A Response to
Philosophical Postmodernism
by Norman L. Geisler
A Brief Background of
Postmodernism
Premodernism is often thought of as the time before 1650 A.D. The
dominant theme was metaphysics or the study of being (reality).
Modernism then began with Rene Descartes around 1650 and turned
attention to epistemology or how we know. The precise date of
Post-modernism is in dispute. Although its roots go to Friedrich
Nietzsche (d. 1900), it did not begin to take shape until around 1950
with Martin Heidegger and began to occupy a front seat in the discussion
a decade or two later with Derrida. The primary focus of
Post-modernism is hermeneutics or how to interpret. The object of
interpretation can be history, art, or literature, but deconstructing it
is the center of focus.
Someone has illustrated the difference
between the three periods of thought by the image of a referee.
The Pre-modern referee says: “I call them like they are.” The
Modern referee claims, “I call them like I see them.” But the
Post-modern referee declares: “They are nothing until I call them.”
Forerunners of Postmodernism
Modern western thought begins with two main streams: empiricism and
rationalism. David Hume represented the former and Rene Descartes
the latter. The empiricists stressed the senses and the
rationalist the mind. The empiricists began a posteriori in
sense experience, but the rationalist began a priori with innate
ideas in the mind. Immanuel Kant synthesized the two streams,
arguing that the senses provide the content of our knowledge but
the mind gives form to it. He claimed that the mind without the
senses is empty, but the senses without the mind are blind. The
unfortunate result of his brilliant but tragic synthesis was
agnosticism. We cannot know reality as it is in itself but only as it is
after it is mediated to us through the senses and formed by the
categories in our mind. Hence, metaphysics—knowing reality in
itself—is impossible.
Kantian agnosticism gave rise to Søren
Kierkegaard’s fideism on the one hand and Nietzsche’s atheism on the
other hand. Acknowledging the Kantian gulf between appearance and
reality, Kierkegaard suggest a “leap of faith” to the “wholly other” God
who transcends all capacity to know him with our minds. Nietzsche,
on the other hand preferred not to leap to an unknown God but to
pronounce God dead and simply go on willing the eternal recurrence of
the same state of affairs forever.
In the absence of any absolute Mind to express any absolute meaning,
Ludwig Wittgenstein built on Frege’s conventionalism and insisted that
we are all locked inside a linguistic bubble which allows us to make no
cognitively meaningful statements about the mystical (metaphysical)
beyond. That is to say, without saying God is dead, he insisted
that all meaningful talk about God is “dead” (i.e., meaningless).
Borrowing Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method, the later Martin
Heidegger posited a new hermeneutic which, giving up on any metaphysical
knowledge of reality, attempted to retrieve rays of truth to shine
through poetry (particularly that of Friedrich Holderlin). It is out of
this context that Jacque Derrida conceived his hermeneutical method of
deconstructions by which one deconstructs a text and reconstructs it
over and over again. Before we analyze that more carefully, it
will be helpful to contrast Modern and Post-Modern thought in general.
Contrast of Modernism and Post-Modernism
As can be seen from the following chart, there is an import shift
between modern and post-modern thought. The general shift is from
epistemology to hermeneutics; from absolute truth to relative truth;
from seeking the author’s meaning finding to the reader’s meanings; from
the structure of the text to destructing the text; from the goal of
knowing truth to the journey of knowing:
Modernism
Postmodernism
Unity of thought
Diversity of thought
Rational
Social and psychological
Conceptual
Visual and poetical
Truth is absolute
Truth is relative
Exclusivism
Pluralism
Foundationalism
Anti-foundationalism
Epistemology
Hermeneutics
Certainty
Uncertainty
Author’s meaning
Reader’s meanings
Structure of the text
Deconstructing the text
The goal of knowing
The journey of knowing
The Nature of Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a condition where [since God is dead] “anything is
possible and nothing is certain” (Vaclav Havel). Nietzsche pronounced
“God is dead,” but there are several different meanings that can be
given to this phrase “God is Dead.” It can mean God is dead--
1. Epistemologically--Kant
2. Mythologically—Nietzsche
3. Dialectically—Hegel
4. Linguistically—Ayer
5. Phenomenalogically—Husserl
6. Existentially--Sartre
7. Cognitively—Wittgenstein
8. Hermeneutically—Heidegger/Derrida
Of course,
many of these thinkers also believe God is dead actually (e.g.,
Nietzsche, Sartre, and Derrida), but this is beside the point at hand
here, namely, the methodology of Post-Modern deconstructionism.
