In his next chapter (4), Grenz does a good job summarizing the views of the modernists, against whose goads the postmodernists have been kicking. He says, “if we are to understand the postmodern agenda, we must look at the rise of the modern mentality to which contemporary thinkers are so vehemently responding” (p. 57).
We begin with the troublesome totalizing of Francis Bacon, who famously said “knowledge is power.” And so it is, says the pomo, but there are hidden costs. “Michel Foucault, for example, alerts us to the dark side of Bacon’s vision. He asserts that when the researcher acts as the ally of the technologist of society, knowledge is transformed into the exercise of power over others in the form of violence against others. Foucault concurs with Bacon’s assertion that knowledge is power, but he maintains that its power is the power of violence” (p. 59). Such is the cost of relatively pain-free dentistry.
So we keep hearing about this Grendel of Enlightenment. When was it? How did it start? “The explosive era in Western intellectual history from about 1650 to 1800 is commonly referred to as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason” (p. 60). That would make the high point of medieval civilization . . . the Westminster Confession of Faith! But I digress.
The Age of Reason “replaced God with humanity on center stage in history” (p. 61). Enough of that, scoffers seemed to say, and walked in like they owned the place, which they soon did. After they did this, they began telling the story of what they had done, only they cleaned it up a little. As N.T. Wright points out, this narrative explanation is a central aspect of every worldview, and it is no exception with this. Even the postmodernists still tell the story of how secular Enlightenment brought us up out of the Egyptian darkness of Sectarian Strife and Warfare, and delivered us from the constant threat of Episcopalians and Baptists shooting at each other. “In the eyes of many intellectuals, the doctrinal disputes that divided Christians into competing confessional camps lay behind the armed conflicts that had ravaged the continent” (p. 63). The problem with this story is that it isn’t true, as Cavanaugh shows in his challenging book Theopolitical Imagination. But aside from that, it provides a great catechism category for the little secular kids asking their parents about the reason for these Enlightenment Passover celebrations.
A discussion of this would not be complete without acknowledging Descartes’ cogito. He begins with radical doubt, and discovers that he cannot effectively doubt that he is doubting, and so he must be there to be doubting in the first place, and that he ought to have said, “Dubito ergo sum.” This was bad whiskey for a number of reasons, but the first effect of it was that it placed the individual at the conceptual starting point. No longer was the life of the mind to begin in Christ. But Scripture says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. It does not say that the fear of the Lord can be safely set aside in order to conduct our philosophical investigations.
The effects of all this soon began to felt everywhere. “In turning to this method, Enlightenment investigators narrowed their focus of interest — and hence began to treat as real — only those aspects of the universe that are measurable” (p. 66).
This had an impact on believers, of course. “However, the revolutions in philosophy and science they engendered resulted in a new view of the world and of our place in it that has not always been sympathetic to the Christian faith” (p. 67). But this was not because of any technological discoveries in themselves, but rather because of the narrative that was being constantly intoned right alongside each discovery. The problem was not so much the movie, but the soundtrack. It was like looking at a jawbone or something in the Smithsonian, and you are fascinated by it. You then turn to read the little explanation next to the case and discover that three bazillion years ago this jawbone fell out of a crab nebula that had just been sucked through a black hole and couldn’t hold on to its jawbones anymore. Or something Scientific, I can’t keep up. I have no real quarrel with the bone in the case. My problem is with the story.
But still, the modernist guys got somethings right. One of the things they got right was sticking with something that every human being in the history of the world has known. “Enlightenment theorists assumed that a correspondence between the structure of the world and the structure of the human mind enables the mind to discern the structure inherent in the external world” (p. 68). Of course they had to fuss over it, and get some philosophical jargon in there, the stuff about structures. But everybody knows, from Adam on down, that there is a . . . what word other than correspondence shall I use? one that won’t set people to calling me a philosophical naif? — oh, never mind, that there is a correspondence between my knowledge of stuff and the stuff in its stuffiness. Stuffiness is not the word I want. Between my knowledge of stuff and stuff-in-itself. In other words, I have the temerity to believe that God created a world that he enables me to look at. And see. Say that I see a watermelon. Not only can I see it, I can thump it, and if I walk out of the room and cover my eyes, I have every confidence that the rind is still green and the insides still red. Call me radical.
