Reflecting on Postmodernism

Postmodernism has been a term used by many writers, but one has the suspicion that people mean differing ideas and ways of life when referring to it. Some writers and speakers will give the impression that we live in a postmodern culture, as if postmodernism is a dominant theme throughout the culture. If this were accurate, it would be an irony that an intellectual movement that casts suspicion on the notion of a theme in history, in the formation of the self, or in the interpretation of a text, would suddenly become a theme of contemporary culture. 

My assumption is that postmodernism describes an important subculture within a larger intellectual and cultural environment. As a product of human activity, it will have valid insights that illuminate human experience. It will also have dimensions of its thought and way of life that are of questionable value. 

A postmodern perspective is one among several live options that one might choose as a way of thinking and behaving in this world. It has differences from the rise of critical theory, the rise of a therapeutic culture, the continuing emphasis on logic and science that leads to technological advances, and those who adhere to the continuing value of bringing economic and political freedom to all human beings as the best ways to advance human flourishing. As with most intellectual movements, it has its positive contribution to make to the advance of the pursuit of what is true and good. It continues a philosophical tradition that seeks to give disciplined attention to patterns of human experience. In doing so, it continues the program of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. However, it will shift attention toward alterity (difference) and genuine pluralism. 

I will engage postmodernity on its own terms, engaging in a give and take with the philosophical issues I see that postmodernism raises. This will include its critique of modernity as seen in Hegel and in the foundationalism of Descartes. It will include its reflection on language and the deconstruction of the text. Reduction to a pure power equation is possible, and I will need to deal with that. I will conclude with a reflection what a postmodern theology might look like and whether such a theology is viable. Although I have read many of the authors, I will rely upon others who engage postmodernism, including Mark Taylor, Charles Taylor, Richard Tarnas, Jurgen Habermas, and Gabriel Marcel.

As I have engaged this study, assembling notes I have taken over the years and engaging in some newer studies, I realize how deeply some form of humanism, deriving from Plato, Aristotle, Christian moral tradition, Erasmus, and Kant, have all been in my background assumptions. Postmodernism will be so critical of these views that I have had to work hard to hear them. In addition, I grant that all of us has a perspective out of which we shape belief and behavior. I am willing to have a conversation about that. What I am not willing to do is reduce us to such positions as if we were prisoners. We can learn from our engagements with other persons and groups throughout our lives. While my criticism will be deep and I hope persuasive, I want you to know that despite its anti-humanism, I have sought to listen.

            Postmodernism has a discontent with modernity. It focuses upon the sins of modernity. Colonial power constantly thrusts outward and expands. In an economy of domination, needs are satisfied by continually extending economic manipulation to new markets and political control to new territories. With this development, it becomes clear that mastery, utility, consumption, ownership, propriety, property, colonialism, and totalitarianism form a seamless though seamy, web.[1] In that sense, a theory of modernism would say that modernism is perpetual change, innovation, and revolution would suggest that postmodernism is part of that cycle that will give birth to a fresh burst of invention. Modernity will absorb the language, forms, and tastes of art found in postmodernism because of the ability of the freedom and economic growth in modernity to overwhelm discontent. The question that still needs answering by the events of history is whether postmodernism is a repudiation of the modernist tradition.[2] As long as postmodernism plays by the rule of the game in a democratic political order, respecting the rights of those who disagree and not using violence to advance its objectives, it does remain within modernity, broadly conceived. The path forward is respect for of difference and genuine pluralism in the public square. Terror places one outside the game.[3]

Postmodernism opens with the sense of irrevocable loss and incurable fault. Deconstructive criticism unravels the very fabric of most Western theology and philosophy. In that sense, deconstruction is parasitic, attacking the organism from within while recognizing that its life depends upon the organism on which it feeds. The sense of loss and guilt within postmodernism leads to the arrogance of deconstruction, overthrowing a philosophical tradition descending from Plato and Aristotle, from Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, overthrowing a theological tradition that includes the Jewish scripture and two millennia of theological tradition. The intellectual and spiritual margin is a place to be when exploring but hardly a place to call home. For many of us, for example, Nietzsche is a delight and challenge to read, largely because of his pithy insights and challenges to conventionality, but not a place to abide.

Levinas is a postmodern author with whom many persons would find compatible, regardless of one’s beliefs or way of life. He offers an understanding of human experience that opposes Heidegger, even while learning much from him. Thus, I find myself existing in a world of alien things and elements that are other than myself. The self is a logical relation that brings its terms together into a neutral system in the light of which each can be understood impartially. However, the world as I originally experience it is not a logical system of this kind, in which no term takes precedence over the rest. My primary experience is biased and egocentric. I take precedence over the various objects I find around me, and as far as my experience is normal, I learn to manipulate and control them to my advantage, either as the member of a group that I identify with myself or simply as myself alone. These objects are at my disposal, and I am free to play with them, live on them, and to enjoy them at my pleasure. This primordial experience of enjoyment, neglected by Heidegger, suggests the priority of the aesthetic. However, Levinas makes a questionable turn in saying that this enjoyment reveals a strong tendency in all persons and groups to maintain this egocentric attitude and to think of other individuals either as extensions of the self or as alien objects to be manipulated for the advantage of the individual or social self. Neither of these egocentric views does justice to our original experience of the other person. The problem here is that he sets the ego thoroughly within a natural and social environment but insists on the purely ego-centric and even solipsistic nature of the self at the primordial stage. As he admits, the original experience is one of having a home or connection, but that our experience leads to alienation and separation. Levinas offers a phenomenology of the other person. The other person comes before me in a face-to-face encounter with one who is like me. It expresses an optimistic hope that is sometimes true. The other becomes an analogue of myself. But not necessarily, for I may find the other to be inhabiting a world that is other than mine. I meet the other for the first time in the strangeness of the face-to-face encounter. I see this countenance before me. This face is present in the flesh. There is also a sense of distance and absence in the questioning glance of the other. To put it in terms not from Levinas, the creative subject engages in calculative thinking that views the world as our own, our private property, designed according to our needs and readily domesticated. Need and desire describe the presence of absence. This absence, gap, hole, emptiness, or nothingness can assume various shapes. Need and desire designate two different forms. Need has a degree of specificity that desire does not have. Past and future are not modalities of the present but signify irreducible absence. Due to the everlasting interplay of identity and difference and of presence and absence, the present is present not as total presence but as trace. The trace marks the liminality of temporality.[4]

One can appreciate the postmodern reconsideration of Hegel, the primary philosopher of modernity. Western philosophy and theology reach closure in the Hegelian system. This closure is a productive opening. As postmodernism will put it, origin is inaccessible, originality illusory, ends are elusive and definitive conclusions impossible. What many postmodern critics of Hegel do not realize is that Hegel constantly attempts to overturn the philosophy of identity, which was so popular during his day, and which has returned to haunt 20^th century thought and life. To effect this reversal, Hegel insists on the irreducibility of difference. Instead of identity dissipating difference, difference constitutes identity. The inclusive rhythm in Hegel’s thought is balanced by his appreciation for the abiding significance of difference. The return to and of Hegel that deconstruction proposes is mediated by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s relentless attack on Hegelian results foreshadows deconstruction’s critique of eschatology and denial of closure. Kierkegaard willfully misreads Hegel as a philosopher of identity whose system is finally totalitarian. The deconstructive reading of Hegel as the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing both acknowledges the force of Kierkegaard’s critique and recognizes the continuing power of Hegel’s position. Nietzsche preserves Hegel’s revolutionary recognition of the vital importance of relationships that both join and separate everything that is and is not.[5] According to both traditional logic and common sense, identity is simple self-sameness, which is exclusive of otherness. Careful inspection shows the untenability of this position. The self-relation that is supposed to establish self-identity is actually pure difference. Identity does not absorb difference, and difference does not disperse identity. Identity-in-difference is always set in tension with difference-in-identity and vice versa. Difference resists the totalitarianism of identity, just as identity resists the anarchy of difference. Negativity is the play of differences that produces the difference that constitutes identity. The idea is of a decentered whole or a totality that cannot either totalize or be totalized. Common sense usually regards finitude and infinitude as opposed to each other and mutually exclusive. Though not immediately apparent, this view of the matter leads to the unintentional finitizing of the infinite and the infinitizing of abstract finitude. As a result of this complex interrelation, finitude and infinitude are neither simply opposed nor mutually exclusive. To the contrary, they enact a ceaseless play in which each becomes itself in and through the other. When time becomes eternity and eternity becomes time, they are no longer separated by an infinitive qualitative abyss. The interplay of time and eternity calls into question anything deemed wholly other and erases every vestige of pure transcendence. Instead of being antithetical to time, the eternal is found in the temporal and the temporal in the eternal. Never straight and narrow, the course of eternity is always curved, winding, circuitous, dishonest, and crooked. As Hegel put it, there is nothing in the ground that is not in the grounded, and there is nothing in the grounded that is not in the ground.[6]

I am suggesting that much of the postmodern critique of Hegel does not appreciate how his notion of the Absolute contains within itself identity and difference. He was far from the totalitarian notion of consensus against which much of postmodernism will fight. At the same time, postmodernism will seek to identify metanarratives or themes that it sees as illusions. I agree with their concern. For example, the myth of ever-advancing economic growth, the myth of the liberation of humanity, the myth of the speculative unity of all knowledge, and the myth of the coherent self or ego. The postmodern decentering of the self is an important insight.

