“Postmodernism” was a major catchword for both academics and the
wider public during the last couple of decades of the twentieth
century. It is losing that status today. Part of its
popularity had the character of a fad. Its paradoxical
character contributed to its popularity.
Nevertheless, the reality to which the term pointed is here to
stay, whether or not the paradoxical name is retained. I
myself favor retaining the name. This depends on choosing one
of two possible meanings of “modern.” The rejected meaning is
like that of the word “today”. The referent of that word
changes daily. Yesterday it referred to yesterday.
Tomorrow it will refer to tomorrow. Similarly, one may speak
of what was “modern” in Rome in the second century C.E. or in
Florence in the fifteenth century. “Modern” then is largely
synonymous with “contemporary.” And it would be not only
paradoxical but really meaningless to speak of what is going on at
any time as “post-contemporary.” Those who have ridiculed the
term “postmodern” have often had this use of “modern” in mind.
However, “modern” has had another widespread use. It is
derivative from the former use, but has crystallized around
particular movements. “Modern architecture,” for example, was
contemporary, cutting-edge, architecture when it was so
named. But the name stuck even when leading architects
criticized it and developed new styles. That they called
these styles, or some of them, “postmodern” was not silly.
Something similar occurred in literary criticism.
For the wider movement of postmodernism, however, a broader meaning
of “modern” has been more important. In the West we have long
spoken of “modern history,” “modern philosophy,” and “modern
science.” Many text books and course designations have
employed these labels. Here the modern period followed on the
medieval period, which followed on the classical period.
Scholars do not agree on exactly when to date the beginning of
modern history. Some have suggested that the fall of
Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1453 inaugurated the modern
period in Western Europe by bringing Eastern scholarship there.
But most histories have treated the fifteenth century as
Medieval and the seventeenth century as modern. The
Reformation of the sixteenth century can be considered to be
medieval in character or as an important initiator of
modernity. The issues that moved it were of the sort that
were important for medieval Christians rather than for modern
thinkers, but it brought the individual to the fore in a new way,
more appropriate to the modern world.
One may date modern history as beginning as late as 1648 at the
Treaty of Westphalia, where it was decided that the secular ruler
would decide about the religious institutions and practice of his
people. Even when a text on modern history begins much
earlier, secularization and nationalism are presented as major
characteristics of the modern period. I will return to this
feature of modernity toward the end.
It is in the history of philosophy that there is the greatest
agreement about the beginning of the modern period. Rene
Descartes is universally acknowledged to be the father of modern
philosophy. We may even date modern philosophy from the
publication of his Discourse on Method in 1637.
Needless to say, there are anticipations of his thought and even of
his method in earlier periods and it took time before other
philosophers adopted his approach. To his day there are many
philosophers who work form Thomistic rather than Cartesian
principles. Nevertheless, this book of Descartes was in
intention and in reality a break with previous forms of philosophy
and the initiation of something quite new. It was
post-medieval and has long been identified as “modern.” The
philosophy that has been influenced by it is called “modern
philosophy.”
The history of modern philosophy is often divided into two
parts. The first treats the major thinkers from Descartes to
David Hume. The second begins with Immanuel Kant and, at
least until recently, it simply came down to the time the course
was given. Although Kant was recognized as having changed the
philosophical landscape significantly, it was largely assumed that
the impulse given to philosophical thought by Descartes permanently
determined the nature of philosophy as such. It was thought
that although Descartes initiated something quite new, all future
philosophical thinking would grow continuously out of critical
reflection in the tradition he initiated. Hence the “modern”
was understood both to be a particular historical movement and to
be permanently contemporary.
“Modern science” is usually depicted has having its beginning
earlier than modern philosophy and, indeed, earlier that modern
history in general. Roger Bacon engaged in experimental
studies of a “modern” type as early as the thirteenth
century. More important, the father of modern astronomy,
Nicholas Copernicus, did his work a century earlier than
Descartes. Still it was in the seventeenth century that
modern science came into its own as a major factor in the culture
of the time. Descartes’s philosophy played a major role in
shaping the form of thinking that has characterized modern science
since that time. As in the case of Cartesian philosophy,
historians have generally assumed that all future science will
develop out of this seventeenth century science so that the meaning
of “modern science” can simultaneously be the science that
developed in the seventeenth century and contemporary science.