Jacques Derrida:
Post-Modernism
Two of the dominant
figures in Post-modernism are Jacque Derrida and Paul-Michel Foucault.
Derrida wrote: Of Grammatology (‘67); Speech and Phenomena (‘67);
Writing and Difference (‘67); Limited Inc. (1970); Post Card: From
Socrates, Freud and Beyond (1972); Specters of Marx (1994).
Foucault wrote: Madness and Civilization (1961);
Death and Labyrinth (1963); The Order of Things (1966);
Discipline and Punish (1975); Archaeology of Knowledge
(1976), and History of Sexuality (1976-1984).
The starting
point for their post-modern thought was Nietzsche’s death of God.
For if
If there is no Absolute Mind, then
there is-
1. No absolute truth
(epistemological relativism)
2. No absolute meaning
(semantical relativism)
3. No absolute history
(reconstructionism)
And if there is no Absolute Author,
then there is—
4. No absolute writing (textual
relativism)
5. No absolute interpretation
(hermeneutical relativism)
And if there is no Absolute Thinker,
then there is—
6. No absolute thought
(philosophical relativism)
7. No absolute laws of thought
(anti-foundationalism)
And if there is no Absolute Purposer,
then there is—
8. No absolute purpose
(teleological relativism)
If there is no Absolute Good, then
there is—
9. No absolute right or wrong
(moral relativism)
The Death of All Absolute Values in
Post-Modernism
“Without God and the future life? How
will man be after that? It means everything is permitted now” (The
Brothers Karamazov, Vintage, 1991, p. 589). As Jean Paul
Sartre put it, “I knew myself alone, utterly alone in the midst of this
well-meaning little universe of yours. I was like a man who’s lost
his shadow. And there was nothing left in heaven, no right or
wrong, nor anyone to give me orders” (Sartre, The Flies, 121-122
in No Exit and Three Other Plays). Aldous Huxley acknowledge
this same conclusion when he wrote, “The liberation we desired was
simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system
and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to
the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom” (Ends and
Means, 272).
Perhaps no one described it better than
Bertrand Russell when he wrote of a world without God: “Man is the
product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
achieving…. His origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and
his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms….
All the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction
in the vast death of the solar system…. Only within the scaffolding of
these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the
soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built” (Bertrand Russell, “A Free
Man’s Worship” (in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 67).
In short, the root of Post-modernism is
atheism and the fruit of it is relativism—relativism in every area of
life and thought. Of particular interest is the post-modern attack
on foundationalism, history, and textual interpretation and how this has
affected Christian thought.
The Attack on
Foundationalism
Foundationalism is the view that there are fundamental self-evident
first principles which form the basis of all knowledge. It is at least
as old as Plato and Aristotle in the Western world, though it has been
the unwitting foundation of Christian Thought from the beginning of
time.
There is an important distinction between two
basic kinds of foundationalism often neglected by post-modern thought.
There is deductive foundationalism and reductive foundationalism.
Deductive foundationalism springs from modern rationalist like
Benedict Spinoza and Rene Descartes. It is based on a Euclidian
geometric model whereby certain axioms are defined as self-evident and
all other truth is deduced from them. The problem with this is
that not all axioms are necessary. Different axioms are possible,
both in mathematics and philosophy. Further, these rational axioms are
empty. They yield no knowledge about reality. For example,
saying “All triangles have three sides” does not tell us there are any
triangles. It merely says that if there are any triangles,
then by definition they must have three sides.
Reductive foundationalism finds roots in Aristotle and was
embraced by the great Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas. It states
that all truths are reducible to (or based on) self-evident first
principles. Every statement not evident in itself must be evident in
terms of something else. But there cannot be an infinite regress of
non-evident statements. For an endless regress of explanations is
nothing more than an attempt to explain away the need for an
explanation. Hence, there must be first self-evident statements in
terms of which non-evident statements are known to be true.
First principles of knowledge are self-evident. That is, they are
a statement where the predicate term is reducible to the subject
term, though not always deducible from it. The basic laws of thought
include the following:
Several things are noteworthy about these
first principles of thought.
