’s story is truer than anyone else’s story. Does the story work? That is, does it satisfy the teller? Does it get you what you want—say, a sense of belonging, a peace with yourself, a hope for the future, a way to order your life? It’s all one can ask.
There is as well a problem with the stories themselves. How is the language in which they are expressed to be interpreted? Within the deconstructionist segment of postmodernism, the stories we tell ourselves and others do not have a determinate meaning. They are subject to normal misreading through lack of intelligence or basic background, or difference between the writer’s or speaker’s background or context and that of the reader or listener. There is an inherent indeterminacy to language itself. Stories all contain the seeds of self-contradiction.26 Texts and statements mean only what readers take them to mean.27
So in postmodernism there is a movement from (1) the Christian “premodern” notion of a revealed determinate metanarrative to (2) the “modern” notion of the autonomy of human reason with access to truth of correspondence to (3) the “postmodern” notion that we create truth as we construct languages that serve our purposes, though these very languages deconstruct upon analysis.
3. Worldview Question 3 (human beings): Stories give communities their cohesive character.
If, then, claims to truth are not seen as the way things really are, if all we have are humanly constructed stories that we believe and tell, total anarchy is not necessarily the result. This is true for two reasons. First, people believe these stories to be true, so they function in society as if they were true. Second, groups of people believe the same basic story, and the result is more or less stable communities. Communities begin to fall apart when different people within them believe substantially different stories.
Christians, for example, believe that God is triune. The postmodernist may say that this story cannot be known to accord with reality, but a Christian thinks it does anyway. A naturalist really believes that “the cosmos is all there is,” regardless of how the postmodernist may explain that this belief cannot in principle or practice be substantiated. One might say, too, that a postmodernist really believes that this explanation is true, though if it is, then it can’t really be true (but this anticipates the critique of postmodernism that follows below). In any case, stories have great social binding power; they make communities out of otherwise disparate bunches of people.28 The result is that though in postmodernism there is an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard), in every culture there is a sufficiently agreed upon story that acts as a metanarrative. So much is this so that these stories, acting as metanarratives, mask a play for power by those in any society who control the details and the propagation of the story.
LANGUAGE AS POWER
The shift is now complete: from being to knowing to meaning. But the implications keep piling up.
4. Worldview Questions 5 (knowledge) and 6 (ethics): All narratives mask a play for power. Any one narrative used as a metanarrative is oppressive.
“Knowledge is power,” Francis Bacon said in a peculiarly prophetic moment. He was right; “modern” scientific knowledge has demonstrated its power for three centuries. With postmodernism, however, the situation is reversed. There is no purely objective knowledge, no truth of correspondence. Instead there are only stories, stories that, when they are believed, give the storyteller power over others.
Several major postmodern theorists, notably Michel Foucault, emphasize this relationship. Any story but one’s own is oppressive. Every modern society, for example, defines “madness” such that those who fall into that category are put out of the way of the rest of society. Since there is no way to know what madness as such really is, all we have are our definitions.29 To reject oppression is to reject all the stories society tells us. This, of course, is anarchy, and this, as we will see, Foucault accepts.
Here then we can trace a movement from (1) a “premodern” acceptance of a metanarrative written by God and revealed in Scripture to (2) a “modern” metanarrative of universal reason yielding truth about reality to (3) a “postmodern” reduction of all metanarratives to power plays.
THE DEATH OF THE SUBSTANTIAL SELF
The question of human identity is thousands of years old. “What is mankind?” the psalmist asked. Created “a little lower than the angels and crowned . . . with glory and honor,” came the answer (Psalm 8:4-5).30 But not in postmodernism.
5. Worldview Question 3 (human beings): There is no substantial self. Human beings make themselves who they are by the languages they construct about themselves.
If this sounds like existentialism, that’s because existentialism is a step in the postmodern direction. Sartre said, “Existence precedes essence.”31 We make ourselves by what we choose to do. The I is an activity. The postmodern pundit says, “We are only what we describe ourselves to be.” The I is not a substance, not even an activity, but a floating construct dependent on the language it uses. If we are “strong poets,” we create new ways of speaking or modify the language of our society. Freud, for example, was a strong poet. He got a whole society to talk about human reality in terms like “the Oedipus complex” or the “id, the ego and the superego.”32 Jung created the “collective unconscious.” There is no way to know whether any of these “things” exist. But we use the language to describe ourselves, and that becomes the truth.
