More musings……..
What is truth, a fact, an absolute in a postmodern age?
One thing for sure is that truth is no longer the same as before and in this event there is a return of myth into our culture and in our language as it tries to capture, not the mythical culture uncontaminated by modernization and rationalism but through the weakening notion of truth, an understanding that points towards an overcoming of the opposition between rationalism and irrationalism in the interests of contemporary thought.
One downside of the above is a devaluing of the ‘New’ highlighting its dependency on the values of an old ‘truth’. Unveiled it has lost its foundational value and any possibility of being valuable again. This is the ‘crisis of faith’ that the Christian Myth’ is subject to and is revealed in its decline. Tied to an ‘old truth’ the myth is already without value in a postmodern world and as such it discloses a crisis of the ‘Future’. That crisis is revealed in an emphatic alteration in our inherited ways of experiencing time and history.
One response to the above view is that there is an emerging opportunity for a dialogue between poetics and philosophy, a commitment to the problematic, but not impossible, overcoming of metaphysics or a non-foundational non-functionalist theory of interpretation that solicits an ethical task of remembering, not as simple repetition of tradition but rather a joyous re-creation.
That response invites the development of a radical hermeneutics that welcomes a postmodern method of interpretation that no longer simply involves a reprise of meanings from the past, but one that remains alert to the contemporary phenomenon of con-fusion which characterizes knowledge as it circulates today. In this hermeneutic journey meanings become so disseminated that the metaphysical nostalgia for a unified system of a foundational truth is challenged and in its place we find a ‘weak ontology’ where, rather than seeking absolute grounds as bulwarks against streams of multiple meaning, we endeavour to discover and prepare for the appearance of chances or the post metaphysical opportunity. A global imaginary where the traditional metaphysical distinctions between subject and object, reality and representation are contained if not dissolved.
Perhaps all of this suggests the arrival of a world of ‘alleviated’ reality, or a world less neatly divided into the true and the fictive, information and mage, a world of total mediation much like the world we have now. A world where an objective, interventionist, theistic God is no longer palatable.
Enough for today……….
revdougnz 