2 What is Postmodernism?

I mentioned a moment ago that a good starting definition for postmodernism is simply to define it as "after modernism"--fair enough. So what is modernism? Are we referring to a period of cultural history, to a philosophy? These labels seem all too vague and imprecise, even if they are pointing to some truth somehow.

Indeed, before I am done defining postmodernism, I hope to convert this language into categories that are slightly more precise and useful.

In philosophy, we might date the birth of "modern" philosophy to Rene Descartes, author of the famous dictum, "I think; therefore, I am." Descartes had set himself to doubt everything that he could possibly doubt. By the time he was finished, he found that the only thing he could not doubt was the fact that he existed as a doubter. Movies like the Matrix now of course call even that into question. Perhaps I am a very sophisticated future computer program. So maybe we should now put it as "I think; therefore, something is."

Let me use Descartes to point out three of the no doubt many features of the modernist period of Western thought. Descartes was very reflective in his doubting process--he was focused on himself as a "knower." Secondly, he tried to be as objective as possible. He tried as logically as possible, using the evidence at hand, to form an unbiased unconclusion. Secondly, he was preoccupied in his venture with certainty of knowledge. He wanted to know what he could not doubt about reality.

These are some of the main features of modernism as we are speaking of it. You will notice how scientific these characteristics all sound. It is no coincidence that these last five hundred years have been the age of science. As Stanley Grenz once suggested, the character of Spock from Star Trek is an excellent picture of modernism. He is completely aware of himself as a knower, can tell you the percentage of certainty on any question, and is absolutely objective--he is in control of his emotions and they do not influence his decisions.

I will now sadly reveal that I can quote certain lines from the first Star Trek movie in the '80's. Captain Kirk and Spock are having a casual conversation when Kirk says something like, "I won't argue with you." Spock then responds, "That is wise." It is not that Spock is boasting--he cannot boast, for that would involve his emotions. He is simply making a logical, objective assessment of the situation. He objectively, as a detached knower of reality, knows that he is correct. It would be foolish to argue with someone who knows the truth and is completely objective and certain.

Against this backdrop, postmodernism affirms that no knowledge is certain, that no one is completely aware of themselves as a knower, and that no one can thereby be completely objective. Here I am struck by the fact that these characteristics of postmodernism are really the outworking of the original "modernist" principles that I first mentioned. Indeed, these concepts seem to flow naturally out of Descartes' agenda to doubt anything he could doubt until he could not doubt anything. He just didn't see that he could doubt further than the existence of himself as an "I."

So what we call postmodernism is really only the answer to the modernist equation. It is the outworking of the principle that we are all stuck in our heads, that we reflect on the world from where we sit and that no one can be fully objective. There is no such thing as Spock, emotions or no emotions. Everything except existence itself can be doubted--and maybe the only reason I think existence itself cannot be doubted is because I've missed something ;-)

Let us therefore use slightly more precise categories than the vague terms, pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. The entire enterprise basically collapses into pre-modern and post-modern: unreflective knowing and various degrees of reflective knowing. These are not really epochs of culture or stages of development in an individual's intellectual pilgrimage. This is everyone at every point of his or her life. We are all at the same time some combination of reflectivity and unreflectivity. And it is impossible for us to know the exact combination for we are, by definition, unaware of those things about which we are unreflective. We can perhaps get some sense of where we've been in relation to where we are now and at least have the impression that we are more reflective today than we were yesterday and thus more reflective than we might be.

Accordingly, only God is perfectly reflective in His knowing. Only God knows all the data in its proper relationship to all the other data. Only God is truly objective and certain in His knowing.

You'll notice that I have introduced God into the equation. So did Descartes, Locke, and so many of the early modernist philosophers at this point. The enterprise of epistemological reflection--reflection on the manner of our knowing--inevitably raises the question of faith. Am I to get stuck in a profitless solipsism, where I conclude that I am the only thing that really exists and that you all are simply products of my warped and twisted imagination? Or am I to assume by faith what all sane people seem to--that while I can't prove it, things really do exist outside myself?

And here let me remind us of Immanuel Kant's contribution to these issues of epistemology, noting once again that postmodernism is little more than the working out of the modernist enterprise. Kant suggested that while the world outside myself exists, I can only know it as my mind processes it. What I can't know, he suggested, was das Ding an sich, the "thing-in-itself." I can know a wall as it appears to me. But I can't know what the wall really is apart from me knowing it (or what it likes to do on weekends). As a side note, Kant--like Descartes and others--finds himself introducing God into the equation again in order to end up with some sense of confidence that the way his mind puts reality together is something like what it actually is.

Let me flash forward to today. If we think of postmodernism as a bomb that has blown up human pretenses to knowledge, the smoke has had some time to clear and it looks to me that we have two things left standing. From a non-Christian perspective, what is left standing is Richard Rorty's pragmatic realism and, perhaps a slightly more Christian perspective, what is called critical realism. I would sum up pragmatic realism as a philosophy that says, "reality works." Sure, I can't really know for sure that things outside me exist, but it works to step out of the way of moving traffic.

Critical realism goes a little further. I affirm by faith that reality exists outside myself, but acknowledge that my apprehension of that reality will inevitably come from where I sit apprehending it. Within critical realism, we will find various levels of confidence by various individuals about the degree to which this perspective might skew our apprehension of reality in itself.

This quick overview is more than adequate for the task at hand. Time will tell of paradigms, the deconstruction in the meaning of texts, and the role of power in truth. (By the way, I might very fittingly have summed up these three "concepts" by way of their primary power brokers, three of postmodernism's most prominent "knowers": Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.