By Thaddeus Kozinski, Oct 9, 2009 in Musings, Pedagogy and Teaching
With the previous three posts as background, I am now prepared to claim that postmodernist non-foundationalism needs to be adopted, at least to some extent, by the Christian philosopher, though in a thoroughly realist and theologically robust mode, for it is the more philosophically sophisticated and reality-adequate epistemological stance. It is simply more in accord with authentic realist and Christian thinking, with its understanding of the complexity and "relative-absoluteness" of human knowledge and of the human person as historically embodied and enculturated yet able to transcend culture and history. Though the genealogy of the postmodernist insight involves some philosophically nefarious characters, one simply cannot throw out the non-foundationalist baby with the anti-foundationalist bathwater.
By understanding and accepting the partial truth of postmodernism in its proper balance with the whole truth of the Christian philosophical tradition, philosophers and theologians such as Tracey Rowland, Thomas Hibbs, Aidan Nichols, D. Stephen Long, William T. Cavanaugh, David Bentley Hart, Paul Griffiths, Archbishop Javier Martinez, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Schindler, and Benedict XVI are way ahead of the game, as it were. For it is the partial truth in postmodernism that enables the contemporary philosopher and theologian to deeply encounter and effectively convey reality to a world that now, for good or for ill, sees right through the facile and arrogant epistemology, ontology, anthropology, and theology of the Enlightenment. Although many, such as Richard Rorty, now see through everything and thus end up seeing only nothing as a result of their construal of the partial truth of postmodernism as the whole truth, we cannot adequately answer their nihilistic conclusions by putting up fearful blinders and rejecting the spoils of these the contemporary Egyptians!
Of course, a purely nihilistic hermeneutics of suspicion is one disastrous fruit of postmodernism, for it encourages a diabolical, suspicious spirit towards God and the Church, but when adopted critically, prudently, and partially by the Christian philosopher, and purified of its nihilistic ontology, godless anti-theology, Nietzschean ethics, materialistic anthropology, and skeptical epistemology, it can help the theologically guided and tradition-constituted philosopher to expose the false and idolatrous cultural, ideological, and political shibboleths that have been erected upon it, and to proffer more attractive and persuasive alternatives.
3 Responses to "The Good Philosopher and the Good Liberal Arts College, Part IV: Postmodernism and Christian Philosophy"
Lee Trepanier on Oct 13, 2009
I wonder how do you apply this in the classroom - the ability to use postmodern ideas to encourage a critical attitude towards the Enlightenment in order to open a path in the recovery of tradition.
Gerson Moreno-Riano on Oct 26, 2009
Thank you all (Lee, David, and Thaddeus) for your responses and for reading my post. Here are my thoughts:
1. It is our task to persuade and convince our administrators regarding the virtues of content-based education. And when we think of employment offers, we should think carefully about the types of administrators for whom we may work. I think persuading them is possible but not necessarily easy.
2. Unless teachers become philosopher or philosophers become teachers, then I am against teachers being therapeutic in the classroom. I agree with you, David, in principle.
3. Content-based education, as Lee suggests, implies a methodology. Understanding it solely in terms of just a type of catechism misses the boat. It implies a dialectic methodology. What you propose is more like ideological education rather than content-based.
Just some thoughts- thanks for reading.
Paul DeHart on Oct 26, 2009
I probably should read some posts in front of this one and the subsequent post before commenting. But I thought I'd post a few queries anyway, just as a matter of friendly conversation regarding what is certainly an engaging post. It seems to me that realism is essentially foundationalist from an ontological standpoint, even if not essentially foundationalist from an epistemic one. Thus Plantinga and Wolterstorff are arguably foundationalist in the first sense though they claim that they are not at all foundationalist in the latter one. I bring this up only because of my persisting suspicion that postmodernism, an elusive concept if ever there was one, seems to be (in its central tendency) a kind of hyper-modernism (modernism/nominalism on steroids, if you will). Nietzsche, Foucault, Lyotard, and Rorty all seem to be nominalists, and therefore modernists, of the most strident sort. I also wonder whether it might be helpful to distinguish the earlier MacIntyre of After Virtue from the later MacIntyre, in this regard. For the later MacIntyre is less amenable, it seems to me, to postmodernism than is the earlier one. Moreover, I think it might be helpful to introduce a distinction between foundationalism of a medieval sort and that of a modern sort (in the Cartesian and Lockean sense). It seems to me that St. Thomas is a kind of foundationalist both epistemically and ontologically. But he's no Cartesian or Lockean. Finally, while Plantinga and Wolterstorff have moved from a devastating critique of classical (Cartesian and Lockean) foundationalism to non-foundationalism, in epistemology, this move doesn't seem to be a necessary entailment of their critique. It seems that one could move to a different kind of foundationalism. That said, I certainly think Plantinga and Wolterstorff destroyed foundationalism of the Cartesian and Lockean variety. I think Plantinga, in some comments in an essay or two, has destroyed any hope for a postmodern epistemology as well (if Foucault or Rorty be taken as indicative here).