Foucault claims that we are now realizing that “humanity” is nothing more than a fiction composed by the modern human sciences. . . . The self is no longer viewed as the ultimate source and ground for language; to the contrary, we are now coming to see that the self is constituted in and through language.33
In postmodernism the self is indeed a slippery concept. For Nietzsche the only self worth living was the self of the Übermensch, the Overman (sometimes misleadingly translated “Superman”), the one who has risen above the conventional herd and has fashioned himself. Thus Spake Zarathustra is the voice of such a “man beyond man.” But few can do this. Most of us have our selves constructed by the conventional language of our age and society.
So again there is a shift from (1) the “premodern” theistic notion that human beings are dignified by being created in the image of God to (2) the “modern” notion that human beings are the product of their DNA template, which itself is the result of unplanned evolution based on chance mutations and the survival of the fittest, to (3) the “postmodern” notion of an insubstantial self constructed by the language it uses to describe itself.
BEING GOOD WITHOUT GOD
Postmodernism follows the route taken by naturalism and existentialism, but with a linguistic twist.
6. Worldview Question 6 (morality): Morality, like knowledge, is a linguistic construct. Social good is whatever society takes it to be.
There is little reason to elaborate on this notion. On the one hand, it is a postmodern version of a much older cultural relativism.34 On the other hand, it is the ethical extension of the notion that truth is what we decide it is. Rorty’s comment will serve to show that this position is not necessarily a happy one for people of what we normally call goodwill:
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.35
This means, he admits, that if some future society decides that fascism is what it wants, a liberal democrat or anyone else is without appeal. So there is no appeal to a higher good outside the human family. One is left with a radical ethical relativism. The good is whatever those who wield the power in society choose to make it. If a person is happy with how society draws its ethical lines, then individual freedom remains. But what if an individual refuses to speak the ethical language of their community?
Take Foucault, in many ways the most radical anarchist of all the major postmodern theorists. For him the greatest good is an individual’s freedom to maximize pleasure.36 Foucault is so fearful that “society constitutes a conspiracy to stifle one’s own longings for self-expression” that “he agonizes profoundly over the question of whether rape should be regulated by penal justice.” For him, writes Ronald Beiner, “law = repression; decriminalization = freedom.”37 Postmodernism can make no normative judgment about such a view. It can only observe and comment: so much the worse for those who find themselves oppressed by the majority.
Even value in literature is seen as the creation of the reader. It is now a common belief, writes Kevin J. H. Dettmar, “that artistic value is not transcendent but contingent: that value resides not strictly within a text, but in a complex interaction between what a text says and does, and what the reader wants and needs.”38
Again we see the shift from (1) the “premodern” theistic ethics based on the character of a transcendent God who is good and has revealed that goodness to us to (2) the “modern” ethics based on a notion of universal human reason and experience and the human ability to discern objective right from wrong to (3) the “postmodern” notion that morality is the multiplicity of languages used to distinguish right from wrong. Table 9.1 summarizes the historical shifts from premodern to postmodern.
POSTMODERNISM’S CUTTING EDGE
7. Worldview Questions 7 (history) and 8 (core commitments): Postmodernism is in flux, as is postmodernism’s take on the significance of human history, including its own history. This means that the core commitments of many postmodernists are in flux as well. Postmodernists, in short, are committed to an endless stream of shifting “whatevers.”
Given the six previous characteristics of postmodernism, it is easy to see why it is always in flux. As Lyotard says, “All that has been received, if only yesterday . . . must be suspected. . . . A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”39 The story of postmodernism’s development is too long to be told here. I can only offer a few short episodes, told, as any postmodern would point out, from one perspective—my own.
