Adam Johnson

Many academic philosophers did not accept the philosophy that postmodernism offered. Some critics argue that we should return to a premodern way of thinking, while others advocate for a return to philosophies reminiscent of modernism. Recently, while logical positivism has mostly died out within academic philosophy, there has been a resurgence of premodernism. Contemporary premodern thinkers include philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Swinburne, John Hare, Robert Adams, Robert Audi, Alvin Plantinga, Peter Kreeft, Robert Koons, and many others. Another prominent critic of postmodernism is Jürgen Habermas, who leans toward Enlightenment modernism rather than premodern thinking. He thinks the Enlightenment needs to be complemented rather than discarded. Finally, one other notable critic of modernism and postmodernism was Michael Polanyi. He said that the roots of the problem could be found with those who attempted to separate faith and reason, which led to extremes of using only reason or only faith. Polanyi forged a middle path between the two extremes of modernism and postmodernism. He argued that all of our types of knowledge work the same way: all of them involve an element of faith because we cannot know anything with absolute certainty, but they still must be verified using good reasons and evidence. He said that while complete objectivity is not possible as modernism claimed, that does not imply that all knowledge is subjective, as postmodernism claimed.

Structuralism was a movement that started in anthropology and then moved into the field of philosophy. Structuralists opposed existentialism because they thought it overestimated the free will that human beings actually have. Structuralists said that people’s feelings and choices aren’t actually free because they’ve been programmed by their culture. The thought patterns, language, and concepts of our culture influence us to such a degree that it is impossible to break free of them. So, instead of you defining yourself, structuralism said that your culture is what defines you and gives you meaning. Out of structuralism grew postmodernism with thinkers like Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida. They said that truth is created at the group level and is relative to a culture and its worldview. Therefore, you are defined by the viewpoint of the cultural groups of which you’re a part – race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, income, etc. According to postmodernism, you don’t define meaning for yourself; being a part of your group creates meaning for you, and you can’t break free of how your group has caused you to think. Postmodernists said that there were no objective truths and that claiming to know truth objectively is just a way to gain power over other groups.

What is morally right and wrong when it comes to sex? Apart from considering Christianity or the Bible, we can establish that sex is morally good inside marriage (one man and one woman) and morally bad outside marriage. Consequences, how an action affects human flourishing, can help us know what is morally good or bad. We know that individuals as well as societies flourish when sex is kept inside marriage, but sex outside of marriage can result in emotional, relational, physical, and financial suffering, as personal experiences and sociological evidence can attest. How has our culture come to believe that sex outside of marriage is not morally wrong, that if we desire something then we should do it? It has to do with the history of Western culture from the modern to postmodern eras. Modernism hit a dead end by concluding that life had no ultimate meaning, and postmodernism reacted to this by claiming that meaning comes from within each individual. Postmodern ideas have told us that we should “follow our heart” and indulge all our inner desires. But sometimes our desires can be bad, and it is morally good to control and discipline our desires, including our sexual ones. Christianity gives us more understanding of why this is true. In Christianity, something is only good if it resembles the true love of God in the Trinity. Thus, the Bible celebrates sexual desires if they resemble the love of God and conform to His purposes. What is the evidence that the Bible celebrates sex as God designed it? Song of Songs gives us a beautiful picture of romantic, sexual love within a marriage.

In the aftermath of World War II, a new movement of atheistic philosophers arose out of France called the existentialists, featuring prominent thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism proposed taking two steps toward finding ultimate meaning and truth. First, you have to have an existential crisis where you realize that there is no meaning to life. This experience can be overwhelming and crushing when you consider that life is absurd and there are no ultimate answers out there. Sometimes fear of death, loneliness, or seeing arbitrariness in life could bring about this existential crisis that the existentialists said you should have. Second, you have to define yourself and create your own meaning to life through the free choices you make. “We are our choices,” said Jean-Paul Sartre. You are true to yourself and can discover your authentic self through this process of defining yourself through your free choices. Sartre affirmed that “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” In existentialism, existence precedes essence.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the famous German philosopher who lived at the end of the 19th century and provocatively declared that “God is dead.” By this, he meant that the idea of God in Western society was no longer influential. In a way, Nietzsche espoused a philosophy very similar to that of Kierkegaard, that we should look internally for meaning, but instead of finding meaning in Christianity like Kierkegaard did, Nietzsche was an atheist who found meaning in the human “will to power.” Nietzsche said that the way to achieve one’s desires or will is through power and force, but this becomes difficult when human desires conflict, because humans must compete to see whose desires will win out. By exerting power to fulfill our desires in life and society, Nietzsche said that we could overcome the emptiness of life. According to Nietzsche, this was all that life was about, and this principle is seen all around us in nature. Nature is the highest reality since there is no higher, transcendent truth. Therefore, Nietzsche was a moral relativist, who taught that what is good is what helps you fulfill your desires, and morality is determined by whether or not you are in a position of power.

