Lasting Legacy #2: No Absolute Truth

Perhaps the most recognized battleground in the earlier postmodern debates centered around the nature of truth. There were many variations of this, but I define it as seeing that any notion of “truth” was “fluid rather than foundational.” This was expressed in two, overlapping ways:

1. There is no such thing as absolute truth. This was particularly pushed in areas of ethics and morality. What is right for you in an absolute sense may not be right for me, because your absolutes don’t apply to me, because there are no absolutes. The best we can achieve is “systemic truth,” things that appear to be true within a certain way of thinking, tradition, or orientation.

Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C.

This became known as “non-foundationalism,” a rejection of logic and reason as absolute guides to truth. At its most extreme, it was a rejection of the Jeffersonian maxim, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” for there could be no self-evident, universally accepted, or unquestionably foundational truths. Ironically, the only absolute truth of postmodern philosophy was that there was no absolute truth.

A manifestation of this that we see now is the rejection of anything like objective “facts.” One political operative famously stated this when she said her people had “alternative facts” about an event. The internet in general and Facebook in particular have been fertile territory for “alternative facts.” Postmodernity’s triumph is on full display, transfigured into mainstream discourse, I think.

The ubiquitous access to the internet has led us to believe that we can do “research” by scouring the web and sorting through various sites dealing with an issue. Too often (and I am guilty of this), we end up rejecting voices we don’t like and embracing those we already agree with. We despair of finding absolute truth, voices accepted by all.

2. There is no such thing as objective truth. The extension of rejecting absolute truth is to reject objective truth. By this, postmodernity meant that no one is a fully objective, impartial arbitrator of truth. We all have biases, preunderstandings, and agendas. Even if the possibility of objective truth existed, no human being can produce it. Therefore, we settle for “subjective truth” that meets our needs and agendas.

This became a tenet of postmodernism through the literary world, beginning in the mid-twentieth century. A popular way of expressing this was to critique literature through a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” questioning the underlying motives and objectives of any serious author. This moved to a trend called “deconstruction,” where literature was dismantled supposedly to find the underlying message of the author, sometimes hidden deviously from the unsuspecting reader. Again, it was ironic that the objectivity of the deconstructer was rarely challenged.

I encountered the dilemma of postmodern thinking concerning truth many years ago at a church in Oregon where I was a guest speaker. This church was in a college town, and I mentioned in the sermon that the rejection of absolutes had become rampant upon most university campuses, permeating every academic discipline. Afterward, this claim of universal relativism was challenged by a church member who was a Ph.D. physics professor at the local college. Although I knew I was in way over my head, I asked him to give me an unquestioned, absolute truth from the field of physics. His answer? “There is no fixed place in the universe.” As soon as these words left his mouth, he realized the irony of his statement, and quickly closed the conversation.

Not all of this is misplaced, I think. We all operate on assumptions about our world that may be beyond objective analysis. Despite many attempts to prove the existence of God, it seems to me that the best we do is disprove the arguments for the non-existence of God. Things like the reliability of Scripture must be taken on faith, which is a much stronger basis than knowledge, because the contours of knowledge and science may change as discoveries progress. Modernity, in its logical extremes, wanted to disallow faith as legitimate, and postmodernity pushed back on this. But faith and knowledge should coexist, I think. All truth is God’s truth. And that is just one example of an absolute, I think!

Next: Empowerment through Transgressing (Contrarianism).

Mark S. Krause
Wildewood Christian Church

Lasting Legacy #1: The Primacy of Self-Care

To me, nothing represents the transfigured postmodern world more than the self-care movement. You might ask, what is this and why is it important?

Let me offer a commonplace metaphor to illustrate. If you have flown on commercial airlines, you will be familiar with the spiel in which a flight attendant (or video) gives a presentation on seat belt basics. Also included will be a quick demo of the potential for an oxygen mask to drop down at each seat in case of depressurization. The presenter will caution, “Put on your own mask before assisting others.” Not surprisingly (at least to me), one speaker tied this admonition into what I’m talking about, using this as the title of her presentation: “Putting on Your Oxygen Mask First: Prioritizing Self-Care.” (link)

Self-care? Last year, tennis champion Naomi Osaka attempted to deflect criticism when she declined to participate in a press conference expected of players on the professional tour. Osaka said, “I communicated that I wanted to skip press conferences at Roland Garros to exercise self-care and preservation of my mental health.” (link) As a result, she was both celebrated as a courageous person and denigrated as a selfish celebrity. I was generally supportive of her, but that is not the point. My antennae went up when I heard the phrase “self-care.” It has become ubiquitous and has taken on a range of meanings.

