Imagine you are René Descartes, a student living in 17th century France. King Henry IV of Navarre is going to be made king of France. His reign, you hope, will end all of the fighting over religion. Peace will come at last. And then, he is assassinated. The people cut out his heart and keep it as a relic. It travels all over France as the people grieve. And then it comes to its final resting place: your school.
I just started reading Walter Brueggemann's "Texts Under Negotiation" the other day. His first chapter describes the situation we find ourselves in. One of his sources, "Cosmopolis" by Stephen Toulmin, describes the scene above.
Another source, Susan Bordo's "The Flight to Objectivity," talks about the "enormous and profound anxiety" Descartes must have felt "as the medieval world collapsed." (Brueggemann, p.3) Maybe you've felt some of the anxiety that accompanies the impending collapse of an era. I think that I have...at least a little.
Descarte's response was to retreat inside himself. "I think, therefore I am." His reference point is himself, not an outside authority. He "permitted the self to generate its own certitude." (Bruggemann, p.4) This new certitude relied on a supposedly "detached, disinterested, disembodied mind." (p.5) It also relied on empirical observation—truth things can be observed and proven through experimentation. This was a "desperate maneuver to cope with anxiety. Thus 'objectivity' emerged as a way to fend off ominous chaos." (p.5)
I find all of that very interesting. Again, I wonder about the parallels to our day and age. There is a certain chaos that is ensuing. It is of a different sort. The ultimate doom of modernity has been heralded and there have been many different reactions. How will we deal with the anxiety? Will we turn inward?
The premise of Brueggemann's book is that regardless of our view of postmodernity, it is a reality that we must deal with. There may be dangers involved with this new reality, but there are also newfound freedoms: freedom from the nullification of tradition, freedom from thinking we can know it all, freedom from the hegemony of white, male, Western, colonialism that has been disguised by the word "objectivity." Brueggemann asks us to react with a postmodern, evangelical (that's a little "e") sense of imagination. More on what that entails in the next post.
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