Søren Kierkegaard arose during the Romantic era as an influential thinker and a prominent critic of reason. According to Kierkegaard, philosophers of the past tried to find meaning “out there” using reason, but they were looking in the wrong places. Kierkegaard said that true meaning was found “in here,” on the inside of each individual. Inside ourselves is where we find meaning to our lives in our passions, desires, and choices. Ultimately, Kierkegaard said that meaning was subjective, and it was so personal that it could not be communicated to anyone else. According to Kierkegaard, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” Kierkegaard advocated the idea of taking a leap of faith, making a personal choice to create meaning for ourselves based on our passions. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the “father of liberal Christianity,” took Kierkegaard’s ideas and similarly applied them to Christianity. He said that the Bible didn’t have to be literally true; as long as it provides you meaning in life, then it’s true for you. Schleiermacher’s liberal theology reduced Christianity to a mere inward feeling or experience.

When modern thinkers who tried to use reason alone to determine ultimate answers ran into a number of dead ends, some people turned to philosophies which emphasized that irrational faith by itself could give us meaning by looking within ourselves. One of the first movements against modernism that emphasized this way of thinking was called Romanticism, which was known for its paintings, literature, and music. Romanticism rejected the idea that reason and science were the ultimate forms of knowledge, because reason and science weren’t leading to greater moral and spiritual progress as was promised. Romantic thinkers also rejected that the universe and human beings were merely physical machines; instead, they focused on the inner life of passions, emotions, and desires and emphasized individual creativity and spirituality. Romantics understood these things as the non-rational aspects of human life that should be indulged. They redefined creativity as breaking away from established rules and traditions of the past and felt that through individual creativity you could create spiritual meaning in your life.

Because of the influence of Kant, Western philosophy began to undergo a split in its way of thinking. Both sides agreed that reason was a dead end for ultimate answers, but some abandoned reason and embraced irrational faith while others stuck to reason but limited its scope. The thinkers who continued to affirm that only reason was useful became known as proponents of analytic philosophy. These thinkers wanted to make philosophy much more scientific. They rejected the transcendent realm beyond the physical world and hoped that analytic philosophy could correct the imprecise work of past philosophers in this regard. They developed more sophisticated uses of logic and focused on giving words very technical, precise definitions to help science pursue truth. Logical positivism was an even more extreme form of analytic philosophy which claimed that we can only posit or state things that can be empirically verified. Because of this, logical positivists believed that statements about the metaphysical weren’t true or false; rather, those statements were actually meaningless. Today, however, there has been a resurgence of the pre-modern way of thinking among analytic philosophers that rejects its initial naturalistic assumptions.

After Kant’s influence, some thinkers continued down the path of attempting to only use reason to understand the world. They concluded that there were no ultimate answers, because reason alone couldn’t give us ultimate answers, but reason could at least help us do science. They focused their philosophy predominantly on the physical realm, the phenomena of nature. If you reject the transcendent realm and limit yourself to only nature, you are likely to conclude that there is no ultimate truth. Because of this, the mechanical view of the world began to gain influence – viewing the world as nothing more than a machine controlled by the laws of nature. The theory of evolution was a pivotal development in this area, because it alleged that humans were just physical machines themselves, just a part of the larger machine of nature. These reductionistic views caused people to view things like morality, love, art, beauty, meaning, purpose, and humanity itself as not really valuable in and of themselves but merely as expressions of how nature and evolution had programmed us.

Immanuel Kant was a giant in the history of Western thought. In fact, one of Adam’s seminary professors claimed that many Christians have been influenced more by Immanuel Kant than by Jesus Christ. Kant was a pivotal thinker, standing at the end of an era of optimistic hope in reason and the beginning of an era of critiquing reason. Kant initially set out to rescue reason, science, and absolute certainty from Hume’s crushing skepticism. To do this, he shifted the focus of knowledge from the universe “out there” to our own minds “in here,” claiming that categories in our minds completely shape our understanding of the world. By doing this, he limited the reach of reason, deducing that we can only know with absolute certainty how things appear to our minds, not how they are in reality. Finally, Kant thought he had rescued faith by separating it from reason and placing beliefs in God or the afterlife beyond the reach of reason. However, he ended up redefining faith as being opposed to reason, an idea that is unfortunately still very influential in our culture today.