Another way to consider the insights of postmodernism is its desire to overcome the epistemological standpoint and to repudiate the enterprise of epistemology. In doing so, it considers the foundationalist enterprise of Descartes, Locke, and Kant as a mistake. Scientists were philosophers, and philosophers were scientists. The quest was for an unambiguous foundation. It may well be that once they left the foundation they had in Aristotle, the church, and monarchy, all of which felt so certain and so wrong, they thought there must be another foundation out there. Their math and science background led many of them to suspect that God, ethics, and politics should follow them same deductive, clear, and unambiguous pattern. The difference between the physical sciences and the human sciences is simply too vast. Physical sciences are cumulative in nature. One does not need to study the history of biology or physics to be a top scientist. The knowledge accumulates because what is taught now is the understanding of that science. Such a science will have an unambiguous foundation from which one can develop clear and distinct ideas. As one can see, philosophy and the human sciences are not that way. Philosophy is always a matter of reading the texts of philosophers considering the issues one faces today.

These authors took their cue from the successful sciences of their day. For Descartes, such science was math, and for contemporary authors in this tradition it would mean reducing everything to the physics of the day. Thus, overcoming epistemology means overcoming foundationalism. Quine would deprive epistemology of its a priori status and consider it was one science among others. It is simply one of many mutually interacting departments of our picture of the world. However, a wider conception of the epistemological enterprise would be that knowledge is to be seen as correct representation of an independent reality. Knowledge is the inner depiction of an outer reality. Such a notion is bound up with influential notions about science and the nature of human agency. It connects with certain central moral and spiritual ideas of the modern age. The link between the representational conception and the mechanistic science of the 16-1700’s is clear. This picture undermined the traditional view of Aristotle, according to which when we come to know something, the mind participates in the being of the known object rather than simply depicting it, a view that depends upon some theory of Forms as we find it in Plato. In a mechanistic world of Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Locke, for example, passive reception of impressions from the external world are the heart of perception. Knowledge hangs on a relation holding between what is out there and certain inner states that this external reality causes in us. This view is just as valid for the latest artificial-intelligence models of thinking. This representational view was also powered by the new ideals of science and new conceptions of the excellence of thought. Any congruence between the new ideals of science and new conceptions of the excellence of thought must come through a reliable method that can generate well-founded confidence. Certainty occurs as one examines the foundations in one’s mind. We must generate such certainty. For Plato and Aristotle, the road to certainty was not inward, but for Descartes, our thought about the real can be distinguished from its objects and examined on its own. The point is something like a moral ideal for modernity, in that to be free is to be self-responsible, to rely on your own judgment, to find your purpose in yourself. Such a notion of freedom has certain key theses about the nature of the human agent. One is that the subject is ideally disengaged, free and rational so that identity does not derive from anything that lies outside the person. This notion emerges in dualism. It continues in the demand for a neutral, objectifying science of human life and action. Two is a punctual view of the self, ideally ready as free and rational to treat the world instrumentally, as subject to change and reorganizing in order the better to secure the welfare of oneself and others. Personal reform movements were the result, continuing today in the engineering models have on social policy. Three is the social consequence of an atomistic construal of society as be explained in terms of individual purposes. It gave rise to social contract theories and continues in John Rawls and many of the assumptions of contemporary liberalism and social science. All of this is to verify that the epistemological tradition is an important basis for moral and spiritual ideas of contemporary civilization.[7] The epistemological construal offers an account of stages of the knower consisting of ideas as self-enclosed in that they can be accurately identified and described in abstraction from the outside world, and that they nevertheless point toward and represent things in that outside world. Put this way, the position is incoherent.[8]

With this epistemological tradition, which continues to exert influence, we can also see it has its philosophical dissenters. Hegel would say its fear of error was a fear of the truth. He further showed its aspiration to individuality and isolated individuals was a chimera as it refused to see the truth of the identity of subject-object. Heidegger notoriously treats the epistemological tradition as a stage in the development of a stance of domination to the world that culminates in contemporary technological society. He would focus on the fact that the knower-known complex is at all. Merleau-Ponty draws political connections and clarifies the alternative notion of freedom that arises from the critique of empiricism and intellectualism. Those who follow Wittgenstein have shown affinity for the critique of disengagement, instrumental reason, and atomism. These critics of epistemology argue its inadequacy and are attracted to a new conception from what they show to be the indispensable conditions of there being anything like experience of the world in the first world. Even Kant saw that we would not have what we recognize as experience at all unless it were construable as of an object and that their being of an object entails a certain relatedness among our representations. Such an appeal to intuition is an appeal to the knowledge of the knowing agent. As subjects engaged in the activities perceiving and knowing the world, we are capable of identifying certain conditions without which our activity would fall apart into incoherence. Thus, Heidegger shows that the condition of our forming disengaged representations of reality is that we must be already engaged in coping with our world, dealing with the things in it, at grips with them. Even to find out about the world and formulate disinterested pictures, we have to come to grips with it, experiment, set ourselves to observe, and control conditions. This insight undermines the epistemological position. Foundationalism goes. Any project relies on a background or horizon of nonexplicit engagement with the world. You cannot go on digging under our ordinary representations to uncover further, more basic representations. Our understanding of the world is grounded in our dealings with it. The task of reason becomes articulating the background, disclosing what it involves. Gone also is the punctual notion of the self. The world of the human being is defined by a way of life shared with othe4rs. This insight removes the possibility of atomism as well, showing the priority of society as the locus of the identity of the individually. Heidegger makes this point through exploring the role of language.[9]

One can legitimately ponder whether one should simply surrender to the subjectivity and pervasive relativism that many think defines the spirit of the times. Our relativism teaches us to count intolerance as a greater sin than actual error in what we believe or what we do.  Openness is the only virtue of our time.  We have convinced ourselves that it is a virtue to be nonjudgmental and open and accept everyone and all behavior as equally valid.  Thus, we do not believe it is right to correct mistakes and really be right.  Rather, we are not to think there is anything to be right or wrong about.  For us, no boundaries suggest correct standards of thinking and behaving.^[10]

However, my commitment to the rationality of the human animal does not permit me to surrender. The post-modern aversion to the normative, to denying that there are any cogent standards, is an important contribution to the spirit of the times. To the post-modern, any norm is obsolete dogmatism. This notion can lead to relativistic indifference to truth and rightness. All I can expect is to achieve is to reach people who are not yet among those converted to the cause of unreason.[11]

Husserl helps us clarify the conditions of intentionality. We come to a better understanding of what we are as knowing agents. We also better understand ourselves as language beings. Such a view would carry further the demand for self-clarity about our nature as knowing agents by adopting a search for self-understanding as awareness about the limits and conditions of our knowing, an awareness that would help us to overcome the illusions of disengagement and atomic individuality. We could understand this as carrying the project of modernity and self-responsible reason further by giving it a new meaning. Such a project would conceive of the excellence of reason as consisting in the articulation or disclosure of the background of our lives lucidly. Along with this would be a conception of critical reasoning that would have relevance for moral thinking in rejecting utilitarianism and variations of the Kantian position. It would reject atomistic theories of culture as well as reductive causal theories as we find in Marx. Such a view stresses situated freedom and the roots of our identity in community has affinities with the civic humanist tradition.[12] Although such a project would learn much from Habermas, his rejection of the notion of disclosure in Heidegger would be a limit.[13]