If this sketch of three major uses of “modern” is roughly accurate,
can we draw any conclusions as to some central characteristics of
the “modern?” One conclusion is that the modern Western world
had a sense of its own finality. It thought that its basic
characteristics, culturally, philosophically, and scientifically
were the form that historical advance must take. Any culture,
philosophy, or science that was fundamentally different from this
belonged to a superseded past. Modernity was inherently
capable of continual progress; so the sense of finality did not
mean that the modern West was static. But it did mean that
progress would come from the inner development of what it already
possessed. It did not need to look to other traditions for
guidance.
There is one area in which modern Westerners have made something of
an exception. That is in the area of religious belief and
practice. Of course, for most Christians no exception has
been made. Their view of Christianity in its relation to
other religions has been much the same as that of the modern West
with respect to philosophy and science. However, one mark of
the modern is secularization. That can mean the abandonment
of religious concerns altogether, but more often it has meant their
relativization, their subordination to other considerations.
Once this has occurred, modern people can examine the religious
beliefs and practices of other people in much the same spirit as
they study the practices and beliefs of their ancestors. In
the scholarly world, a more pluralistic view of religion developed
within the context of modernism. This was also true in the
field of art and to a lesser extent in other cultural
forms.
In this respect the fields of art history and history of religions
led the way in the twentieth century toward postmodern
thinking. Like all such changes, however, it took time and
struggle. The first step, and even today the only one that
has clearly been taken, was to develop modern methods of objective
study that led to appreciation of the multiplicity of art forms and
the multiplicity of religious beliefs and practices without judging
Western art or religion as superior. I say this is only a
first step, since it still implies that the modern Western mode of
scholarship is normative. It does not yet recognize that
comparisons of art forms and religious traditions might also be
made equally well in other ways besides that of Western
objectifying scholarship. This second step has not been taken
as widely, but it alone leads to a genuinely postmodern vision.
I have noted that secularization is part of modernization. It
is partly for this reason that the view that there are a variety of
points of view on religious pluralism other than that of Western
scholarship is so clearly postmodern. It rejects the modern
privileging of secularization. The variety is based on
allowing the plurality of religious traditions to formulate their
own ways of viewing one another, and that means recognizing that
the objectifying methods of Western scholarship are not necessarily
superior ways of approaching the plurality of the traditions than
are approaches developed by these religious communities themselves
out of their own
convictions.
Often rationality is affirmed as a characteristic of the
modern. For this to be accurate, we need a clear
understanding of how the modern West has understood
rationality. It has been understood largely as part of the
secularizing process. Reason has been viewed chiefly over
against the authority of tradition and revelation, which, it has
been assumed, are the basis on which religious communities make
their judgments. To be rational is to come to conclusions
based on facts, which include the facts disclosed by scientific and
historical study. It was generally assumed in early modernity
that once one clears away prejudices and external authorities, a
rational interpretation of the facts can guide the mind to
truth.
For the most part rationality and empiricism, in this way, went
hand in hand. However, there could also be tensions.
The strict empiricists insisted that reason had no other basis than
sense experience for development of its conclusions. Thus
when Hume showed that sense experience provided no basis for the
fundamental scientific idea of causal relations, this was a major
crisis. On the other hand, the rationalists believed that the
careful examination of fundamental ideas could also contribute to
an understanding of reality. This paved the way for Kant’s
response to Hume and for Kant’s idealist following. This
tension between rationalism and empiricism is internal to the
modern mind.
Modern reason was also set over against medieval speculation.
If one compares modern thinkers with those of the high Middle Ages,
one cannot judge that the moderns had higher expectations of mental
activity. On the contrary, the moderns judged that the
medieval philosophers had too great a confidence in the capacity of
thought to penetrate the mysteries of reality. What the
moderns called reason was closer to common sense. It was a
restriction on the activity of the mind imposed to insure more
reliable results. Thus confidence in the achievement of
modern reason, especially in science and other forms of
scholarship, accompanied restrictions on the use of reason to probe
fundamental questions, such as the question of what it means to
be. For example, once the basic nature of the reality studied
by science was set by the scientific and philosophical communities
in the seventeenth century, modern reason did not seriously
question it as medieval reason would have.