Table 9.1. Summary of historical shifts, premodern to postmodern
PREMODERN | MODERN | POSTMODERN |
Concern for a just society based on revelation from a just God | Universal reason as a guide to justice | Despair of any universal standard for justice |
A revealed, determinate metanarrative | Autonomous human reason with access to truth of correspondence | Truth created through language constructed to serve a particular community. Nevertheless, these languages deconstruct upon analysis. |
Acceptance of metanarrative revealed by God through Scripture | A metanarrative of universal reason yielding truth about reality | A reduction of all metanarratives to power plays |
Human beings dignified by being created in the image of God | Human beings are the product of their DNA, which is the result of unplanned evolution of chance mutations and survival of the fittest | An insubstantial self constructed by the language used to describe itself |
Morality based on the character of a transcendent God who is good and who has revealed that goodness to us | Morality based on a notion of universal human reason and experience, assuming the human ability to discern objective right from wrong | Morality is the multiplicity of languages used to distinguish right from wrong |
In the Middle Ages, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Enlightenment, philosophy, and especially science, became the leading edge of intellectual cultural change. In the postmodern age, literary theory once led the way.
To anyone who did graduate work in English in the early 1960s this move seems both sudden and surprising. But in the 1960s literary theory began to become both sophisticated and culturally relevant.40 While scientists continued to do what they had done for over a hundred years and philosophers trained their focus on smaller and smaller matters of analytic philosophy, a new mode of thinking about thinking emerged and quickly evolved. A kind of Precambrian burst of new ideas fired the imagination of backwater English departments, whose younger scholars did not just move into the mainstream but became the mainstream.
The babbling brooks of Marx and Freud fed into the sedate pools of Southern gentlemanly New Criticism and historical criticism, stirring the waters. Then fresh springs from anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), sociology (Foucault, Lyotard), feminism (Kate Millet, Elaine Showalter), and linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) came with such force that the eddies of literary study became the mainstream of intellectual life. Scholars like Jacques Derrida (deconstruction) and Stanley Fish (reader response) became hot on campus. Literary critics became intellectual celebrities. “The hunger for social status has always seemed to me more pronounced in English professors than in other academics,” charges literature professor Mark Krupnick. The postmodernist baby boomers have won, he says. “Now there are fewer clashes in the English departments because nearly everyone is a theorist or cultural-studies specialist.”41
Nonetheless, some backlash has ensued. The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), what some would call a retrograde movement founded and dominated by older scholars, began forming in 1991, led by John M. Ellis, whose own Against Deconstruction is a sharp critique of Derrida’s work, among others.42 This organization is still active in its emphasis on the traditional study of literature as “literature,” not as linguistics, politics, or an instrument of social change. Ilan Stavans even harks back to Matthew Arnold, who defined literary criticism as “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”43 Perhaps of even more interest is the automatic backlash that comes when postmodern scholars themselves are subjected to postmodern critique. Gender, political, and psychological causes are now being found or speculated to account for their theories. The snake appears to be swallowing its own tail.44
Finally I note one rather bizarre twist. Daniel Barash and Nanelle Barash suggest a literary approach that is at once postmodern in that it is new (as far as I know) and retrograde—a return to scientific modernity. They suggest that the theory of biological evolution be the “organizing principle” of literary criticism. “Literature does not so much construct an arbitrary array of disconnected imaginings as it reflects the interaction (whether actual or imagined) of living organisms with the world in which they evolved and to which they are adapted.”45 Four years later, D. T. Max outlines the work of a small cadre of scholars devoted to literary Darwinism. Heartily promoted by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, they are developing a variety of mostly speculative hypotheses they hope may be confirmed by what they describe as a scientifically conducted analysis of literary texts.46 Both traditional and postmodern scholars are highly dubious. But proponents such as Jonathan Gottschall are euphoric with expectation:
If we literary scholars can summon the courage and humility to do so, the potential benefits will reverberate far beyond our field. We can generate more reliable and durable knowledge about art and culture. We can reawaken a long-dormant spirit of intellectual adventure. We can help spur a process whereby not just literature, but the larger field of the humanities recover some of the intellectual momentum and “market share” they have lost to the sciences. And we can rejoin the oldest, and still the premier, quest of all the disciplines: to better understand human nature.47
In any case, as literary study has in general backed off from some of its wilder irrational theorizing, there are hundreds of graduate students of English literature who have been schooled in these once cutting-edge theories and have brought them into the undergraduate classroom. Even if fifteen years ago there was a discernible backlash, these approaches will have a long-term effect.48 Moreover, Jeffrey J. Williams has recently detected a return to interest in postmodern literary theory of thirty years ago. Today’s literary theory, he says, is in a “holding pattern”; it is an “eclectic mix” that is “memorializing the past.”49
The cutting edge is of course always moving. Postmodern core commitments are ephemeral. Today’s hot intellectual ploy is tomorrow’s forgotten foolishness. And what’s next is up for grabs. For one thing the whole postmodern movement may be in trouble. As we shall see, its internal contradictions are almost as rife as those in New Age thought. But then, if history proceeded from one good reason to the next better reason, the story told in this book, let alone this chapter, would be different. We can, however, see why much of postmodernism may not be with us for the long haul.