All this serves as background for the challenge that postmodernism presents. Nietzsche and a range of writers who align themselves with a certain reading of him, among the more interesting of which is Foucault. He could not accept the rival notion of a deep or authentic self that arises out of the critical traditions of Hegel, and in a separate way, as we find in existentialism generally, but especially with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Such a self seemed to be another prison to Foucault. He offered a critique of the modern notion of the depth of the self, which for him was a construal that led to a form of control through psychotherapy. Both Derrida and Foucault end up celebrating the freedom and power of the self. He rejected it in favor a of the notion of the self as self-making, the self as a work of art, a central conception of an aesthetics of existence. Derrida will give a similar answer, although in his stress upon the end of subjectivity, one of the strong attractions of this position is the license it offers to subjectivity. Nietzsche stressed that language imposes order on the world in a violent way. He thereby attacks the very aspiration to truth. They take an act of power for a revelation of truth. Such a stance is compatible with the spiritual stance of self-making, making the will primary. Those who take the path of Nietzsche are reluctant to understand the critique as a gain in reason. Reason has nothing to do with the choice of what one wants to be. It becomes a voluntaristic anthropology, with its roots in voluntaristic theology and its predecessor in nominalism. Knowledge becomes relative to various imposed regimes of truth (Foucault). Of course, no construal is innocent, so something is always suppressed. Some interlocutors are always advantaged relative to others. However, the issue is whether this settles the matter of truth between differing construals of knowledge.[14]

When we ignore the pervasive influence of rationality upon who we are, we allow temperament and personal inclination to have its way. It can lead us to embrace cognitive relativism, where the standards of every group are equally valid. The question is whether adopting the position that every group standard is equally correct. Of course, we have a position. We have that position because the contextual pluralism that reflects various experiences of life. Yet, we can remain committed to truth. As cognitive relativism sees it, people choose beliefs and values on extra-rational grounds, such as custom, habit, fashion, and so on. Rationally, they think, all alternatives are on the same footing. Yet, our claims rest upon purposive human endeavor. Human projects are teleological. Some available alternatives will serve our purposes better than others do, which, obviously, means they are not on the same footing. This view can lead us to ignore the ordinary uses of language, which call for us give reasons for our beliefs, values, behavior, and evaluations all the time. It ignores the presupposition or postulate of the ontological reality of a mind-independent world that we need to engage.

Foucault and Derrida contributed to the solipsism of the postmodern mindset. Its openness and indeterminacy derive from a lack of any grounding as a worldview. For the postmodern, the universe is fully open and without foundation. The path to this perspective on the world is through language. The genealogical investigations of Foucault into the social construction of knowledge and the challenge of the deconstructionism of Derrida to find a secure meaning in any text, contributed to the postmodern mindset. The effect on the academic world promotes a view of discourse and knowledge that relativizes human claims to enduring truth. Human knowledge is historically contingent and social practices. The mind has no access to reality independent of the mind.[15] Foucault is part of a consensus within postmodernity that the world is a construct, human knowledge is interpretive, there are no perspective-independent facts, every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, and soaked with theory. Human language has no connection with an independent reality. The mind is the origin of any meaning we have. Foucault wants us to feel deeply our alienation in the world.[16]

Along with Nietzsche, Foucault championed the powerful category of the Dionysian. They wanted to undo the disenchantment of desire, as well as the ethical suppression. They called for release of desire, sexual as well as violent and destructive desire, but also the attempt to recover a profound resonance of these desires. They can offer us escape from our disciplinary prison into ecstasy. We are too much in our heads. We are deeply excarnated. We need to undo this.[17] An important part of this is the rejection of classical humanism, which largely accepted the moral codes found in religion. Such normalizing (Foucault) humanism objected to aggression, combativeness, and licentious dimensions of human life. Nietzsche saw in fighting and domination and the infliction of suffering as expressions of the will to power. In the name of equality, happiness, and an end to suffering, humanism would move against the very qualities that Nietzsche valued. The fascination with death and violence we find in Nietzsche recurs in Derrida and Foucault. Foucault continues the attack on civilizing humanism.[18] It is significant that the anti-humanist thinkers of our time, Derrida and Foucault being primary examples, go back to Nietzsche.[19] Humanism is a stifling, confining space out of which one must break.[20] Granted, Derrida ended up authorizing an ethic that has deep roots in the humanism of western civilization moral order, so that our actions and structures  should conduce to the benefit of all.[21] The power critique Derrida and Foucault of the moral order of the humanism of the West yields to the need for a moral order and a political and economic structure that benefits as many people as possible. They do not have the courage of their mentor, Nietzsche, to carry the critique of the moral prison he saw in humanism to its conclusion.

Foucault wants to invert the modernist turn toward the subject by arguing for the disappearance of the subject. He deepens the relativism already expressed in modernity by eliminating any grounds for subjective certainty.[22] He does so by breaking with the privileged status of the present in its consciousness of time under the pressure of facing the future responsibly. This will mean the methodology of the destruction and dismantling of the context of effective history that links the historian with the object and where the historian enters communication only with the historian. He wants to end global historiography the covertly conceives of history as a macro-consciousness. He wants us to see the plurality of history, of irregularly emerging and disappearing islands of discourse. He raises power to a basic transcendental-historicist concept of historiography as critique of reason. By the destruction of historiography, he participates in the postmodern destruction of metaphysics. Power is a synonym of structuralist activity. Power has the same role in Foucault as does difference in Derrida. He must retain for his concept of power the transcendental meaning of a condition of the possibility of truth. Yet, he historicizes in a way that is also nominalist, materialist, and empiricist. He was disenchanted with revolution in 1968-70. He regards the modern form of knowledge as marked from the very start by the aporia that the knowing subject raises itself up out of the ruins of metaphysics in order, in the consciousness of his finite powers to solve a task requiring infinite power. Modernity begins with the incredible and unworkable idea of a being who is sovereign precisely by virtue of being enslaved, a being whose very finitude allows him to take the place of God. He develops his basic idea that modernity is characterized by the self-contradictory and anthropocentric form of knowledge proper to a structurally overloaded subject in a wide arc that stretches from Kant and Fichte to Husserl and Heidegger. Foucault uncovers the same dialectic in the second dimension of self-positing. Since Fichte, the I, as the reflecting subject, undergoes the twofold experience of encountering itself in the world always already as something that has become itself contingently, as something opaque, on the one hand. On the other hand, as being endowed by precisely this reflection with the ability to make that in itself transparent and to elevate ti into consciousness for itself.[23] He will explain the emergence of knowledge from practices of power. He can relinquish the philosophy of the subject. In their very form the formation of power and the formation of knowledge compose an indissoluble unity. Such a strong thesis cannot be grounded just with functionalist arguments. If one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in western societies, one must take into account not only the techniques of domination but also techniques of the self. The technologies that encourage individuals to test themselves conscientiously and discover the truth about themselves Foucault traces, as is well known, back to the practices of confession, to the Christian examination of conscience. His genealogy of the human sciences enters on the scene in an irritating double role. On the one hand, it plays the empirical role of an analysis of technologies of power that are meant to explain the functional social context of the science of humanity. On the other hand, the same genealogy plays the transcendental role of an analysis of technologies of power that are meant to explain how scientific discourse about humanity is possible at all. In his basic concept of power, he has forced together the idealist idea of transcendental synthesis with the presuppositions of an empiricist ontology. This approach cannot lead to a way out of the philosophy of the subject, because the concept of power that is supposed to provide a common denominator for the contrary semantic components has been taken from the repertoire of the philosophy of the subject itself. According to this philosophy, the subject can take up two and only two relationships toward the world of imaginable and manipulable objects: cognitive relationships regulated by the truth of judgments; and practical relationships regulated by the success of actions. Power is that by which the subject influences objects in successful actions. He admits areas of incoherence but does not draw consequences from them. First, he cannot avoid dividing up historical epochs through implicit reference to the present. The unmasking of the objectivist illusions of any will to knowledge leads to agreement with a historiography that is narcissistically oriented toward the standpoint of the historian and instrumentalizes the contemplation of the past for the needs of the present. Second, his historiography can evade relativism as little as it can acute presentism. His theory would exhaust itself in the politics of theory, and indeed in setting theoretical-political goals that would overburden the capacities of even so heroic a one-person enterprise. The genealogist directs his prospecting toward the dark ground proper to that local, marginal, and alternative knowledge that owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it. According to him, Marxist theory owed its freedom from ideological bias to the privileged possibilities of knowledge from a perspective of experience that had arisen with the position of the wage-laborer in the process of production. The argument was only cogent within the framework of a philosophy of history that wanted to make the universal interest discernible in the class interest of the proletariat. Foucault’s concept of power does not permit such a concept of counter-power that grants cognitive privilege based on a philosophy of history. Every counter-power already moves within the horizon of the power that it fights. It is transformed into a power complex that provokes a new counter-power. [24]

Foucault wants to initiate a special discourse that claims to operate outside the horizon of reason without being utterly irrational. To be sure, this merely shifts the paradox. Surrender remains as chained to the desire for control as the rebellion of counter-power does to the oppression of power. Those who would like to leave all paradigms behind along with the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness, and go forth into the clearing of post-modernity, will just not be able to free themselves from the concepts of subject-centered reason and its impressively illustrated topography. Since early Romanticism, limit experiences of an aesthetic and mystical kind have always been claimed for the purpose of a rapturous transcendence of the subject. The mystic is blinded by the light of the absolute and closes his eyes. Aesthetic ecstasy finds expression in the stunning and dizzying effects of the illuminating shock. In both cases, the source of the experience of being shaken up evades any specification. [25]

