A Postmodern Trickle of Semi-Consciousness

So what are we to do with postmodernism? The greatest value of postmodernism in philosophy is the way in which it draws our attention to how little we really and truly know. Of course this idea is not new. We have seen that Socrates and others recognized this centuries before Christ.

But postmodernism points us to the ultimately "mythical" character of our knowledge. We argued in our chapter on the birth of philosophy that we do a disservice to ancient myths when we think of them as "bad science," as if the myths primarily served to explain how the world works. Rather, myths were far more poetic expressions of the mysterious workings of the world. Our scientific equations today are really just very precisely tuned myths. It is not at all clear that they tell us about the world.

What science and math do is express the mysteries of reality in very precise ways. But we have no way of knowing how they might relate to some reality-in-itself. So the distance something travels is the speed it is going times the amount of time it travels at that speed. This formula works very well to tell you how far you have travelled since the last pit stop. We can say that this myth really works when you're talking about things like cars.

But does it really tell us what the reality of these things is apart from us? What is distance, really? Is it a thought in the mind of God? What is time, really? Einstein told an even more precise myth he called relativity. It works even better than the myth above. Perhaps it will prove to be such a great mythical expression of how things works that we will never replace it.

Our attempt to arrive at what is true is our attempt to find the most accurate myths that we can to express the way the world works. We can believe all sorts of things about what is behind the way the world works--or not believe that there is anything behind it. But a good myth and one worthy of being called a "true myth" is one that accounts for the way things work the best.

Where does God and Christian revelation fit into this picture. Because we are stuck in our heads, it does not change the process by which we reach toward truth. As we saw in our chapter on a Christian View of the World, whether we like it or not, revelation still must pass through our reason and experience to get into our understanding.

But as believers we believe by faith that God exists and that He is involved in the world, that He is involved in the process of our understanding. This does not mean that God works around our myth-making ways. We find equally godly people in all the different forms of Christianity--and God lets them go on believing different things. We see over and over throughout biblical and Christian history that God's people have also formulated their understandings of God in ways that were deeply influenced by the culture of their day.

In short, God apparently does not reveal by showing us absolute truth removed from our worldviews and paradigms, our "myths." Rather, God's consistent mode of revelation seems to meet us where we are at, to meet us in our "myths" and make them work far better than they did before. He makes them far more true than they were before.

But the only One with a God's eye view on reality is God. Only He knows all the data of the universe in all of its relationships to all the other data of the universe. We see an infintesimal portion of it and comprehend the interrelationships of that portion only in part and in fact further as skewed by the perspective from which I can never fully free myself.

We are thus all myth-makers. All the words in this chapter are indeed attempts to express the myth-stery of life as precisely as possible. Derrida and Foucault were themselves mythmakers, as are other philosophers like Heidegger or Rorty. Those who urge us to stop thinking of ourselves as knowers and the world as that which is known are only urging a different myth that they think expresses the mystery better. And those who would urge us to stop talking "meta-talk"--talk about talk--are themselves only urging a different myth.

The key is not to mistake these stories philosophers tell themselves for reality. I will continue to use meta-language, and I will continue to discuss myself as a subject reflecting on reality. I do so not because I am committed to a particular subject-object metaphysic or epistemology, but because this mythical construct works really well. I use this language with an eternal footnote that says, "You should not think that I mistake this language for the actual nature of the world in itself." You foolish Lyotard to think I mistook these things for reality. The meta-myths never left the field you story tellers thought you captured.

Another thing that works is a movement toward greater reflectivity. I may not be able to become absolutely reflective, but I can point to places where I have become more reflective. The problem with modernism is that it thought it was more reflective than it was. It labeled the lack of self-awareness of those before it pre-modernism.

But we are all at the same time some mixture of reflectivity and non-reflectivity. The postmodern truth is that we are never fully reflective. We see through a glass darkly. A healthy dose of postmodernism will not lead us to give up on the idea of truth and reflectivity altogether. After all, that approach to life certainly doesn't work. It is to know what we think we know humbly. To listen and learn from others, from all those around us, from all those of the past. Ironically, experience is the best path to greater reflectivity.

When God's kingdom comes, we'll see far more of the puzzle. Perhaps God will miraculously undo the egocentric predicament. Or maybe God will then enjoy watching how our myths become more splendid than anything we might currently imagine.