Beginning especially with Hume and Kant modern philosophy has
restricted its scope more and more narrowly. This stands in
marked contrast with its earlier ambitions. Descartes
undertook a comprehensive account of all reality, God, the human
mind, and the natural world. He believed that a rational
interpretation of empirical evidence could achieve this, once
inappropriate authorities were rejected. In the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries this confidence in the capacity of reason
eroded dramatically. Philosophy abandoned its earlier
synthetic role to become analytic. In one tradition it
developed phenomenology as a rigorous way of examining human
experience and its contents.
In another tradition it limited its attention to equally
rigorous examination of language.
Others followed Hegel in the analysis of concepts, not now to
construct a synthetic vision of human history but so as to show how
through time concepts have become corrupted and distorted so that
it is necessary to deconstruct the history of Western
thought.
All of these procedures share with the earlier forms modern thought
one feature. All are in quest of certainty. What one
can be certain about becomes less and less. But the methods
are designed to exclude doubtful material. They prepare the
way for the postmodern, but in themselves they may be considered
the “most modern.” They remain committed to reason in its
modern meaning, only with more and more restricted expectations of
what reason can accomplish.
The postmodern appears when the idea of certainty or objectivity is
abandoned. Everything is set into flux. Philosophy
becomes “nonfoundational.” All language is interpretation of
other language, and there is no one set of correct rules for such
interpretation. Diversity is appreciated, or at least
accepted, as ultimate. All beliefs are understood to arise
out of particular socio-cultural-economic historical contexts.
Among the beliefs that are thereby undercut are those that have
been integrated into scientific language. These are
expressive of the Cartesian worldview and have survived despite all
the problems found in that world view. The vast majority of
science has been built around the idea that the physical world is
composed of matter in motion and that all complex physical
processes are ultimately analyzable in these terms. The
matter in question is understood to have the properties normally
attributed to a “substance.”
Descartes himself taught that alongside this material substance is
a very different mental substance. This dualism of human mind
and the physical world is built deeply into the common sense of the
modern West, and is shared by the great majority of scientists at
the practical level at least. On the other hand, they often
teach that human beings are fully apart of the physical
world. This double teaching is a source of great
inconsistency and confusion in modernity.
For Descartes and for modern thought generally, each human mind is
a separate mental substance. Since mental substances, like
physical substances, are related to one another only externally,
this view of minds as mental substances leads to metaphysical
individualism. Metaphysical individualism both expressed and
supported individualism in economic and political thought, as well
as more widely in the culture. The powerful role of community
in the medieval period eroded rapidly in the modern West, most
extremely in the United States.
Characteristic of postmodernity is the erosion of the idea of the
substantial self. This has occurred through deconstruction of
the Western self in literature and philosophy and, to a lesser
extent, through interaction with Eastern thought, especially
Buddhism. It has also been influenced by developments in
contemporary science. Although this has not yet had much
effect on Western common sense, that is also beginning to
happen. In any case, the decentering or dissolution of the
substantial self or ego is fundamental to the break with the modern
vision.
Although I have been tracing the emergence of postmodernism
primarily in terms of the deconstructive version, most of what I
have said applies also to the constructive version. There can
be no constructive postmodernism in the West without deconstruction
of much of the Western tradition. This is true in the East
only insofar as the East has adopted modern Western thought forms,
but since the universities of East Asia are so deeply influenced by
the modern West, Easterners need at least to understand the
deconstructive process.
In other words, constructive postmodernism affirms the radical
pluralism of postmodernism generally. It understands modern
Western ways of thought, including modern Western science and
scholarship, as just one way of thinking alongside others. It
also abandons the quest for certainty and, therefore, for any solid
foundation on which to build constructive systems. It rejects
the dualism that has underlain modern Western thought and the idea
of a substantial self or ego.