THE PANORAMIC SWEEP OF POSTMODERNISM
The effects of postmodern perspectives can be seen almost everywhere in Western culture. I have already mentioned literary study. We will look briefly now at history, science, and theology.50
In the discipline of history, for example, the pastness of the past disappears in the mists of the present moment. Historians are moving from a modern historicism (the notion that the meaning of events is to be found in their historical context) to a postmodern “denial of the fixity of the past, of the reality of the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus any objective truth about the past.”51 The postmodern historian does not use imagination to re-create for readers a sense of the past itself but creates “a past in the image of the present and in accord with the judgment of the historian.”52 The move away from using footnotes in scholarly writing only exacerbates the situation.53 Who can check the historian’s judgment?
With postmodern historian Keith Jenkins, history becomes a hall of mirrors: “In the post-modern world, then, arguably the content and context of history should be a generous series of methodologically reflexive studies of the makings of the histories of post-modernity itself.”54 History becomes reflection on histories of reflection.
Postmodernism has made little impact on science itself—either on how it is conducted or on how it is understood by most scientists. Nonetheless, postmodernism has begun to rewrite our understanding of what science is despite what scientists do or say. Most scientists, whether naturalists or Christian theists, are critical realists. They believe that there is a world external to themselves and that the findings of science describe what the world is like more or less accurately. Accuracy increases as scientific study progresses or it discovers a better paradigm to organize and interpret the data. Postmodernists are antirealists; they deny that there is any known or knowable connection between what we think and say with what is actually there.55
History is a shifting problematic discourse, ostensibly about an aspect of the world, the past, that is produced by a group of present-minded workers (overwhelmingly in our culture salaried historians) who go about their work in mutually recognizable ways that are epistemologically, methodologically, ideologically and practically positioned and whose products once in circulation, are subject to a series of uses and abuses that are logically infinite but which in actuality generally correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any given moment and which structure and distribute the meanings of histories along a dominant-marginal spectrum.
Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History
Scientific truth is the language we use to get us what we want. “There is no other proof that the rules [of scientific practice] are good than the consensus extended to them by the experts,” wrote Lyotard.56 Science is what the scientists say it is.57 To which one scientist wag has replied, “Just step outside that ten-story window and say that again.” But this is to misunderstand the postmodern theorists. They are not saying that no physical world exists; they are rather giving a “report” on the status and nature of scientific claims to knowledge in light of the impossibility of directly accessing reality with our epistemic equipment. The world does not speak to us. Our minds do not access the essences that make reality determinate, the essences that make wood wood and metal metal. We speak to the world. We say “wood” or “metal” and put these words in sentences that often get us what we want. When they don’t, we say that these sentences are false. We should rather say that they don’t work.
Over against both of these positions [positivism and naive realism], I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of “knowing” that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence “realism”), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence “critical”). This path leads to critical reflection on the products of our enquiry into “reality,” so that our assertions about “reality” acknowledge their own provisionality. Knowledge, in other words, although in principle concerning realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower.