I grant that if one makes a genuine shift in one’s way of life or form of belief, one can think of it as a new way of seeing. Let us think of it as having three sets of eyes, each building upon the other. The first is eye of physical sight, the second is the eye of reason as we reflect upon experience and reason with each other, and the third is the eye of intuition as we contemplate enough to see life and thought in a unique way. We have an experience of illumination. This third eye is a matter of becoming calmly present to self and world, in which we see connections beyond our typical black/while, either/or, dualistic, separating, alienating, thinking. The loss of this form of seeing leads to much shortsightedness and crises. Everything divides into dualistic oppositions like liberal vs. conservative, with vested interests pulling against one another. Truth is no longer possible at this level of conversation. Theology becomes more a quest for power than a search for God and Mystery. One surrenders to the desire to control and engage in public posturing. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that “us-and-them” seeing, and the dualistic thinking that results, is the foundation of almost all discontent and violence in the world. In contrast, the third eye is form of seeing that is the path of wisdom.[26] The reality behind this experience is that the beliefs that guide our way of life are too big for us to comprehend fully. Thus, we live with uncertainty. Such beliefs are so massive that, in the world real human beings live, we cannot prove they are right. We can testify to an experience: I trust this path is right, it seems to work, and it is wonderful. One can offer excellent reasons, but one cannot prove their validity. Entrusting oneself to a path or to a belief is always a matter of surrender. This does not make the surrender a leap in the dark, irrational, nor nonrational. One comes to a point where one says to oneself, “This is so good that I feel in my heart that this is right.” Yet, one will still need to test that feeling in the light of experience and rationality. Thus, the decision to surrender is not leaping into the darkness.[27] We are dealing with the quest for truth. We wonder what humanity is like, what way of life will lead to any meaning and fullness we can experience in this life, and some way of understanding and facing suffering and death. When we think of truth, we experience so much emptiness and absence that we wonder if there is any possibility of meaning and fullness in this life.  Such truths are beyond the ability of words to contain. Such truth will not stay still long enough. It is always moving and shifting like air. It will beckon us in diverse ways and come at us from different directions. Such truths often come to us apart from the language of logic and science. They often come in stories.[28]

Here is the reality. With any speech act, the speaker takes up a relation to something in the objective world, something in a common social world, and something in his own subjective world. The legacy of logo-centrism is still noticeable in the terminological difficulty of expanding the ontological concept of world in this way. An ontological difference exists between language and the things spoken about, between the constitutive understanding of the world and what is constituted in the world. This difference means that language and acting subjects interpret states of affairs, encounter things and people and have experiences in dealing with them. The world-disclosing function of language is conceived on analogy with the generative accomplishments of transcendental consciousness, prescinding, naturally, from the formal and supra-temporal character of the latter. Agreement arrived at through communication, which is measured by the inter-subjective recognition of validity claims, makes possible a networking of social interactions and life-world contexts. We need a concept of society in terms of fundamental ontology that leaves room for an inter-subjective action for which socialized individuals are accountable. The process of socialization itself is one of individuation, the sought-for mediation between individual and society is less puzzling. Language must be conceived of as a medium that both draws each participant in interaction into a community of communication, as one of its members, and at the same time subjects him to an unrelenting compulsion toward individuation.[29]

The quest of postmodernism to abandon norms is ancient one. It makes me think of the Beatles’ song, “Octopus’s Garden,”

We would be so happy you and me

No one there to tell us what to do

 

            Heidegger could refer to language as the house of being. Derrida starts with language. He views modernity as in search of traces of a writing that no longer holds out the prospect of a meaningful whole. The modern condition is that of deprival that one cannot comprehend within the horizon of either rationality or the divine. This means the traditional metaphysics of being, which views being as presence and holds to the foundationalist tenacity of the philosophy of the subject, gives way to the vacillating, oscillating, flow of time. Derrida relies upon a form of mysticism, but losing the direction and illumination provided within the context of Jewish or Christian tradition. [30]

Typology derives from Greek tupos + logos, related to tupto (to strike), means both a blow and the mark or trace left by a bow or the application of pressure. Trope is from Greek trepo, to turn, designating a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used in a sense other than that which is proper to it. Tropology means speaking by tropes or the use of metaphor in speech and writing. It refers to a moral discourse or a secondary use of interpretation of Scripture relating to morals. Metaphor is the trope that most effectively discloses the interconnection between typological and tropological interpretation. Differences between metonymy and metaphor with the distinction between sign and symbol. Like metonymy and metaphor, sign and symbol both entail over-determination and, thus, exhibit the structure of multiple-meaning. Whereas the relationship of signifier to signified is arbitrary in metonymy and sign, it is not arbitrary in metaphor and symbol. While the sign bears to necessary relation to that to which it points, the symbol participates in the reality of that for which it stands. Unlike the free-floating sign, the symbol is grounded; it has roots. These roots bestow on the symbol its revelatory power. Since the symbol participates in the symbolized and the laten inhabits the manifest, symbols give what they say. The goal of de-cipherment and dis-closure is to make present that otherwise remains absent. Effective symbols allow the hidden to shine forth or to emerge from concealment into the open. In metaphorical terms, the light that dispels shadows is the divine logos. For this reason, typological interpretation is logocentric. The relation between type and antitype is discovered rather than fabricated. As the primal ground and enduring substance of all created order, the logos is the principle of unity that underlies all experience. It would be misleading to consider typology simply in terms of spatial metaphors. In addition to the tension between surface and depth, figural interpretation also includes the tensive relation of past, present, and future. As far as an event recalls a prior type, it must be approached archeologically, and to the extent that it prefigures what is yet to come, it must be interpreted teleologically. For the archeologist, to dig down is to go back to the origin from which everything emerges. The teleologist regards latency as a fund of potentiality awaiting realization. In Derrida, in contrast to chronicle, narrative presents events as interrelated episodes within a coherent pattern. Narrativization involves an act of structuration as emplotment. The plot of a narrative is the ground-plan or secret scheme devised by the A/author to fashion otherwise disparate episodes into a coherent literary creation. The plot structure mediates between individual events or incidents and a story is made from events to the extent that plot makes events into a story. An event must be more than a singular occurrence. It receives its definition from its contribution to the development of a plot. A story must make an intelligible whole of the incidents, in such a way that we must always be able to ask what is the point of the story as its theme. From a narrative perspective, meaning or semantic value is a function of location within a significant whole or an encompassing totality. This reading of narrative helps to explain the structure of history. The overall coherence of narrative requires a specific center, which refers to an inaugural moment and ahead to a conclusive end.[31]

At the bottom of history, and particularly of world history, there is a final aim, and that this has actually been realized in it and is being realized that there is reason in history, that is to be shown philosophically and thus as altogether necessary, a history without such an aim and without such a point of view would be merely a feeble-minded pastime of the imagination, not even a children’s fairy tale, for even children demand some interest in stories, that is, some aim one can at least feel, and the relation of the occurrences and actions to it. That my life has no aim is evident from the accidental nature of its origin; that I can posit an aim for myself is another matter. The suspicion gathering throughout our consideration of history, story, and narrative is that it is possible there is more imagination and fairy tale in history than most people are willing to acknowledge. History and autobiography are more the work of creative imagination. To say that history is an imaginative construction is not to imply that it is unreal. The fanciful dimension of history suggests that reality is imaginative. To the extent that history involves narrative it is, like the centered self, ineluctably literary rather than literal. There is really a close resemblance between the historian and the novelist. History remains within the shadow of logocentrism. Both historian and believer insist that history is a coherent process whose rational is comprehensible. The logos is as much invented as revealed, as much created as discovered. History is a trope. Instead of being descriptively neutral and factually accurate, historical discourse is imaginative and rhetorical. If history is a trope and historical discourse is rhetorical, toward what end does the imaginative rhetorician direct his or her powers of persuasion? Why do we seem compelled to tell and retell stories? Who narrates history? To whom are stories told? For whom is the story of history recounted? In short, why do people make history?[32]