Methodologically, however, it departs from deconstructive
postmodernism in its understanding of the challenge we postmodern
people face and how to respond to it. Constructive postmodern
thinkers believe that human beings need an inclusive vision of
reality more than ever before. We cannot respond to global
problems effectively out of the modern way of thinking, but we will
be even more severely limited if we use our intellectual capacities
only to deconstruct the modern. The danger of the
deconstructive approach, when not checked by others, is that it may
end in a debilitating relativism, one that seems to imply that it
makes little difference what one does or believes. It can
even lead to a thoroughgoing nihilism. This is not what the
world needs as it faces huge political and ecological crises.
The human mind, we constructive postmodernists believe, has
capacities that have atrophied during the modern period. We
focus on two. One is the identification and analysis of basic
assumptions wherever they function. The second is the
imagining of alternative assumptions and their testing.
To affirm that the human mind can and should engage in these
activities is not to continue a quest for certainty. We
recognize that there is no secure foundation on which to
build. All thought rests in concrete historical circumstances
and is conditioned by them. As circumstances change further
thinking is needed. However, we can learn here from the
sciences. They do not have the secure starting point they
once supposed, but they do have a good method of moving
forward. This method is to formulate hypotheses, to consider
what evidence would count for or against these hypotheses, and
then, through empirical search or experiment to test them.
That a hypothesis survives many tests does not establish its final
truth. But it does provide grounds for continuing to build
upon it and to expand the range of phenomena that are provisionally
explained. This hypothetical method, constructive
postmodernists believe, can supplement assumption criticism and
provide useful, and relatively reliable, guidance to global
society.
Constructive postmodernism did not arise as a corrective of
deconstructive postmodernism. It has been around longer,
although it did not emphasize the label. Its most important
founder, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote a book called Science and
the Modern World. Although he does not say so explicitly,
he treats the modern world in terms of the ideas and practices that
came to dominance in the seventeenth century. He shows how
brilliantly they succeeded, but he also notes the price paid for
this success. He also shows how they no longer suffice for
the sake of science itself. Throughout the book he indicates
alternative assumptions that could work better for science at the
time he wrote. Clearly, he is calling for a new conceptuality
that can replace the modern one.
He also points to the emergence of a new philosophy. He does
not point to phenomenology or language analysis. Instead he
points to William James and specifically his essay, “Does
Consciousness Exist.” This is a thoroughgoing deconstruction
of the Western substantial self or ego. He thus makes clear
that what is needed is a new understanding both of the natural
world and of the human being, and he points forward to a possible
new construction. Subsequently, in Process and
Reality, he spells out this new vision in rigorous
detail. We consider it the classical work in constructive
postmodernism.
Those of us in this tradition point to the crisis in physics at the
beginning of the twentieth century as the first great call to break
with the modern mind. A particular scientific worldview was
central to that mind, one that did not acknowledge its
particularity. But this scientific worldview proved unable to
account for either relativity or quantum phenomena. The
rational response would have been to examine the assumptions of
this scientific worldview and seek alternative assumptions that
would explain the whole range of scientific data. For us it
has been deeply disappointing that scientists on the whole have not
been open to any such enterprise.
Instead, scientists have accepted fragmentation. Where they
can account for their data in the old way, the great majority have
continued to do so, ignoring the new developments in physics.
Within the fields where the old assumptions glaringly do not work,
they have preferred to stay with the old models and declare that
the world is paradoxical. They have thereby contributed to
the further erosion of confidence in reason. Philosophers of
science have often argued that what all this shows is that the
human mind is not able to deal with reality as it is.
Constructive postmodernists believe that we should not give up on a
project before trying it. We believe that different
assumptions can lead to much greater intelligibility and
interpretive power. We have been proposing these assumptions
for some time, and slowly there has come some response.
These different assumptions, we think, are not that difficult or
obscure. The problem is simply that certain habits of mind
have so deeply characterized modernity, and our educational system
has so socialized students into them, that most people can not
imagine trying any other way of explanation. The
deconstructive work of deconstructive postmodernism may open the
door somewhat wider to experimentation with alternative
approaches.