N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God
Much postmodern writing about science has been couched in highly obscure language. This has both frustrated practicing scientists and bamboozled the editors of at least one postmodern journal. Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the journal Social Text.58 The editors, not noticing that the article was riddled with inanities from the standpoints of both physics and sociology, accepted it for publication. Sokal then announced in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, written to expose the absurdity of much postmodern cultural analysis in general and science in particular. Claiming himself to be on the “left” socially, he said that he was only trying to keep cultural studies from obscurantism and overweening ambition. The joy the hoax incited among modern-minded scientists and the furor it caused among the editors and their intellectual friends points up the personal stake today’s social critics and their subjects have in postmodern approaches to science. The whole affair merited a further comment in Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science and The Sokal Hoax, a collection of comments by both American and foreign scholars and pundits, edited by the editors of Lingua Franca.
The postmodern sociologists might, however, get at least an echoing giggle. Two French scientists without PhD credentials slipped a pseudoscientific, jargon-laden paper past the professional referees of a scientific journal. Whether their discussion of the singularity at the heart of the Big Bang was intended as a hoax or just bad, presumptuous science is not clear. But it did show that nonsense can get past the intellectual guards posted at the gates of journals of both the natural and the human sciences.59
The reactions of theologians to postmodernism have run the gamut. Some accept its central claims and write not theologies but a/theologies (neither theologies nor nontheologies but theologies that stem from the interstice between the two). Don’t try to understand that without reading Mark C. Taylor.60 Other theologians accept the postmodern critique of modernism, see much contemporary Christian theology as being too “modern,” and attempt to recast theology. Among these are postliberals who revise the notion of what theology is and can do (George Lindbeck), those who see in the postmodern emphasis on story a chance for the Christian story to get a hearing (Diogenes Allen), and evangelicals who revision evangelical theology (Stanley Grenz, John Franke, Merold Westphal, and James K. A. Smith), or who emphasize the narrative nature of theology (Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh).61 Still others reject the entire postmodern program and call for a return to Scripture and the early church (Thomas Oden) or to a Reformation program that continues to value human reason (Carl F. H. Henry, David F. Wells, and Gene Edward Veith Jr.).62
In evangelical circles postmodernism continues to prove controversial.63 Some younger scholars such as Robert Greer have surveyed the Christian options and call for a recognition of the true insights of postmodernism and a fresh approach he calls “post-postmodernism.”64 Older scholars such as Merold Westphal and Douglas Groothuis disagree over what postmodernists like Lyotard are saying, sometimes, so it seems, talking past one another in their dialogue. While both affirm the central teachings of the Christian faith, they take remarkably different views on how much the mind is able to accurately know what is true about God, humans, and the universe.65 It is clear that the last word on postmodernism and theology has yet to be written.
POSTMODERNISM: A CRITIQUE
I will start my critique by pointing out some aspects of the postmodern perspective that seem true, not just useful, and continue with more critical remarks.
First, postmodernism’s critique of optimistic naturalism is often on target. Too much confidence has been placed in human reason and the scientific method. Descartes’s attempt to find complete intellectual certitude was fatal. As a Christian he might well have been satisfied with a confidence based on the existence of a good God who made us in his image and wants us to know. He should not have expected to be certain apart from the givenness of God. Subsequent intellectual history should be a lesson to all who wish to replace the God who declares “I AM THAT I AM” with individual self-certitude. There is a mystery to both being and knowing that the human mind cannot penetrate.
Second, the postmodern recognition that language is closely associated with power is also apt. We do tell “stories,” believe “doctrines,” hold “philosophies” because they give us or our community power over others. The public application of our definitions of madness does put people in mental health wards. Indeed, we should suspect our own motives for believing what we do, using the language that we do, telling the stories that inform our lives. We may just as well suspect the motives of others.