Suspended between a past that has been lost and a future not yet possessed, history is the domain of discontent and restlessness, of striving and strife. It is dissatisfied and unhappy seeking saving presence. History always involves repression. The historical effort to dominate the other is the enactment of the causa sui project on the temporal plane. This contest entails the transformation of the consciousness of death into a struggle to appropriate the life of another human being at the risk of one’s own life. Perpetually dissatisfied, the historical actor repeatedly seeks fulfillment through the other subjects he attempts to control. Lack is regarded as a deficiency that should not be or as an emptiness that ought to be filled. When carried to completion, the pursuit of mastery proves to be a self-contradictory undertaking in which an agent simultaneously tries to deny deficiency and attempts to satisfy need. The historical agent’s struggle for mastery and quest for domination indicates personal deficiency. When the analysis of the struggle for domination is extended to the question of the function of narrative, it becomes clear that the narration of history also arises from the need to achieve a position of mastery. By now it should be clear that this search is no idle pastime, it is a matter of life and death. It is a desperate struggle to save presence. By neatly tying together beginning, middle, and end, the successful story line produces the pleromatic conformity that satisfies exiles who seek fulfillment. The metaphors are totalizing. The plot of history assembles discrete episodes into a coherent whole. This collection is re-collection. The thread of the story overcomes discontinuity by stitching together distant incidents. In this way, the fabrication of narrative covers holes, fills gaps, cures wounds, and spans intervals. Since it presupposes closure, historical narrative, as against the chronicle, reveals to us a world that is putatively finished, done with, over and yet not dissolved, not falling apart. In this world, reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience. History and its narration represents a colonial enterprise. The logocentrism of history implies that narrativity functions to humanize time by giving it form. Historical narration reflects the effort to ease the trauma of dislocation by weaving scattered events into a seamless web. The subject entangled in history longs to be a faithful son inste3ad of a nomadic orphan. This colonial pursuit finally subverts itself. The repressive quest for presence ends by disclosing the irreducibility of absence and the inevitability of death. Absolute plentitude and total presence are nowhere to be found. There is always a serpent in the garden. The myth of origin represents the attempt to efface the trace by making loss secondary rather than original. Deficiency is believed to be the result of a fall or fissure, a breach or break. Stain is sin. History is an archeoteleological process that constitutes a forward-moving, the goal of this searching process is salvation, a cure that is supposed to bring health by closing the wound within. But the search inevitably fails. For homesick exiles, the absence of origin transforms life into an endgame in which one tries to kill time by telling stories. The very search for presence testifies to the absence of presence and the presence of absence. Anticipated satisfaction never becomes fully present. The end of history not only presupposes the death of the transcendent God and the disappearance of the sovereign self; it also requires the overcoming of unhappy consciousness. These combine to fray the fabric of history. The endgame is a play about ending endgames. The final plot is that there is no plot. Beneath the search is the experience of absence. It may even hint at the chaotic core of reality. The unwillingness to face the harshness of absence, which suggests a chaotic story without coherent beginning, middle, or end, that we need to give up the myth of origin or end, and therefore accept absence. If we bring science into the picture, the universe derives from nothing, evolves in a chaotic and violent way, and concludes with a cold death.[33]

I want to be clear. Postmodernism places before its audience an important challenge. Psychology has taught many of us to search for self. Existentialism by way of Kierkegaard and Heidegger has taught us of the possibility of the authenticity of the self. We have read of self-actualization. Most of us are taught to set goals and strive to fulfill them as the path to happiness, meaning, and fulfillment. Postmodernism is saying that all this activity covers up the reality of human life, which is absence and death. Abandoning both archeology and the myth of origin and abandoning teleology and the myth of the end, all we have is the ongoing interplay of presence and absence, life and death, and then we die. We are the thin trace in our choices of life. What is true on an individual basis is also true of human history, which is chaotic, without meaningful origin and without a meaningful end. 

The deconstruction proposed by Derrida is a sustained argument against the possibility of anything pure and simple that can serve as the foundation for the meaning of signs. His deconstruction clears away the ontological scaffolding erected by philosophy in the course of its subject-centered history of reason. He proceeds by a critique of style, in that he finds something like indirect communications, by which the text itself denies its manifest content, in the rhetorical surplus of meaning inherent in the literary strata of texts the present themselves as nonliterary. In this way, he compels texts to confess their guilt, against the explicit interpretations of their authors. He claims that deconstruction is an instrument for bringing the radical critique of reason by Nietzsche out of its dead end of paradoxical self-referentiality.[34]

The notable program of postmodernism is the deconstruction of texts. It maintains an indifferentist relativism regarding textual interpretation that sees all the alternatives as equally justified and appropriate. In its unwillingness to draw evaluative distinctions with respect to rational cogency, such a subjective to-each-their-own approach is the opposite of objectivism. The doctrinal core of the position involves two theses. First, that a text always allows many alternative interpretive constructions whose elaboration is the proper mission of the interpretative enterprise. Second, that all these various interpretations are coequal in merit. At the core of this stance lies a view of textual plasticity. As the enterprise of text interpretation proceeds, it brings to view an ever-increasing range of viable equivalent alternative interpretations. Deconstructionism says the enterprise of text interpretation accordingly confronts us with an inevitable plethora of coequal alternative possibilities. The partisans of deconstructionism condemn, with the epithet of textualism, the view that a given text has a meaning in such a stable and objective way as to favor one interpretation over the rest. They insist upon the relativistic stance that there is no room for objectivity here: interpretation is a matter of to each his own.

This approach is called “demythologizing” the text. Deconstruction seeks to destroy the symbol as the representation of a false reality, represented best by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. For them, true thinking is an exercise in suspicion and doubt. They undermined the confidence of pious individuals in their beliefs and motives. Their program of de-mystification treats symbols as a false reality that they must shatter. For that reason, we cannot arrive at common rules of interpretation, but only can understand the opposing rules.

A discriminating rationalism suggests that the problematic crux of the argument of deconstructionism is for a relativistic indifference in text interpretation, with its assertion of merit equivalency. This premise is untenable. This relativistic indifferentism badly misapprehends and underestimates the crucial role that context plays in the sphere of text interpretation. It is coherence with the resources of context that is at once the appropriate instrument of text interpretation and the impetus to objectivity in this domain. Text interpretation is an evidential exercise where one must make the best possible use of the relevant data over a wide range of information. One must deal with what the text explicitly affirms, include other relevant discussions by the author bearing on the issues that the text addresses, offer biographical evidence regarding the education interests, contacts, relevant interactions with contemporaries, and so on, of the author, considerations of intellectual history regarding the state of knowledge and opinions in the time and place of the author, and philological data regarding the terms and expressions. Any text has an envisioning historical and cultural context, and that the context of a text is not simply textual. This context of the texts that concern us constrains and delimits the viable interpretations that these texts can bare. 

I wonder if the loss and fault with which postmodernism begins are not of their own intellectual making. They construct a view of God, self, history, and text that, while it raises some good points, goes as far as to lead us to the conclusion that rationality is nothing more than the attempt to dominate, that the primary issue is power, leading us down the path that the only logical ethical behavior called for is violence. Deconstruction traces a path toward a revolutionary reading of texts. My question here is why revolutionary. What is so sinful about modernity that one gets into an intellectual posture where violence is the response. Such philosophers paint an alienating picture of the domination motive in modernity to make it look like overthrow and revolution are the only possibilities. Such envisioned fundamental change will mean the overthrow of economic and political freedom. What is it about freedom that scares them so much? 

The process of deconstruction is interpretatively dissolving any text into a plurality of merit-equivalent constructions. One should offset this by the process of reconstruction that calls for viewing texts within their larger contexts. The ramifications of systemic coherence preclude an indifferentist egalitarianism of textual interpretation and provide the materials for an interpretive objectivism. The situation is akin to the old story that trades on the Talmudic belief that each passage of the Torah contains forty-nine possible meanings. The story has it that once a student offered an interpretation of a passage to the rabbi who was giving him instructions. “No you are quite wrong,” the rabbi proclaimed. “How can you say that?” protested the student. “Didn’t you say there are forty-nine meanings for each passage? “Yes,” replied the rabbi, “but yours isn’t one of them.” Any viable approach to the theory of text interpretation must be normative. It must be predicated on standards and criteria that provide for the evaluation of better and worse, sensible and foolish, of responsible and irresponsible. The crucial task of text interpretation is one of examining possibilities and evaluating them. It is a profound error to see the textual sector as closed. Texts meet contexts.  

In communicative settings there are purposive constraints to objectivity that differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate interpretations. To agree with Jacques Derrida in Speech and Phenomena in subordinating process or voice to product or the textual product in writing would be to ignore the crucial lesson that what a text is depends on its function or what it sets out to do. Texts are produced with a view to their communicative mission. They are instruments of communication, of conveying information and inciting to action, even where the only action is one of deliberation or discussion. They are not disconnected from life.