Grenz ably summarizes four key elements of the modernists’ worldview — reason, nature, autonomy, and harmony (pp 68-69). They did some other stuff too. “Enlightenment ethicists stepped away from the belief that all human beings are born in sin and naturally inclined to evil” (p. 70). Yeah, that one had to go. And since hubris was the order of the day, there was a naive faith in “progress” (p. 70).
The end result was a tamed and domesticated religion, one that wasn’t scary and superstitious like the Christian faith had been. “Natural religion involved a set of foundational truths (typically believed to include the existence of God and a body of universally acknowledged moral laws) to which all human beings were presumed to have access through the exercise of reason” (p. 71).
Then Hume came along and did his radical skeptic thing, and everyone just stood there, pole-axed. “We don’t know nothing,” about sums it up. A mild-mannered Prussian philosopher appeared and threw himself into the breech, and brought about a Copernican Revolution in epistemology. The only difference is that Copernicus offered the relatively simpler explanation of the earth going around the sun. In epistemological terms, Kant’s insight posited that all motion in the solar system should be interpreted as revolving around one of Jupiter’s moons. This results in lots of epicycles, and a few figure eights, but the autonomy that this gave to that moon made the whole thing worthwhile. “In a similar manner, Kant elevated the mind to the center of the human knowing process (epistemology). He theorized that we can experience the world around us only because of the active participation of the mind” (p. 74). You can’t be serious. Say that again. I am seriously thinking about changing my major from philosophy to forestry.
“To this end, he proposed a bold hypothesis: the mind is active in the knowing process” (p. 76). Okay, I’ll bite. How active? “He maintained that space and time are not properties that inhere in things but are rather parts of the ordering that the mind imposes on the world it encounters” (p. 76). Whoa. Pretty active. And here, in the confines of my mind (the brain of which weighs a few pounds), I summon up my god-like powers, and bestow on the universe the much needed categories of space and time. Before breakfast.
“We can gain no knowledge of things-in-themselves, at least not through sense experience and use of the scientific method” (p. 77). We can’t know anything the way it is, but we can create everything the way we experience it. Might the universe-as-it-is not be there at all? Who can say? Might it be off four-wheeling in a noumenal meadow? Could be, but down here in the nitty-gritty of phenomenal creativity on my part, I just content myself with, as I say modestly to myself, fixing the whole world.
“And his work marked the inauguration of modernity in its fullness, the era characterized by a focus on intense self-reflection. Kant was the first philosopher to scrutinize so thoroughly the nature and limitations of reason itself” (p. 79). And people took all this seriously, which just goes to show. And all of them pretended merrily together that it somehow answered David Hume. And they got away with it, even though the whole modernity project was now creaking ominously from the Kantian sky-hook that had been bolted firmly in the stratosphere.
“Rather than viewing the self as one of several entities in the world, Kant envisioned the thinking self in a sense ‘creating’ the world — that is, the world of its own knowledge. The focus of philosophical reflection ever since has been this world-creating self” (p. 79). As Dave Barry might say, I am not making this up. Neither is Grenz.
But since we have radically centered everything in Me, how am I to communicate with my fellow philosopher homies? How can we coordinate anything? Maybe there are bunch of minds out there, and maybe they are not doing the same space/time structuring that I think best. How do we synchronize this stuff? The answer is found in a concept developed by Staples office supplies, a philosophical concept called the “Easy Button.” You just push it, and everything works out. “The transcendental pretense assumes that the workings of one’s own mind and the mores of one’s own culture reflect what is universally rational and therefore what is universally human” (p. 80). Ah, there we go.
Now a review of all this modernity stuff reminds every right-minded Christian to thank the God of heaven that modernity has come a cropper. But of course, we have felt that way for several centuries, and now that modernity is showing signs of stress, the postmodernists have rushed up and declared victory, and a new aeon to boot. The difference between the autonomy of modernity and the autonomy of postmodernity is the difference between white and egg-shell white. The Christian faith is, and has always been, electric blue. What’s wrong with this picture?
“Whatever else postmodernism may be, it embodies a rejection of the Enlightenment project, the modern technological ideal, and the philosophical assumptions upon which modernism was built” (p. 81). Yeah, right. Whatever else the postmodern residents of eastern Rhode Island might be, they are united in their rejection of the mores of modernist western Rhode Island. They also united in rejecting the robust Trinitarianism of conservative Bible believers out in South Dakota on the grounds that South Dakota is way too influenced by western Rhode Island.
I am going to go to bed now. Before Kant starts to make sense to me.