If, however, we adopt the radical form this suspicion takes in Foucault, we will end up in a contradiction or, at least, an anomaly. If we hold that all linguistic utterances are power plays, then that utterance itself is a power play and no more likely to be proper than any other. It prejudices all discourse. If all discourse is equally prejudiced, there is no reason to use one rather than another. This makes for moral and intellectual anarchy. Moreover, Foucault’s prime value—personal freedom to intensify pleasure—is belied by his reduction of all values to power itself. The truth question cannot be avoided. Is it true, for example, that all discourse is a masked power play? If we say no, then we can examine with care where power is an undue factor. If we say yes, then there is one sentence that makes sense only if it is seen not as a power play. A radical postmodernism that says yes is self-refuting.66
Third, attention to the social conditions under which we understand the world can alert us to our limited perspective as finite human beings. Society does mold us in many ways. But if we are only the product of the blind forces of nature and society, then so is our view that we are only the product of the blind forces of nature and society. A radical sociology of knowledge is also self-refuting.
Nonetheless, though often flawed in its approach, postmodernism does make several positive contributions to our understanding of reality. I turn now to more critical comments.
First, the rejection of all metanarratives is itself a metanarrative. The idea that there are no metanarratives is taken as a first principle, and there is no way to get around this except to ignore the self-contradiction and get on with the show, which is what postmodernism does.
Second, the idea that we have no access to reality (that there are no facts, no truths-of-the-matter) and that we can only tell stories about it is self-referentially incoherent. Put crudely, this idea cannot account for itself, for it tells us something that, on its own account, we can’t know. Charles Taylor puts the matter more carefully in his analysis of Richard Rorty:
Truth isn’t outside power . . . it’s produced by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. . . . Each society has . . . its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which it is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
. . . By truth I do not mean “the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted” but rather “the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true,” it being understood also that it is not a matter . . . “on behalf” of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays.
“Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operations of statements. . . . A “regime” of truth.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge*
*The passage is abridged and quoted in Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London: Routledge, 1991), 31-32.
Rorty offers a great leap into non-realism: where there have hitherto been thought to be facts or truths-of-the-matter, there turn out to be only rival languages between which we end up plumping, if we do, because in some way one works better for us than the others. . . .
But to believe something is to hold it true; and, indeed, one cannot consciously manipulate one’s beliefs for motives other than their seeming to be true to us.67
Likewise, when Nietzsche says “truth is a mobile army of metaphors” or conventional “lies,” he is making a charge that implicitly claims to be true but on its own account cannot be.68
Third, as Lilla points out, deconstructive postmodernism’s view of the indeterminacy of language (a text can be read in a variety of ways, some contradictory) raises a question: “How then are we to understand the deconstructionist’s own propositions? As more than one critic has pointed out, there is an unresolvable paradox in using language to claim that language cannot make unambiguous claims.”69
Fourth, postmodernism’s critique of the autonomy and sufficiency of human reason rests on the autonomy and sufficiency of human reason. What is it that leads Nietzsche to doubt the validity of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”? That is, what leads him to doubt that the I is an agent that causes thought? Answer: Nietzsche’s thought. What if Nietzsche’s thinking is not produced by Nietzsche, if it is merely the activity of thought? Then Nietzsche’s I is being constructed by language. There isn’t any Nietzsche accessible to Nietzsche or us. In fact, there is no substantial us. There is only the flow of linguistic constructs that construct us. But if there are only linguistic constructs, then there is no reason we should be constructed one way rather than another and no reason to think that the current flow of language that constructs us has any relationship to what is so. The upshot is that we are boxed into subjective awareness consisting of an ongoing set of language games.
SPIRITUALITY IN A POSTMODERN WORLD
It is true, as we have seen, that some people seem to get along well with the notion that there is no God. Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, and Kai Nielsen are cases in point.70 Others have more difficulty. Nietzsche replaces God with himself. Václav Havel attributes to Being a character that presents itself in theistic terms but is not really a personal God.71 Postmodern scholar Ihab Hassan briefly encourages a vague spirituality. “This I know,” he pleads, “without spirit the sense of cosmic wonder, of being and morality at the widest edge, which we all share, existence quickly reduces to mere survival.”72 Science writer John Horgan surveys the possible connection between science and spirituality, concluding rather vaguely that mystical experience bestows on us a great gift:
To see—really see—all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so Gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion, fun.73
How atheists and nihilists are to be so haunted, he does not say.
