Postmodernism Etc...

Since the 1980's it has become common to consider ourselves in a "postmodern" age. But what exactly does that mean? Probably the best way to start exploring the question is to recognize that "post" modern surely means in a most basic way "after" modernism. Apparently, we best define postmodernism not so much in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it is not. And what it is not, is modernism.

Now to be sure, we can describe postmodern culture without reference to modernism. Postmodern culture is pluralistic, it emphasizes not only the tolerance of all ideas but professes them all to be just as valid as each other. There is less a sense of an overarching right or wrong. Everybody's business is their own business. Whatever floats your boat is your own business. We could play out this Zeitgeist in all sorts of areas ranging from art to ethics.

But to understand postmodernism as a philosophical development, we best look at what it is unraveling. In the philosophical sense, you can hardly be a post-modern if you have not at least passed through the fires of modernism. Historians of Western thought usually point to Rene Descartes as the father of modern philosophy because of the way he turned philosophy's attention on me as a knower. He asked not what is certain in general, but how can I know what is certain.

This development in philosophy roughly paralleled the rise of science and the decline of the church as sources of truth. The focus in the quest for truth comes to be evidence and the goal objectivity, the ability to look at the world without bias or preconception about where the evidence will point. Stanley Grenz likened the goal of modernist epistemology to Spock in the late 60's TV sitcom Star Trek. [A Primer on Postmodernism] Spock was half human and half Vulcan. He struggled to keep the emotions of his human side under control so that he could think objectively about things.

Grenz considers the transition from Star Trek to Star Trek the Next Generation a metaphor for the transition from modernism to postmodernism. If Spock has emotions but does his best to bury them and keep them from affecting his thinking, Data in the Next Generation has no emotions because he is an android, but he covets them and finally receives them in the first Next Generation movie.

Therefore, postmodernism in the philosophical sense is a movement that recognizes the vast limitations of human objectivity. Such reactions vary among thinkers "after modernism." Some would throw out the concept of truth altogether. The meaning of a text is a free for all, whatever you want it to mean. There is no such thing as reality, I can make my world whatever I want to make it. Then there are those like me, the author of this chapter, who believe that we can still speak of truth and of more and less objective understandings of it.

Reality After Modernism
In some senses, postmodernism on reality is simply a different trajectory than Descartes and Kant took. Descartes concluded that the only thing I couldn't doubt was that I exist because I am doubting. We should revise his answer. Whatever it is I am calling doubt exists. Whether I exist as a person thinking the doubt is a different matter.

Descartes then rebuilds reality with confidence, bringing God in as a deus ex machina, the god of the ancient play who swoops in on some mechanism and rescues the person in distress. Because we can trust God, we can trust that the world basically is as it appears. Kant makes a similar move almost two hundred years later. Sure we can only know the world as our minds process it, but God has made the mind software, so it must work properly.

This tendency among believing philosophers to bring God into the mix highlights the fact that faith is always involved with our belief in reality and in what we know about it. Apart from believing that something exists, everything else that we believe, to one degree or another, requires faith, where faith is belief in the face of varying degrees of uncertainty. In saying that faith is always involved, we should not assume that faith is always blind faith. Blind faith is when we believe in something for which there is very little or no evidence at all, but we choose to believe anyway. Faith is belief without absolute certainty. Most of the time faith is not blind.

So does reality exist? I'll have to admit I can't prove it. I could be a brain attached to wires in a vat somewhere. I could be a sophisticated computer program like the Matrix. I suppose I could even be dreaming (although if so, this is the most vivid dream I've ever had). My belief that I actually exist on a planet called earth in the early twenty-first century requires faith--in some senses an immense amount of basic faith.

But it is a faith that works very well. In the 1700's, Thomas Reid became the "father" of what we might call the school of Scottish Realism. He called it "common sense realism" and others call it "naive realism." This is a sense that we actually do know the world directly through intuition. Over the last two hundred years several philosophers have suggested in one way or another that Descartes set us up for confusion by making the hard and fast distinction between ourselves and the world, the distinction between me as subject and the world as object [see the last chapter].

There is a great appeal, especially on a popular level, just to take the world as it is. I would argue--and because we are talking postmodern now, I intentionally bring myself as the writer of this chapter into view--that this common sense realism is fine as long as it acknowledges that this is an item of faith. Because I can brainstorm other possibilities that the common sense realist cannot disprove on her own terms she must concede that faith is involved. [this also applies to the phenomenologist that we will discuss in the final chapter]

A slightly different perspective that arrives at an ironically similar destination is pragmatic realism. These are those that consider questions about what is truly behind reality as largely irrelevant. What is real is the way things work in our world. Some, like Hilary Putnam, are more optimistic that what we are seeing might have some sort of reality beyond our interaction with the world. Others like Richard Rorty don't think there is any meaningful reality beyond how we function in the world. It seems to me that we are on good ground to accept at least this much. We may not be able to prove or demonstrate much of anything about the nature of the world beyond our interaction with it, but it is not incoherent to operate by faith as if it exists.

We as Christians might want to exercise even more faith and consider ourselves critical realists. We recognize that because of the fallen state of the human mind after Adam (whatever this might mean), we do not see the world objectively. But we have faith in a God who is a God of truth and thus that there is a reality out there that is real. We are critical of our own apprehension of that reality, but by faith we believe in reality.

Truth After Modernism
If Richard Rorty is perhaps the major postmodern philosopher to know in relation to reality. Michel Foucault is probably the one to know in relation to the topic of knowledge. For Foucault, "knowledge is violence." That is to say, all knowing of the world is an imposition on the world.