Whereas modernity has been committed to viewing the physical world
as composed exclusively of matter in motion, we propose that we
view it as a vast field of energy events. Einstein showed
that matter and energy are convertible, but the implication is not
that it makes no difference which we take as basic. Already
“matter” in this context means nothing more than “mass,” and mass
can be explained in terms of energy, whereas energy cannot be
explained in terms of mass. There is a great deal of energy
in the universe that has no mass.
Energy occurs most immediately and directly in events rather than
in enduring objects. Enduring objects come into being as
successions of events. The patterns that emerge in fields of
events have both particle-like and wave-like characteristics, but
that does not mean that they are either particles or waves.
Both the idea of a particle and that of a wave assume the
metaphysics of matter in motion that is here rejected.
These events are largely constituted by their relations to other
events in the field. Indeed, one may view a single energy
event as what the field is in a particular locus. There are
no isolated or self-contained events.
There is another kind of event that is quite different from the
elementary ones of which I have been speaking. It is a moment
of human experience. Some portion of this event is usually
conscious, although most of it is not.
Despite all the differences, there are also similarities in basic
structure. A moment of human experience arises out of a vast
field of events. These events include the neuronal events in
the brain as well as a wider environment that includes other
people. They also include the past experiences that
constitute the person through time. Moment by moment this
vast array of events is synthesized into a new human
experience. This experience plays a role in shaping
subsequent events. Just as no material substance underlies
the quantum events, so no mental substance underlies the flow of
human experiences.
This vision of reality is relational through and through. Its
implications in the fields of education, of economics, and of
politics are to emphasize these relations. Human community
and interrelatedness with other beings replace the self-contained
isolation of homo politicus and homo
economicus. The ecological context is apparent as crucial
for human thriving.
Despite the importance of relationships and, therefore, of human
community and ecology, the picture is not complete without the
notion of decision. Scientists speak of quantum events
as also deciding. There are alternatives among which only one
is actualized. In human experience also there are
alternatives of which only one is actualized. Moment by
moment we decide exactly what we shall make of ourselves given all
that is settled for us by our past and our environment. We
are responsible beings. We are not simply the outcome of our
situations, profoundly as they inevitably shape us.
I have sketched the alternative understanding that we believe to be
suitable to replace the modern one, which is now
counterproductive. We think that many ecologically oriented
people are moving in this direction. We believe that many
feminists are also sensing something of this sort. We think
that thoughtful physicists who are still trying to understand the
strange world of quantum and relativity are increasingly exploring
an interpretation of this sort. We think that this vision is
closer to that of the cultures of much of the world.
But we hold these views as hypotheses to be tested. Our
complaint is that too few people are willing to engage in this
testing. Our judgment is that, thus far, where testing has
occurred, the results have been favorable. That encourages us
to seek more testing. It is my hope, and even my expectation,
that China will be the place where the most serious testing takes
place.
In a world in crisis, we cannot wait for the elusive certainties
that we might like. We need to test and act on the results of
those tests. The fields in which we need to act are
many. I myself am a Christian theologian. I believe
that Christianity has suffered greatly from its adoption of one
kind of substance thinking from the Greeks and another, cruder
form, from modernity. For decades I have been testing the
fruitfulness of translating Christian teaching into a new
ontological context. I find the resultant formulations closer
to those of the Bible and also more directly expressive of
Christian experience. In addition transforming Christianity
in this way opens it to a more positive relation to other religious
traditions. My testing has led me to think that this
experiment is well worth pursuing.
Because the global crisis is so profoundly informed by economics, I
have also proposed an experiment in that field. What if we
understood human beings as fundamentally relational and communal
instead of self-contained individuals in competition with one
another? What kind of an economy would we then recommend and
strive for? Would it still make the increase of goods and
services as defined by Gross Domestic Product its one goal?
Or would it strive to find a way to produce goods in such a way as
to strengthen human community and to develop a sustainable
relationship to the natural world? I believe the latter would
follow from this change in the assumptional basis of economic
theory. I believe we would all benefit if economists
experimented with developing policies geared to this end.
Since the human and ecological consequences of present economic
policies are leading the world to ecological disaster and are
destroying the human communities that might enable us to respond to
the crises that lie ahead.