Still, the predominant stance of recent naturalists is humanistic to the core. Somehow after the death of God we will muddle through. At the end of his massive book The Modern Mind, Peter Watson looks to a chastened postmodernism, a chastened science, and a chastened Western humanism to provide a way from cultural anarchy to societies in which all can find meaning and significance.74 He cites both philosopher Bryan Magee and sociobiologist E. O. Wilson. For Magee no justification by God or reason is required for a moral stance or belief in human decency. We can just act as we intuitively know we should.75 For Wilson, future science pursuing its current course will blend with humanistic studies and the arts in a “consilience” that will support human values and aspirations. Wilson believes that discovering the material causes for our sense of morality will provide a sufficient justification for acting as we should. Actually, despite his disclaimer, he has committed the naturalistic fallacy of deriving ought from is. Few have found his materialistic reductionism convincing.76
Finally, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont consider three possible outcomes to the challenge to postmodernism. First is “a backlash leading to some form of dogmatism, mysticism (e.g., New Age), or religious fundamentalism.” Second is “that intellectuals will become reluctant (at least for a decade or two) to attempt any thoroughgoing critique of the existing societal order.” Third is “the emergence of a culture that would be rationalistic but not dogmatic, open-minded but not frivolous, and politically progressive but not sectarian.” But Sokal and Bricmont are realistic. They add that “this is only a hope, and perhaps only a dream.”77 And a dream it most probably is. Where in scientific rationalism is there a foundation for such hope?
In any case, the challenge of the death of God, the death of reason, the death of truth, and the death of the self—all dominant in current postmodernism—is likely to be with us for a very long time. Thinking people of every age refuse to stop wondering about what is really real and how we can know. If we are only material beings, a product of unintentional, uncaring sources, why do we think we can know anything at all? And why do we think we should be good?
If postmodernism has not taken us beyond naturalism but rather has enmeshed us in a web of utter uncertainty, why should we think it describes us as we really are? Is there a way beyond postmodernism?
BEYOND POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism is, of course, not a full-blown worldview. But it is such a pervasive perspective that it has modified several worldviews, most notably naturalism. In fact, the best way to think about most of postmodernism is to see it as the most recent phase of the “modern,” the most recent form of naturalism. In postmodernism the essence of modernism has not been left behind. Both rest on two key notions: (1) that the cosmos is all there is—no God of any kind exists—and (2) the autonomy of human reason. Of course, 2 follows from 1. If there is no God, then human beings, whatever else they are, are the only “persons” in the cosmos; they have the only rational minds for which there is any evidence. We are therefore on our own. The first moderns were optimistic; the most recent ones are not. The distinctions between the early and late moderns are certainly important enough not just to note but to signal the latter with a term like postmodern.
Postmodernism pulls the smiling mask of arrogance from the face of naturalism. The face behind the mask displays an ever-shifting countenance: there is the anguish of Nietzsche railing against the herd mentality of the mass of humanity, the ecstatic joy of Nietzsche willing into being the Overman, the leering visage of Foucault seeking the intensification of sexual experience, the comic grin of Derrida as he deconstructs all discourse, including his own, and the play of irony around the lips of Rorty as he plumps for a foundationless solidarity. But no face displays a confidence in truth, a trust in reality, or a credible hope for the future.
If our culture is to move toward a hopeful future, it will first have to move back to a more realistic past, pick up from where we began to go wrong, take into account the valuable insights derived from what has happened since, and forge a more adequate worldview.78
One worldview has been on center stage in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia for centuries. But its presence as an intellectual and social challenge to the modern Western world has been minimal—until recently. But the event called 9/11, the date in 2001 when terrorists flew commercial airline planes into the World Trade Center in New York, has changed all that. Islam has now come to front and center stage in the West as well. Its worldview can no longer be ignored.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1. How have you heard the term postmodernism used and defined?
2. What are some ways in which postmodernism is “the last move of the modern” or the natural outgrowth of modernism?
3. What do you think of the author’s belief that “being is prior to knowing”? How does postmodernism challenge this view?
4. How has postmodernism made positive contributions to our understanding of reality?