Postmodernism rightly understood

In his Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought , Peter Augustine Lawler says that “Postmodern thought rightly understood is human reflection on the failure of the modern project to eradicate human mystery and misery and to bring history to an end.  One form of postmodern thinking is found in the writing of anticommunist dissidents Vaclav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  The fall of communism, Havel said, should be understood as a lesson about the resistance of being and human being to manipulation.  And Solzhenitsyn, of course, told Americans at Harvard that if human beings were born only to be happy, they would not be born to die.  Postmodern thought begins with the news, perhaps both good and bad, about the intractable limits to any pragmatic project to make human existence predictable, tranquil, secure, and carefree.”  He strikingly include Tocqueville among the postmoderns.

Postmodernism is thus a kind of realism:

It “rejects the illusion of self-creation in favor of the reality of conscientious responsibility.”  We are rational in that we seek to “understand and to come to terms with” reality, not to transform it: “There is some correspondence between human thought and the way things really are.  Postmodernism is the return to realism.”

Lawler admits that this is not how postmodernism is usually understood.  Postmodernism rightly understood is not “antifoundationalism,” which Lawler characterizes as “the assertion of the groundlessness of human existence.”  Antifoundationalism is instead “hypermodernism.”

Lawler is right on target in his description of postmodernism as reflection on the limits of human knowledge and power, the chastening of hubris.  Yet, two qualifications: First, what Lawler describes as “antifoundationalism” is not what typically goes by that name among philosophers and theologians.  I affirm that human existence is grounded, in God; but that ground is not universally acknowledged and uncontested, as foundationalism requires.  Second, things aren’t simply as they are.  Like it or not, we do transform reality.  That man is, in a strong sense, a maker – poetic – is one of the affirmations of modernity that we ought to maintain.  As Milbank stresses, what we deny is that poiesis is by definition secular.