First, they are all first
principles of thought and being. Why? Because “If there were
an infinite regress in demonstration, demonstration would be impossible,
because the conclusion of any demonstration is made certain by reducing
it to the first principle of demonstration” (Aquinas, Commentary on
the Metaphysics of Aristotle, 244). Or, as C. S. Lewis aptly
put it, “You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that
you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on
‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through
something is to see something through it. It is good that the
window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is
opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use
trying to see through first principles. If you see through
everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly
transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is
the same as not to see” (The Abolition of Man, 91).
Second, they self-evident
in the reductive sense. That is, there predicate is reducible to their
subject. So that once one understand the meaning of the subject
and predicate he can immediately see that they are self-evident.
For example, once one knows what the words “bachelor” and “unmarried”
mean, then he knows immediately that “all bachelors are unmarried men.”
Likewise, once one knows this is a three-sided figure, then he sees
immediately that it is a triangle.
Third, they are also
undeniable. That is, every attempt to deny them, affirms them (at
least implicitly) in that attempted denial. Take, for example, the
Law of Existence. I cannot deny that something exist without
existing to make the denial. The claim that I do not exists,
implies that I do exist to make the denial.
Fourth, these first
principles apply to all of reality. They are metaphysical first
principles. Unlike deductive foundationalism, they are not empty
and vacuous. They are first principles of being (reality). They
begin with something exists.
Fifth, from these
principles one can demonstrate the existence and central attributes of
God. For if something exists (#1), and if nothing cannot cause something
(#5), then something eternal and necessary must exists. And whatever
else exists, then it must be similar to God in its being (#7). But
not all being is a necessary being (#6). For example, I am a contingent
being, that is, I am, but I might not be. My non-existence is
possible. But I am a knowing and moral being (which is
undeniable). Hence there must be an eternal and necessary Being
who is a knowing and moral Being that exists (i.e., God). And if
God exists, then absolute thought, values, and meaning also exists.
In short, post-modernism is wrong.
A Critique of Postmodernism
This critique can be applied to other areas of
post-modern thought, for example, to deconstructionism in history and
textual interpretation. Let’s briefly apply it to history.
A Critique of Post-Modern View of History
According to a post-modern view of history,
we must deconstruct all historical accounts of the past since they are
relative and not objective. This, of course, would be destructive
of orthodox Christianity since it is a historic religion. We
believe, as the Apostles’ Creed says, that Jesus “was born of the Virgin
Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was
buried… [and] the third day He arose again from the dead.” These
are all historical claims, and if history is unknowable, then we cannot
know these to be true. But is history really unknowable?
Let’s briefly examine the post-modern arguments for the unknowability of
history. One historical relativist said, “The event itself, the facts,
do not say anything, do not impose any meaning. It is the historian who
speaks, who imposes a meaning” (Carl L. Becker, “What Are Historical
Facts?” in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, p. 131).
However, there is a serious self-defeating
problem with this claim. How can one know that something is not
objective history unless he has an objective knowledge of history that
enables him to say that a particular view of history is not objective.
One cannot know not-that unless he knows that. And
he cannot know not-objective history unless he knows objective history.
Second, it is self-defeating to deny objectivity in history. Even
Charles Beard, the apostle of historical relativity himself, wrote:
"Contemporary criticism shows that the apostle of relativity is destined
to be destroyed by the child of his own brain." For, "If all
historical conceptions are merely relative to passing events...then the
conceptions of relativity is itself relative." In short, "the
apostle of relativity will surely be executed by his own logic"
(Meyerhoff ed., The Philosophy of History in Our Time, 138,
emphasis added).
A Critique of a Post-modern Views of Hermeneutics
There are several characteristics of a deconstructionists view of interpretation.
First, it is based in conventionalism.
This is the view that all meaning is culturally relative.
However, this too is self-defeating for if “all meaning is culturally
relative” then even this statement would be culturally relative.
Yet it claims to be a statement about cultural relativity not one
of cultural relativity.
Second, post-modern hermeneutic claims that
there is no objective meaning. For all statements are made from a
subjective perspective. However, this too is self-destructive for
it amount to saying that it is an objective statement about meaning that
no statements are objectively meaningful.
Third, it denies that there is a
correspondence between our statements and their object. This denies the
correspondence view of truth. But the problem with denying that
truth corresponds to reality is that this very denial claims to
correspond to reality. So, one cannot deny statements correspond
to reality without making a statement he believes corresponds to
reality.