Only where people are concerned merely and solely with using text interpretation as a training ground for the unfettered imagination does that free-floating deconstructionist approach to texts make any sense. When we speak of interpreting a literary text, two distinctly different things can be at issue. It is crucial to distinguish between exegetical interpretation, which is the endeavor to elucidate the meaning of a text in relation to the intentions of its producer and the intended audience, and the imaginative reinterpretation, the recasting or representation of a text in an endeavor to evoke aesthetic responses and affective resonances in a current recipient. The exegetical interpretation asks what the author meant by the text. Genuine interpretation recognizes the ownership rights of authors and of the scholars who address their products. Deconstructionists think that the text belongs to interpreters to do with as they wish in using texts as springboards for ventures in the imaginative expansion of sensibility. The esthetic interpretation asks what can the text mean for us? This requires creatively reinterpreting it or endeavor to endow it with current relevance and interest. It focuses on issues of edification or entertainment. Where this sort of enterprise is at issue, the free-wheeling inventiveness envisioned by deconstructionism has something to be said for it.

In the end, deconstruction swallows up the old hierarchical distinctions between philosophy and literature, men and women, equal and unequal, community and discord, uncoerced and constrained dialogue. Nothing emerges from the flux worth affirming. What deconstruction celebrates is the power of deconstructing. It celebrates the power of subjectivity to undo all the potential allegiances that might bind it. It celebrates pure, untrammeled freedom. The poverty of this position is clear if one moves from reading Derrida to reading Levinas. It celebrates a form of freedom that offers a charter for subjectivism and the celebration of our own creative power.[35]

I want to suggest a different path than that which postmodernism advises. I want to learn from postmodernism as an option in our culture. This learning includes appreciation for the aesthetic and affective dimension of rationality and morality. I also want to push back on the deficiencies I see.

A commitment to rationality, which is simply a commitment to who you are as a human being, is to put aside idiosyncratic predilections, parochial preferences, and biases in forming one’s believes, making evaluations, and making choices. It suggests an ability to engage in impartial reason. It strives for sensible resolutions. Such a notion is communal in that all human beings engage in rational activity. This means that we can account for the diversity of beliefs and actions by the various contexts that each individual lives. Rationality comes into play when we are in the public square and participate in situations that require cogent grounds for what we believe, do, or evaluate. In the public square, the point in engaging others in rational discussions regarding beliefs, evaluations, and choices is not agreement. People like Jurgen Habermas have urged the possibility of power as acting in concern, acting together, rather than as a relation of domination. The idea that power can be a consensus, a realm of inter-subjectivity, common action, is one that the work of Foucault undermines, and I agree with him, although for a different reason than he offers (Politics and Ethics: An Interview, 1984). He views consensus as invalid because that consensus does not liquidate the power relation, whereas I think the only path forward is to respect the genuine pluralism required in the public square. It is not important that I agree with you or that you agree with me. The goal is respect for pluralism in these matters, a respect that arises out of a mature and reasonable approach that respects the freedom and independence of the other. The fact that “our truth” is not that of others should not disillusion us from its pursuit. We can do the best we can, which we are justified in evaluating as being good enough. Genuine pluralism means we can disagree about what is true and what good reasons are at hand while maintaining commitment to the truth that we see. Inquiry is a purposive endeavor in which some modes of procedure serve the purpose better than others do. This purposive quality of human projects affords a standard of rationality and objectivity regarding its adequacy. 

Further, reflect upon ordinary use of language in our daily lives. We are part of a communicative community. We naturally strive to gain better understanding of the problems we have and naturally strive for better solutions. Such a process is rational and not simply relativistic. Of course, our conceptions of things are always provisional. A correct perception of things requires getting all the properties of a thing right, and this is not something any of us can do. We are led back to the thesis of the great idealist philosophers, such as Spinoza, Hegel, Bradley, and Royce, that human knowledge inevitably falls short of the perfect, the Idea or the Absolute. Our knowledge of the objects in the world is deficient both in completeness and correctness. This epistemic modesty is crucial. Human cognition involves a community of inquiry concerning an objective order of reality. Such ontological objectivity is a presupposition. Without it, communication would be impossible. Real things have a cognitive depth whose bottom we cannot plumb. This circumstance has a strongly realistic tendency. It means that the limits of our world cannot be claimed to be the limits of the world. It is the very limitation of our knowledge of things that betokens the mind-independence of the real. This postulate of an ontologically objective order of mind-independent reality a) preserves the distinction between true and false with respect to factual matters to operate with the idea of truth as agreement with reality; b) it preserves the distinction between appearance or our picture of reality and reality itself; c) it serves as a basis for intersubjective communication; d) it furnishes the basis for a shared project of communal inquiry; e) it provides for the fallibilistic view of human knowledge; f) it sustains the causal mode of learning and inquiry and to serve as basis for the objectivity of experience.

The primacy of rationality automatically carries in its wake the appropriateness of cultivating beliefs, values, behaviors, and evaluations in the public square outside the realm of personal indulgence. It has robustness, it allows communication, and it encourages community and collaboration. No person is an island. On getting onto a ground where others are at work allows one to find possibilities of communication, cooperation, and collaboration. Only by joining with others, by shifting from I to we, can I manage to accept the tasks that life in this world sets before us. The issue is caring about the views of others. With objectivity, I seek to align my proceedings with theirs to realize my interests; with courtesy I do so to cater to their sensibilities.

Moral discussions bring into focus the issue. Morality by its nature stakes categorical claims to appropriate behavior in the public square. Morality is inherently something functional: the moral enterprise exists as what it is because it has a purpose to serve. It is structured by its having a characteristic functional mission of transparent appropriateness. For it is the objective of morality to equip people with a body of norms, rules, and values that make for peaceful and collectively satisfying coexistence by facilitating their living together and interacting in a way that is productive of the realization of the general benefit of the wider community. The pursuit of righteousness that constitutes morality is like the pursuit of health that constitutes medicine. The inherent teleology of morality is one geared to fostering patterns of action and interaction that promote the best interests of people. Violations of moral principles are not just offenses against convention or custom, but the well-being and flourishing of the other. In violating the moral rules, we inflict injury on the life, welfare, or legitimate interests of others. Moral pluralism is a reality, but we have justification for adopting the code of our group as being of supreme importance to us, even if others ignore them. Genuine pluralism will allow such decisions to have respect in the public square. One can embrace pluralism without being relativistic or indifferent regarding moral choices. Yet, the ontological obligation is toward moral obligation. 

Such a life is a creative and artistic life. It recognizes the value of the practical morality made in many religious and secular codes, while also recognizing the importance of developing personal excellences, such as listening to the tradition within which one finds oneself while accepting responsibility for applying that tradition appropriately in specific settings (self-direction), recognizing those who have shared ideals of the good life, knowledge of the tradition, and practice in applying its wisdom to the situations today (moral authority), treating others with respect and developing good taste (decency), approaching a human life with the realism of one who does not expect the contingencies of life to always be favorable, that suffering and pain will intersect with one’s life, but that one can still pursue one’s projects with hope (depth), and that one can develop loyalty to being the type of person one desires to be regardless of whether one will have a successful outcome (honor). We will choose our style of life through the projects to which we dedicate ourselves. An artful life chooses worthy projects. The classical virtues will accompany the artful life largely because the virtues keep us from making shipwreck of our lives. Love precedes the virtues, for without basic care for self and others we will not consider virtue. Aristotle will consider virtues as universal principles or values that “we” hold: courage, truthfulness (sense of duty), temperance (self-control, moderation) in our enjoyment of pleasure, liberality or generosity with our wealth, proper self-esteem or humility, good-tempered or gentle, tactful humor, wholesome ambition (duty of working honestly), and righteousness indignation. He will discuss justice as having a sense of proportion. I think it wise to add to his list with such virtues as compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, simplicity, tolerance, and purity (which adds a consideration of sexuality that Aristotle omits). As I began with love, it might be an appropriate addition to say that as we consider the ethical moment and these principles, the result will be a loving action. Such principles are guidelines to our moral development, educating our feelings to desire a life exhibiting the character of the good person. Such wisdom is practical and encourages development of proper insight into a situation. Such wisdom is not theoretical knowledge that we could prove through math or science, but rather, as we deliberate concerning the type of character we need to develop to arrive at the end, which is a happy, well-lived, and meaningful life. Proper philosophical reflection on ethics will keep bringing us back to the virtues necessary for a human being to experience the desired end. It will bring us back to the ordinary life most of us lead and help us to live it well. Contrary to Aristotle in Book III of Nichomachean Ethics 1112b12-20, we can reason about ends. Cognitive deliberations regarding matters of information involving the issue of means is one type of deliberation, and evaluative deliberations regarding matters of value involving the issue of the merit of ends is another. Whether certain means are appropriate to given ends is a question whose resolution must be addressed in the former, informational order of deliberation. Whether the ends we have are appropriate, whether they merit adoption, is an issue that can be addressed in the latter, evaluative order of deliberation. Valuation is clearly something subject to reason once the matter of what is necessary for or advantageous to human well-being enters upon the scene. One cannot be rational without giving due care for the desirability of what one desires. If our ends are inappropriate then no matter how well we cultivate them, we are not being rational. A voyage to a foolish destination is a foolish enterprise, regardless of how efficiently conducted. There is inferential or logical reason that focuses on an instrumental or cognitive concern for effectiveness and efficiency in their cultivation and evaluative or axiological reason. Reasoning about ends is a matter of legitimation. It involves appraisal and evaluative judgment and focuses upon the appropriateness of ends. Political and economic belief systems ought to have (meaning that such systems are also moral systems) the goal of giving persons the freedom to pursue their vision of a flourishing human life in a reasonable and morally acceptable way. Such systems will show basic respect and regard for the personhood of their citizens. A well-ordered society will strive for political arrangements that coordinate morality with self-advantage. Everyone has a personal interest in so arranging matters that it comes to be in everyone’s interest to act as morality demands. Morality calls for working toward a social order where moral comportment is advantageous. Self-advantage will call for working toward the same end. The political and economic order do not have the tools to serve as the primary source of moral education, but they can provide a structure within which persons can fulfill their personal vision of their excellence. Such education must come from other institutions of society, including the faith community. Art shares these qualities but has regard for deeper dimensions of life in the formation of picture, myth, and story as it explores the depth of individual life.

