Confident Belief: What Does it Mean to Know Truth?
Was Descartes’s method significant in Western History? Grenz notes that “Descartes set the agenda for philosophy for the next three hundred years” by making human reason central.8 In time, this approach was applied to other disciplines as well, from politics to ethics to theology. “In this way,” says Grenz, “all fields of the human endeavor became, in effect, branches of natural science.”9
Time has proved the value of scientific and mathematical reasoning. We all enjoy the benefits of technology. This being the case, however, why is it that we at the turn of the century find ourselves so skeptical? What has happened to the confidence modern man had in his ability to know?
Postmodernism: The Rejection of the Enlightenment Idea
With the acceptance of René Descartes’s idea that truth was to be found ultimately in reason, and that the starting point for knowledge was doubt, the die was cast for the period of history we call modernity. Using just his reason, and denying anything which wasn’t certain, the individual could come to true knowledge with no reference to God.
But skeptical attacks continued through such philosophers as David Hume. In response, Immanuel Kant formulated a new understanding of knowledge. He believed that knowledge came from data received by the senses which was then formed into understandable ideas by the workings of our own minds. Thus, the structure of our own minds became a crucial component of the known world. With Kant, the thinking individual was now firmly established as the final authority for truth. Even with this, however, Kant still believed there is a reality external to us, and that all our minds work the same way to understand it.
Although Kant believed that we could truly know the world around us, his ideas pushed us a significant step away from that reality. He believed that we are thus incapable of knowing things as they are in themselves; we only know things as they appear to us. Thus, since God doesn’t appear to us empirically, we do not have real knowledge of Him. Philosophers following him began to pick away at this ideas. Johann Fichte, for example, accepted Kant’s ideas for the most part, but denied the idea that there are things——themselves; in other words, that there is something to reality apart from our perceptions of it. What we perceive is what is there. Now the way was made clear to think in terms of “alternative conceptual frameworks.” There could now be multiple ways of understanding and interpreting the world.
Nietzsche
Other philosophers picked away at Kant as well, but we’ll only consider one more, the man who has been called the “patron saint of postmodern philosophy,”10 Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a true foe of modernism. He believed the whole project of building up these “great edifices of ideas” 11 was fundamentally flawed. Our attempts to abstract general knowledge from the particulars around us only results in distortion, he thought. He argued that “what we commonly accept as human knowledge is in fact merely a self-contained set of illusions. He essentially viewed ‘truth’ as a function of the language we employ and hence believed that truth ‘exists’ only within specific linguistic contexts.”12 Our world is only a construction of our own perspective, an aesthetic creation. And it has its roots in the will to power, “the desire to perfect and transcend the self through the exercise of personal creative power rather than dependence on anything external.” Thus, “Motivated by the will to power,” he thought, “we devise metaphysical concepts—conceptions of ‘truth’—that advance the cause of a certain species or people.”13
Category: Fall 2007, Living the Faith
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