I’m sure some of you are asking, how can you be critical of self-care if it is just the idea of caring about your emotional and physical health? I’m not. I try to maintain a quasi-healthy diet, go to the gym three times a week, and find time for spiritual nourishment through prayer and meditation (all hallmarks of the self-care movement). But I think there is a more insidious side to this with roots in postmodernity that have not been recognized by many.

Michel Foucault

One of the most enduring voices that shaped what became postmodernity was Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and teacher. Foucault believed the central issue of philosophy was personal freedom in all things, freedom apart from any coercive, external influences. In discussing this, Foucault anticipates the self-care moment when he concludes that the greatest virtue for humankind is “care of self.” For Foucault, evil is anything that hinders the “care of self.” Foucault even gives a theological twist to this when he claims that while Christians believe salvation comes from a “renunciation of self” (seemingly the opposite of self-care), the ironic bottom line is that Christians are seeking salvation. This, he asserts, means that in Christianity, “achieving salvation is a way of caring for oneself.” According to Foucault, the underlying motive for Christians is selfish if it results in personal salvation.[1] So, self-care is not just good or wise. It is the “greatest virtue” available to humankind.

I want us to all be emotionally, spiritually, and physically healthy. But should this drive us to care about ourselves more than we care about others? Or, worse, where is the line between caring about ourselves and caring about others that becomes just caring about ourselves. I think that Foucault would be gratified to see that an unflinching demand for personal freedoms, even at the expense of caring about others, has become a dominant voice in our society. No one is quoting Foucault these days, but his postmodern ethic hasn’t gone away. I think it has been transfigured and become pervasive.

I still believe in the words from the prayer of St. Francis, knowing that Foucault might see its conclusion as a blatant desire for self-preservation and care. I don’t think so. Francis ends his prayer saying this:

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

(For a thrilling performance of this as put to music by John Rutter, see the video of the Bowling Green State University’s Men’s Choir at this link.)

Prayer: Lord, may our desires to care for ourselves never overcome our practice of caring for others. May we live out the words of Paul to “value others above [our]selves.” May we follow the example of Jesus, who loved us even to the cross at the expense of his own life. In his name we pray, Amen.

Mark S. Krause
Wildewood Christian Church

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[1] See Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Ranibow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 1 in the series Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 (New York: The New Press, 1994), 284-85.

Death and Transfiguration, Richard Strauss

An orchestral favorite of mine, both to hear and to play, is Richard Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration.” (YouTube link of an excellent performance by the Flanders Symphony Orchestra) In German, this is “Tod und Verklärung,” and I might translate it “Death and Transformation.” Strauss composed this when he was only 25 years old, a testament to his musical genius.

I mention this because I would like to offer several blogs on the “Postmodern Journey to 2022.” It has been twenty years or so since anyone talked seriously about postmodernism. What happened? Did the postmodern moment in culture pass away? My contention is that postmodernity’s “death” is an illusion, but its “transformation” into the mainstream of American culture has happened with little notice. So my analysis may not be as exciting and rousing as Strauss’s masterpiece, I want to comment on where postmodernity is today. Is it a corpse? I don’t think so. I think it has been transformed and we don’t recognize it.

An article I wrote in the early 2000s on “Ethics in a Postmodern World,” identified six general characteristics of postmodernity as understood at the time. (If you want to access this, use this link. My article begins on p. 51.) These six are:

1. Fluid rather than foundational
2. Multi-connective rather than sequential
3. Holistic rather than compartmental
4. Spiritual rather than Scientific
5. Personal story rather than metanarrative
6. Interiorizing rather than exteriorizing

I think these still hold up pretty well, but I want to look at some trends today that (for me) are heirs of this period. What are the lasting legacies of postmodernism? In the next blog, I will begin with one of the most obvious to me, “The Primacy of Self-Care.”

Mark S. Krause, Scholar in Residence, Wildewood Christian Church