Fourth, post-modern hermeneutics is a form of
linguistic solipsism. Following Wittgenstein, Derrida believes
that we are locked inside of language in a kind of linguistic bubble and
cannot get out. However, this is a form of the “nothing-buttery”
fallacy. For all statements that imply we can know nothing but
what is inside the linguistic bubble imply that we have knowledge of
more than what is inside the bubble. Like the Kantian
contradiction, one cannot know about reality that he cannot know
anything about reality. Language is not a wall that bars us
from reality; it is a window that expresses the reality we know.
This linguistic solipsism fallacy is based on
the failure to recognize that creation is analogous to the Creator.
There must be a similarity between the Cause of finite being and the
Infinite Being that caused it. For one cannot give what he does
not have to give. He cannot produce what he does not produce.
Thus, the Source of all being must be similar to the being that he
brings into being.[1]
Fifth, according to post-modernism, logic is
language dependent. The laws of thought are, therefore, culturally
dependent. But this is clearly contrary to fact—the fact that
language is based on logic, not the reverse. For the basic laws of
thought (enumerated above) operate in ever language and culture, as do
the basic laws of mathematics. Logic transcends culture and makes
cross-cultural communication possible. The very claim that the Law
of Non-contradiction is not applicable to all cultures is itself a
non-contradictory statement about all cultures.
Sixth, another post-modern hermeneutical
premise is that meaning is determined by the reader, not by the author.
For they claim that every text is understood in a context and every
reader brings a new context to the text. Hence, it is not the
meaning of the author that is the true meaning of a text by the meanings
of the readers. However, here again we are faced with a
self-stultifying claim. For no post-modernist desires us to give
our meaning(s) to his words. He expects us to take the meaning of his
words (i.e., the author’s meaning). So, the denial that the
author’s meaning is the correct meaning implies that the authors’
meaning is the correct meaning.
The Problems with
Post-modernism
In
summation, the problems with post-modernism are: (1) It can’t be thought
consistently; (2) It can’t be spoken consistently, and (3) It cannot be
lived consistency. Why? Because it is based on atheism, and
atheism cannot be thought, spoken, or lived consistently. Evidence
for the inability to live atheism consistently comes from the lives of
atheists themselves.
Evidence for atheists that atheism cannot be lived consistently
Atheist Jean Paul Sartre wrote, “I reached out for religion, I longed
for it, it was the remedy. Had it been denied me, I would have invented
it myself… I needed a Creator….” (The Words, 102). Atheist
Albert Camus added, “For anyone who is alone, without God and without
a master, the weight of days is dreadful” (The Fall, 133).
Even Nietzsche wrote a poem to an “Unknown God,” crying out: “Unknown
one! Speak. What wilt thou, unknown-god?… Do come back With all thy
tortures! To the last of all that are lonely, Oh, come back!… And my
heart’s final flame --Flares up for thee! Oh, come back, My unknown god!
My pain! My last--happiness!” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Four,
“The Magician”).
Bertrand Russell expressed a revealing moment
when he wrote to a lady friend, “Even when one feels nearest to other
people, something in one seems obstinately to belong to God...--at least
that is how I should express it if I thought there was a God. It
is odd, isn’t it? I care passionately for this world and many things and
people in it, and yet…what is it all?” There must be something
more important one feels, though I don’t believe there is”
(emphasis is his).
A number of years, before the iron curtain
was lifted, while I was returning from Europe, I was given Time
magazine. The cover caught my attention. It read: “God is
Dead; Marx is dead, and I am not feeling too well either” (Time
cover, European edition, 1978). Nietzsche wrote, “I hold up before
myself the images of Dante and Spinoza, who were better at accepting the
lot of solitude. Of course, their way of thinking, compared to mine, was
one which made solitude bearable; and in the end, for all those who
somehow still had a “God” for company.... My life now consists in the
wish that it might be otherwise…and that somebody might make my “truths”
appear incredible to me…” (Letter to Overbeck, 7/2/1865).
Even David Hume could not live his
skepticism. He wrote: “Most fortunately it happens, that since
reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds [of doubt], nature
herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of the philosophical
melancholy and delirium…” (A Treatise on Human Nature 1.4.7).