In describing the features of Western modernity, I mentioned
nationalism. In the medieval period, national feeling was
subordinated to religious commitments. People in Western
Europe understood themselves as Christians first and
foremost. Having a single Christian empire remained an
unrealized goal. The church, however, was organized
institutionally so as to express the sense of unity among
believers. The language of educated people everywhere was
Latin.
Gradually this changed. People began writing in ethnic
languages and giving expression to the particularities of those
ethnicities. The Reformation gave impetus to this move by
encouraging the translation of the Bible into all the diverse
languages of Europe. By turning Christianity into a principle
of division rather than one of unity the Reformation also
undermined the medieval synthesis. Eventually, as I noted
above, peace was achieved only by subordinating the church to the
state. The states of Europe were gradually reshaped into
units characterized by a common language and ethnicity, in short,
nationality. Europe was reorganized into nation states.
The feelings that had formerly been ordered primarily by religious
community came to be ordered to national identity. Nations
became the supreme objects of devotion. French Catholics
fought German Catholics for the glory of France. Nazism
brought this nationalism to such an extreme that a deep revulsion
set in.
Competition among European nations played a large role in the
conquest and settlement of the New World and the colonization of
Africa and much of Asia. But the ideal of nationalism
also cut against the maintenance of these empires. Woodrow
Wilson wanted to promote national independence from European powers
after World War I. But it took yet another paroxysm of
nationalism in World War II to bring an end to the
colonially-organized world. There was a major move toward the
realization of the ideal of national self-determination. This
might be considered the flowering of the modern ideal if it were
not so restricted by the neo-colonialism of the new economic
order..
It is also possible to see the reorganization of Europe after World
War II as post-national and, therefore, postmodern. The
nations of Europe surrendered some of their sovereignty in order to
achieve a significant level of government at the broader European
level. Exactly how to balance the continuing authority of
nation states with that of the European Community will long remain
a matter of negotiation. In my view a healthy nationalism
resists going too far in centralizing power.
I believe Europe does point the way forward to a postmodern global
organization. The ideal I derive from my constructive
postmodern perspective is that of a community of communities of
communities. Deconstructive postmodernists celebrate
localism. They talk a great deal about local knowledge and
contrast it with ideas imposed from without. I affirm this
too. Catholics have long talked of the principle of
subsidiarity. All decisions should be made at the smallest
level possible. Families should be free to make those
decisions that they can make, and we should organize society to
expand those decisions. The same is true of villages and
urban neighborhoods. But, of course, in a world like ours,
many decisions must be made at larger levels. An increasing
number must be made globally. We should also strengthen
global political and legal organizations.
In such a postmodern world order, nations would continue to have an
important role. But some of their power would be
decentralized to their provinces and cities and villages, and some
would be surrendered to regional and global institutions.
There would be important elements of control at the national level,
but there would be no such thing as sovereignty at that or any
other level. I think there are moves in some such direction
in various parts of the world, although nowhere else has the
experiment advanced as far as in Europe.
But alongside the birth of a postmodern world there is the threat
of continuing the modern or even the premodern one. The
current leaders of the United States aim at global hegemony.
Their model is the Roman Empire now become global. They do
not want a peace that arises out of the negotiation of local,
national, and regional interests but one that is imposed by a
single nation state on all the others. To prevent this in
Europe, statesmen struggled to maintain some kind of balance of
power among the nations. Just that balance of power is now
rejected by neoconservatives in the United States in favor of
overwhelming power in the hands of one nation. I am
distressed by this goal and frightened by the way it is being
pursued. It is, I believe, urgent, at least in the United
States, to make visible an alternative, postmodern vision of world
order to rally support behind a quite different program.
In conclusion, I remind you that there is no proof that the kind of
postmodern theory, science, politics, economics, and world order
that constructive postmodernists advocate is the one right way to
go. We propose it, instead, as the best that we can now
envisage and as offering far more hope to the world than continuing
on the present modernizing path. It is certainly preferable
to a premodern, imperial world order imposed by one nation simply
through military force. May China lead the way into a better
future!
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