We might call Foucault a "post-structuralist," because he believes that all the patterns and structures we think we "find" in the world are really ideas we are forcing on the world. In one sense, Foucault's idea here makes sense. The world is an almost infinite collection of individual bits of data. Our finite minds cannot master even the smallest portion of that data, let alone have anywhere near a complete sense of how each bit relates to every other bit.

The result is that our knowing of the world requires us to "select" certain bits of the world as more important than others, which we then implicitly "deselect." We prioritize certain data and "rip" it "violently" from reality. Then we usually claim to have discovered the pattern in reality. Foucault suggests we are rather forcing the pattern on reality.

Truth for Foucault is thus not real but is a matter of power. What is true is what I can convince or force others to "see" with me. Ironically, Foucault studied a number of patterns in history that seem to "work" very well. He not only studied the history of sex but also the history of crime and of insanity. His constructions of reality are at many points very convincing. So he argues that sexuality as a distinct aspect of a person is a fairly recent way of structuring knowledge. And he shows how the punishment of crime has moved in the last century from a technique of public shame to a private revenge ceremony.

In the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn seems to embody this approach to truth well. Kuhn has argued that scientific paradigms or ways of interpreting specific subjects are constantly changing and do not really point to any fixed truth. So at one time the "normal science" perspective was that the sun went around the earth. When Copernicus then argued that the earth went around the sun, his math was not at all the clear winner in the argument. But, in a Foucaultian way, we was able to convince a group of scientists who eventually had enough power to overthrow the geocentric paradigm. It was only with Johannes Kepler that the math actually superceded the other side.

Normal science resists paradigm change. Instead, it uses its power to maintain its status as the dominant paradigm. But there is almost always data out there that doesn't fit very well into the paradigm. I like to call it "naughty data." Eventually, someone notices this aberrant data and rather than using their intellect to try to fit the data into the present paradigm, they brainstorm a completely different one. They generally face resistance and opposition. But if they can gain power in the guild, their ideas might get a hearing. If the younger scientists go for the idea, the older scientists will eventually die off. Viola--a new dominant paradigm!

The history of science seems filled with examples of this process. We have already mentioned Copernicus and the question of whether the sun goes around the earth. We could also mention belief in the existence of oxygen, relativity, and quantum mechanics in physics. This last paradigm shift is particularly interesting, because in its case Einstein was one of the "normal scientists" who didn't accept the new paradigm.

Quantum mechanics operates on the idea that when an electron is moving from one charge to another, it simply jumps--it doesn't pass through all the theoretical charges in between. This shift in thinking entailed all kinds of differences between the way Isaac Newton did physics and the way nuclear physicists do today. Einstein was one of many who opposed many aspects of quantum mechanics.

But he's dead now. Today we find almost no competent physicists who would agree with Einstein. But Kuhn would say they will get theirs eventually. Eventually someone will come along with another paradigm shift. Some would say that string theory may bring a similar revolution, although it hasn't yet. Kuhn initially took a very "pessimistic" view of paradigms, as if no paradigm was ultimately any better than any other. In the second edition of his work, he allowed for the possibility that some paradigms might account for data better than others [Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Ironically, it was the topic of evolution that pushed him to make this allowance. He did not want to allow for the possibility that creation science might be an equally valid way of understanding the scientific evidence]

Texts after Modernism
We might finally mention how postmodernism has played itself out in relation to the meaning of texts. Here the key player is Jacques Derrida, the "father" of deconstruction. Deconstruction is a movement that believes there are no fixed meanings in any text. As soon as you try to construct the meaning of a text, it unravels or "de-constructs" before you.

The following illustration is a caricature of the deconstructionist idea. Let's say I want to know the meaning of the previous sentence. I go to a dictionary and look up each of the words. But what do I find? More words! I could spend the rest of my life looking up the words in the definitions of the words in the definitions of the words in the definitions of each word in that sentence. Meaning becomes like a dog chasing its tail.

Now this illustration does not do justice to Derrida, but it points us in the right direction. The main idea is that words have no meaning in themselves. We find the meaning in the difference between this word and that word, or as Derrida liked to put it, in the differance between them, in the "traces" of meaning left in the movement from one word to the next.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, Derrida is not as pessimistic as we might make him sound. After all, he wrote books and wanted others (at least some) to understand him. But he seems to bring up a valid point. Take the word gift. What does it mean? If you are an English speaker, you no doubt think of a present of some sort. But if you are a German speaker, you will see here the word for poison.

The meaning of a word does seem to be a function of the mind looking at the word. To be sure, we don't just invent our own individualistic meanings to words. Stanley Fish has pointed out that we get our "dictionaries" for words from the communities to which we belong. Ludwig Wittgenstein put it a different way. The meaning of a word is a function of the "language game" we are playing in a particular "form of life."

If I say, "fire" in a crowded theater, the language game tells me that this is a command to run for your life. If the form of life is a firing squad and I am holding a gun in my hand pointed at someone, I am being told to shoot the person. If a boss tells me "you're fired" or I am on a deserted island and finally someone has managed to rub two sticks together enough to get a spark, all of these situations have different games that tell me what meaning to take from the word fire. The word has no intrinsic meaning apart from a particular context.

So Wittgenstein is also known for asking the question, "If a lion could speak, would we understand it?" The answer he is looking for is "no," because even if you could put its words into Google and translate it, we would not know the language game needed to understand it because we do not know the forms of life that pertain to a lion.