So, what did he do? He said, “I dine, I play a game of backgammon,
I converse…; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would
return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and
ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any
farther” (ibid. 1.4.7).
Famous unbelieving historian and philosopher
Will Durant wrote: “I survive morally because I retain the moral code
that was taught me along with the religion, while I discarded the
religion…. You and I are living on a shadow…. But what will happen
to our children…? They are living on the shadow of a shadow” (Chicago
Sun-Times 8/24/75 1B).
The British
Humanist Magazine charged that Humanism is almost "clinically
detached from life.” It recommends they develop a humanist Bible,
a humanist hymnal, Ten Commandments for humanists, and even confessional
practices! In addition, "the use of hypnotic techniques--music and
other psychological devices--during humanist services would give the
audience that deep spiritual experience and they would emerge refreshed
and inspired with their humanist faith..." (1964). I have
composed some hymns for them: “Socrates, Lover of My Soul,” “No One Ever
Care for Me like Plato,” and “My hope is built on nothing less than Jean
Paul Sartre and nothingness”! A hymn for a Post-modernists might read
like this:
“Open my eyes that I may see,
More of my own subjectivity.
Help me, Derrida, ever to be
All absorbed in uncertainty.
Then I’ll know what it is to be
Lost forever in postmodernity.”
In summary, when atheists themselves evaluate atheism they conclude it like living on s a “shadow of a shadow.” It is not “bearable.” It is “dreadful,” even “cruel.” It even leads to “delirium.” The main point is that postmodernism is not only unthinkable and unspeakable, but it is unlivable.
Atheist Albert Camus declared that “Nothing
can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man” (Camus,
The Rebel, 147). Blaise Pascal insisted that there is a
God-sized vacuum in the human heart which nothing but God can fill.
He wrote: “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim
but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now
remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with
everything around him… though none can help, since this infinite abyss
can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words
by God himself” (Pascal, Pensees # 425). Former Atheist Francis
Collins who headed up the human genome project asked: “Why would such a
universal and uniquely human hunger [for God] exist, if it were not
connected to some opportunity for fulfillment?... Creatures are not born
with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby
feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling
wants to swim: well there is such a thing as water” (The Language of
God, 38). So, if there is a God-sized vacuum in the human
heart, then nothing smaller than God will be able to fill it.
Atheist Sigmund
Freud claimed that “What is characteristic of illusions is that they are
derived from human wishes.” As for “religious doctrines,” “all of
them are illusions and insusceptible of proof” (The Future of an
Illusion, 49-50). However, as it turns out it is the atheist who has
the illusion. For Freud never made a study of believers on which
he based his view. On the contrary, recent studies show that
belief in God leads to a better and happier life. Former Freudian did a
study of great atheist and found that they were fatherless wither
actually of functionally and that, rather than believers creating the
Father (God), atheists are attempting to kill the Father (Paul Vitz,
Faith of the Fatherless). He wrote, “Indeed, there is a coherent
psychological origin to intense atheism” (p. 3). “Therefore, in the
Freudian framework, atheism is an illusion caused by the Oedipal desire
to kill the father (God) and replace him with oneself” (p. 13).
Indeed, in Nietzsche’s famous quote about
“God is dead” the next line is “and we have killed him.” French
existential atheist Jean Paul Sartre, illustrates the point in his own
autobiography when he wrote: "I had all the more difficulty of getting
rid of him in that he had installed himself at the back of my head.… I
collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw him out; atheism is a
cruel and long-range affair; I think I've carried it through. I lost my
illusion” (The Words, 252-253).
However, even though Sartre had given up on
God, God had not given up on him. Before Sartre’s death he is
recorded as saying, “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a
speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected,
prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could
put here” (National Review, 11 June, 1982, p. 677). Indeed,
Sartre was disowned by his own mistress as a “turncoat” and visited by a
Christian minister regularly before his death. I have in my file a
letter from missionaries in France who knew Sartre who had expressed to
them his regret on how many young people he had led astray with his
atheistic thought.
[1]
Of course, there must be a difference between Creator and
creature since He is an infinite kind of Being and we are finite
beings. He is a Being with no potentiality
for non-being, and we are contingent beings which have the
possibility not to be. God is Pure Actuality
(with no potential not to exist), and all creatures are
actualities with the potentiality not to exist.
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