Is a postmodern theology possible? Clearly, Christianity has much to learn from postmodernism. Preachers, teachers, and theologians need to listen to the concerns that arise out of postmodernism. Such listening is an important path toward building a bridge toward those with whom one disagrees, learning that there is some common ground. At the same time, building a theology on the philosophical perspective of postmodernism would seem unwise. Derrida said that his philosophy demanded atheism, and I am suggesting that theologians need to respect that insight. Learn what one can, but do not surrender theology to atheism. Yet, I can hardly leave it at that. I need to offer what I think are good reasons for coming to this conclusion.

The official affirmations and confessions of faith that arose out of ecumenical councils and the statements of faith out of the various Protestant traditions, have become part of the theological trajectory. God is the supreme Creator who through the mediation of the divine Logos brings the world into being and providentially directs its course. The First Cause is also the Final Goal or Telos of the world. God is transcendent and eternal yet is present to the divine self and is omnipresent to creation as its fount, source, ground, and cause. The self is made in the image of God and is therefore a centered self, a subject who is both self-conscious and freely active, and therefore having individual responsibility. History is the domain where the divine guidance and human initiative meet. The temporal course of events is plotted along a single line stretching from a definite beginning through an identifiable middle in the Incarnation and moves toward an expected end in redemption. History forms a purposeful process whose meaning can be coherently represented. The Book weaves the unified story of the interaction between God and self. Since the logic of this narrative reflects the Logos of history, scripture rewrites the Word of God.[36] However, such theology was a partner in the oppression of women, the subjection of races, the use of war and crusades to oppose those who disagreed with their vision of God, subjected the masses to a rigid hierarchical structure, became a partner with kings in the subjection of the masses, and inhibited the growth of science and technology. Some of the most thoughtful theological responses to modernity have been formulated by appropriating insights advanced in contemporary philosophy that differ as widely as Heidegger (Bultmann, Tillich, Macquarrie), Bloch (Moltmann), Wittgenstein (?), and Hegel and Whitehead (process theology, Teilhard de Chardin, Hodgson, Pannenberg). They have provided the background for significant theological reformulations. However, the deconstruction (Derrida, Foucault,) of classic texts wants to uncover what it views as the hidden oppression contained in the texts, deriving its interpretive tools from Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Along with Derrida, these thinkers believe they have put behind them concerns of religion and theology. There is no transcendent reality. The deconstruction of texts leaves humanity without the guidance of masterpieces in literature or philosophy, as well as leaving Christianity without classic texts to guide current theological reflection. Having no “North Star” to guide, no “center” around which to think and live, one has only the becoming of the present within which to play the game of life. If one builds a theology on such philosophy, the Bible provides texts with which one can play as one chooses. The loss of self is the reemergence of the trace, which embodies the ceaseless interplay of desire and delight. The trace becomes in interplay of absence and presence, not seeking satisfaction and fulfillment. It is purposeless. Profitless play can overcome the unhappy consciousness of the historical agent, inviting images of the carnival and the festive dance. The levity of comedy replaces the gravity of tragedy. The best image of this life is meaningless, frivolous, purposeless play, with the image of the carnival and the clown. Abandon the proper for the transgressive. All we have is becoming, the mixture of absence and presence. The unending play of surfaces discloses the ineradicable duplicity of knowledge, shiftiness of truth, and undecidability of value. Since there is no transcendental signified to anchor the activity of signification, freely floating signs cannot be tied down to any single meaning. This infinite interrelationship of interpretations cannot be captured in a closed book. It must be written in an open text. Writing is a ceaseless process. Truth and certainty are gone and with lit the masterpiece and therefore the view of the Book, Scripture, as norm, rule, and canon. We still have the text with which we can freely play. The Father disappears in the Incarnation of the Son, and the Son disappears in the play of word and sacrament.[37]

Such an approach is a convenient way to eliminate thousands of years of human thought. It is a way of arrogantly assuming the superiority of the present generation over the past. I would emphasize that the communities out of which classic texts arose have also sustained the lives of women, serfs, slaves, and improved the lives of millions through its worship and communal life. We need to discern whatever is true and holy in classical theology, so that Christian community today may reflect the divine light that they share. The classical themes suggest that no symbols, metaphors, or words we use can contain what we mean by God, the analogical nature of all talk about God, and the necessity of many names and metaphors for God are parts of the heritage quite relevant to us today. The community engaged in a debate that led to what we might consider as the orthodox faith. To participate in the fellowship of the Christian community is to participate in this hermeneutical trajectory and to embrace the joint responsibilities of maintaining continuity with the past and addressing the context in which the community is situated today. Recent theology includes the voices of Barth, Bruner, Tillich, Bultmann, hope theologians Pannenberg and Moltmann, and the re-emergence of theology out of the Pentecostal tradition. Theology arising out of oppression, first in Latin America but expanding to other parts of the world, has added another dimension to the theological conversation. The theologian today needs to be aware of these shifts in the cultural challenges that faced the community. Even these are not a final authority since the ongoing life of the church moves toward its destiny. 

Such classic texts have an excess of meaning that resists its bondage to its moment of creation. This statement would be true of other classic texts as well. That is why we continue to read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and so on, with so much profit. Their images, symbols, events, rituals, and persons are continuous sources of reflection. Our experience of such classic texts vexes, provokes, and elicits a claim to serious attention from us. The interpreter must now interpret to understand the experience of this text claiming attention. The type of interpretation we might want to consider is the conversation that releases us to the to-and-fro movement of the question and response under discussion. The claim to serious attention provokes our questioning and response. I want to stress that anyone can engage in this type of interpretation. However, use of various methods of literary criticism help to keep the interpreter from an overly subjective interpretation, in which the text will mean whatever the interpreter wants it to mean. Since we are considering religious texts, the provocation in the interpreter will be toward existential questions of the human spirit, such as the issue of finitude, our guilt, the issue of that in which we trust, the issue of meaning, as well as initial comprehension of the text. Such provocation will alert us to the otherness of the text by forcing us to recognize our pre-understanding of self, our religious beliefs, and our culture. The nature of our participation in a community and in the wider culture become clearer to us. We are now in a genuine conversation with the text. The interpreter cannot simply impose a prior value judgment upon the text. The subject-matter of that which has provoked us and claimed our attention is the focus of our attention. We lose ourselves in that conversation, even as, in an enjoyable conversation with another person, we will lose ourselves in the subject-matter under discussion. To be clear, such a conversation cannot occur if the reader already knows what a religious text is going to say, and thus does not allow the text to provoke them. A conversation with the text cannot occur of the text is so autonomous that the response of the interpreter is not possible. A conversation cannot occur if one must get behind the text to the mind of the author, to the socio-historical conditions of the text, or the response of the original audience. If we allow the conversation to start, the text is presenting us with a genuine possibility to our imagination. Such a mutual critical correlation of contemporary experience and the Christian tradition renders explicit the hermeneutical character of theological reflection.

