I’m back on the blog. No trumpets. Just a simple post, discussing a recent rant by Ray at The Freedom Sanction. (dissing philosophy ;D ) Before I go much further though, I should confess that I know that Ray’s post is titled as a rant, and I should not take it as his depth of understanding. What I mean by “confuse” should become obvious by the end of the post.

Ray writes:

Philosophy shatters the whole into smaller parts. Philosophers divide the smaller parts again and again to the nth degree. Deconstruction is the natural end of philosophy. If I may verbify the adjective, it seems that the nth-ing inherent in philosophy makes investment in time and effort of study less and less attractive.

I want to make three points: 1) Ray, you’re confusing analysis with philosophy, 2) This comes from the distaste moderns grew for “philosophy”, and 3) how the death of modernism affects religous and non-religious postmoderns.

The Confusion

First, we can easily confuse philosophy with analysis, as Ray does here. It comes easy if you’re used to a modern way of thinking. The success of technology, which requires analysis, has warped the public view of this art. Philosophy faded to become a poorer form of science in the views of the pragmatic moderns, and those who still felt some attraction to it responded to that with some amount of shame by making philosophy as obscure as technology research.

I’d like to introduce a link here that explains the difference: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=analysis. Here’s what it basically says. Philos (love, passion) + Sophia (skill, practise, wisdom — you have to go into the Greek for this.) This is most often translated “wisdom”, which has a common history with the rather un-stodgy “wit” and “vision” in our language.

On the other hand, we have analysis => ana + lysis, “a breaking apart” as the etymology goes. I find it fitting that “lose” also comes from this root. I once wrote that in a philosophy which just take things apart, we find parts rolling off the table, through the cracks in the floorboards, and “lost” forever. We then find that we can’t get it back together again.

We lose something in analyzing things past the point. Take this post as an example. I “break up” words. I “break apart” the modern perception and the historical understanding. But I can only go so far. I have to leave it to you to “see” that “passion for vision” is quite different from “breaking things apart”.

So I agree with your wisdom, that endless analysis is hell of its own. But it’s also a good thing to “break apart” what has been wrongly “fused together” (literally con+fused), and by people who did not in any sense “love” anything but “tearing things apart”.

Love of Reduction

Next, postmoderns tend to be frustrated moderns. Regardless of belief structure. Notice that I used a method that I found to be very common in deconstruction, etymological analysis. But one thing separates relgious postmoderns from secular postmoderns. Secular postmoderns don”t believe.

The reductio is the heart and soul of modernism. Reduce everything to its basic parts, and then we would see how the machine of the universe worked. Even people of faith, like Galileo believed this idea.

They take the hopelessness of constructing a world from a modernist perspective and dispair. Even their view of “freedom”, derriving from a break up of modernism, reeks of this secular dispair. Postmodern Christians, see themselves just as free as modernist Christians (and perhaps a little more, but only a little more). But we do not argue that we have lost all ability to communicate values and standards. And we do not rejoice that we now have tools to break apart all words that would create common values and standards, and so we can question the very reason that anybody should expect anything from me.

If postmodern Christianity borrows from that part of postmodernism, then I they have missed the boat.

When you see the End of the Modern World, you can go two ways: into the inanity of secular postmoderns, or into confidence that people essentially know what they are talking about even though we can in no sense prove it. That is where we conflict.

Some postmoderns lose all confidence in their fellow man’s judgment, because it is not proven through unshakable mathematical formulas or laboratory experiment. We who believe, but also see a problem with proof, never demanded proof in the first place. Man is not unable to communicate because he cannot be proven to communicate. We view the flaws in modernism as a bad turn from the confident to the pedantic.

Paul advocated a sort of deconstruction in (2 Corinthians 10:4). In “tearing down strongholds” of “presumption” with “words”. Thus, for non-believing postmoderns postmodernism is a destruction of their confidence in the conceit of modernism. But to us believing postmoderns, the destruction of the modern mind that had begun to prove God “meaningless”, substantiates the powerful weapons of God that Paul talked about. And that even though his believing people had started to abandon him for the certainty of modernism, he would smash presumptions and “loftiness” flat with the frustration of the 20th century.

I do not hope to prove what I say as much as I hope that it has been sound.