I invite you to consider theological reflection as an unfinished work of art. My hesitation is that the work of art is external to the creator. The theologian is willing to commit his or her life to the beliefs and values presented. One is risking one’s life. However, set that difference aside for a moment. Theological reflection is an uncompleted play. Part of the initial task of the actors chosen to improvise the new final act will be to immerse themselves with full sympathy in the first four acts, but not so as merely to parrot what has already been said. They cannot go and look up the right answers. Nor can they simply imitate the kinds of things that their character did in the early acts. Good successive acts will show a proper final development, not merely a repetition, of what went before. Nevertheless, there will be a rightness, a fittingness, about certain actions and speeches, about certain final moves in the drama, which will in one sense be self-authenticating, and in another gain authentication from their coherence with authoritative previous texts. This suggests a conception of theological reflection more like a work of art in need of completion. We might consider the biblical story as involving successive acts: creation and fall, patriarchs, Mosaic liberation and law, tribal federation, Israel, Judaism, Jesus, the Spirit and church, the redemption of humanity and the created order. When we consider other acts, many would reflect on the seven ecumenical councils and the theologians that guided their decisions as having special significance. As we continue the story, the division of the church in between east and west, between Protestant and Roman Catholic, the continuing splintering of the church as a voluntary organization within secular culture, and the continuing tension between modernity and the church. Recognizing the lack of completion contained in the Christian story might be better ways to deal with the unresolved questions of theology.

Such an approach has an apologetic dimension in that it views those outside the community as people of good will and openness to rational argument and genuine witness. The early apologists of the Christian community in the second and third centuries gave a great complement to their world by adopting an apologetic form. Such an approach also is an encouragement to those within the community to refuse to become insular. It encourages them to view themselves open to the wider world, eager to bridge the misunderstandings separating them from others. They have a shared culture that enables such bridge building. Such an apologetic seeks to persuade those outside the community to enjoy its life together, while also encourages those within the community to be intelligible to themselves and to others. It strengthens community even as it seeks to communicate it. At the same time, it takes the risk of transforming the symbols of the community into a form and content in a way that becomes a bridge to those outside the community. This risk is present because one must be willing to use language and symbols familiar to the culture to build the bridge. The aim is greater understanding and tolerance.

Post-modernity has an uneasy relationship with pluralism. Its loss of the transcendent nature of truth and goodness tends to localize them in the tribe with which one has identified. The persons in another tribe become the embodiment of evil, while their tribe is on a righteous cause. We are losing what it means to be “with” others and “together” with those who disagree. Are we losing a sense of intimacy? Social arrangements are increasingly complex. Technology as practiced can lead to increased isolation. Yet, we are social beings whose center is outside us, that is, in the interpersonal and in our connection with transcendent mystery. Are we losing an ability to experience our world and contemplate that which is not us? Such a stance toward life requires the capacity of the long-distance runner rather than looking for every short-cut. Are we losing the ability to have a critical spirit toward our own ideas, opinions, and groups with which we have united? This would be a great calamity for our world.[38] Our lives need more of the quality of welcoming others, especially those with whom we differ.[39] Adopting such an approach will be counter-cultural, it will take courage. 

Of danger is the progressive who magnifies the sins of modernity and undervalues the ways in which modernity has sought to repent of these sins and amend its life in the direction of furthering the spirit of freedom. 

Theology needs to have the power to persuade and to strengthen the practice of the Christian faith. For any religion to be living and active, it needs to become an affair of the heart and passion of its adherents. Such experiences are not legitimate sources for theology, for feeling is far too subjective. Such experiences contained in the act of faith, in conversion, need further clarification and confirmation in an ongoing process of experience. Irrational fanaticism that locates religious truth in the realm of feeling is a sign of weakness, leaving rationality to the culture. Religions deal with forms of human life, the ordering and shaping of individuals and communities. The question in any theological work is whether it has the power to do that today in sufficient numbers beyond the theologian who writes. It also has a future reference. Is it lasting and reliable? That which is true shows itself as such as time progresses. Truth is accessible to us as human beings in the relativity of our experience and reflection. We do not have access to the true meaning of things and events in our world so long as the course of history continues. The extent to which we humbly share truth as we have to experience it and reflect upon it, we rest upon the confidence that we are sharing an anticipation of the fullness of truth. The meaning we ascribe to the data of individual history and to the events of social history depend on anticipation of the totality that is developing in history. These anticipations constantly change with further experience because as we move ahead the horizon of experience broadens. This does not rule out the possibility of provisional experiences of the reality of God and of the faithfulness of God in the course of history. However, all the statements that we make in the specific mode of human talk about God, rest on anticipations of the totality of the world and therefore on the yet non-existent future of its uncompleted history. This applies also to knowledge of God based on the historical revelation of God. The knowledge of Christian theology is always partial in comparison to the definitive revelation of God in the future. Recognizing the finitude and inappropriateness of all human talk about God is an essential part of theological sobriety. Every religion meets its test in the power it influences in the lives of individuals. Human history records many religions. Most of them died. The same is true of Christianity in general. We have no way of knowing today the truth of Christianity. Every Christian theology has an open quality to it in that only the future will determine its power and influence. It must interpret the central symbols of the tradition for a theological interpretation of the present situation, risk new interpretation of the tradition and the present situation, risk envisioning a Christian future, and recognize the complexity and ambiguity of interpretation. It needs to provide some objectivity to what conversion to Christian belief and life might look like. Part of the theological task is to define itself as an activity, it presents a possible correlation between faith and a theological interpretation of the present situation, it must be appropriate and understandable, it contributes to proclamation and apologetics, it will recognize the interrelated disciplines of historical theology, systematic theology, and practical theology, and it will recover the essential unity of theological reflection.

Within the broad Christian community, in our pluralist setting, unity of theological perspectives is not possible. The conflict of our interpretations is our actuality. I do not see the possibility of a theological paradigm emerging that will unite various theological perspectives. Such an observation could lead to pessimism and despair. It could lead us to dogmatism of the Left and Right. However, genuine consecration and dedication to God can lead us out of captivity and into freedom. Conversation is our hope. Hope has a prophetic tone. It can lead us to creative fidelity to the community of the followers of Jesus of the past, present, and future. It can also lead to a form of creative destruction of what I love now so that I can embrace the new. Here is the challenge. Given the expansion of the spirit of freedom, it is tempting to look down upon previous generations of modernity with moral superiority. Given the advances in theological reflection in a time of pluralism, it is tempting for this generation of theologians to proceed with a moral superiority that ignores the insights of the past. Such a witness has made a commitment and is willing to stand in the presence of others to offer their testimony. Testimony bears on an event or that part of an event that is unique and irrevocable.[40] The spirit of freedom needs institutions like religious communities to strengthen the slender threads that hold a free society together. Religious communities need to take many of the insights of modernity into itself, listen with discernment, allow creativity to emerge, and become salt and light in a culture that desperately needs the insight and wisdom of the ages.

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[1] (M. C. Taylor 1984) Chapter One.

[2] (Lyotard 1979, 1984) Foreword by Fredric Jameson.

[3] (Lyotard 1979, 1984)

[4] (M. C. Taylor 1984), Chapter One and Two.

[5] (M. C. Taylor 1984) Chapter Five.

[6] (M. C. Taylor 1984) Chapter Five.

[7] (C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments 1995) 2-8.

[8] (C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments 1995) 9.

[9] (C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments 1995) 8-13.

[10] Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.

[11] (Rescher, Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason 1997)

[12] (C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments 1995) 13-15.

[13] (C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments 1995) 17.

[14] (C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments 1995) 15-19; (C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 1989) 488.

[15] (Tarnas 1991) 398-9.

[16] (Tarnas 1991) 418-9.

[17] (C. Taylor, A Secular Age 2007) 613.

[18] (C. Taylor, A Secular Age 2007) 635.

[19] (C. Taylor, A Secular Age 2007) 726.

[20] (C. Taylor, A Secular Age 2007) 373.

[21] (C. Taylor, A Secular Age 2007) 586.

[22] (Tarnas 1991) 351.

[23] (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1985, 1987), Chapter 9. (Foucault 1966)

[24] (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1985, 1987) Chapter 10.

[25] (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1985, 1987) Chapter 11.

[26] —Richard Rohr, adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (Crossroad, 2009), 28-29.

[27] —Alister McGrath, interviewed by Ruth Jackson, “Alister McGrath, a world expert on C.S. Lewis shares his thoughts,” Patheos.com, December 26, 2020.

[28] —Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (HarperCollins, 2007), 132.

[29] (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1985, 1987) Chapter 11.

[30] (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1985, 1987) Chapter 7.

[31] (M. C. Taylor 1984), Chapter Three.

[32] (M. C. Taylor 1984) Chapter Three.

[33] (M. C. Taylor 1984) Chapter Three

[34] (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1985, 1987), Chapter 7.

[35] (C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 1989) 489-90.

[36] (M. C. Taylor 1984)

[37] (M. C. Taylor 1984) Chapters 6, 7, 8.

[38] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960)

[39] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950)

[40] (Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism 1956, 1966)